Comment by gambiting
7 hours ago
...what steam devices? Steam Deck and Machine? I work in video games(at one of the largest publishers - worked at other two in the last few years) - and while we usually do some testing on the steam deck it's literally just to see if the windows version runs well. Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify.
Most games run on Steam devices via Proton (Wine). You don't really need a native port in that case.
In your experience, is "Steam Deck Verified" attractive enough to fix any issues you might find when testing? I've been immensely curious about whether it's moved the needle at all
And I hate it with a passion. Publishers have no problem taking money from Linux users, only to ignore Linux-related bug reports and tell people “it’s not supported.”
I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.
That's really what the (Deck/Machine/SteamOS) Verified program is for. Valve tests games out on those platforms and reports results back for everyone on the store page. Publishers have the control to explicitly mark it as unsupported too.
And the Frame Verified program, which is most of where I was going with this.
Lepton may most directly target Quest games, but it's not like it wouldn't also enable flatscreen titles running on AOSP, and it's not like Proton is limited to the use cases Valve intended either.
...I mean, you're buying a windows version, then complaining that it's not running well on an unsupported operating system?
Steam is very upfront when you’re buying a windows game on mac. There’s a big banner saying it’s not for your OS and likely won’t work. There’s a compatibility icon for mac, and it’s filterable, for library and store, so you can get mac games. There’s an additional click-through screen on the store page with a checkbox. There’s a lot that’s filtered out!
The proton story pretends like you can run every windows game on steamos, verified or not. It’s quite different and tbh a little dishonest. I wonder how much of it is avoidance of alert fatigue (because many many unverified games do work) and how much if it is trying to sell users on steamos.
1 reply →
> Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify
Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
> why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.