Can’t wait for the game engine to delete my filesystem and then be really very sorry about it.

If you’re going to act like a petulant child, I’m gonna put you in timeout. Go sit in the corner.

I don’t see how Steam would make any difference.

• Implementing any kind of DRM is the game developer’s prerogative.
• Allowing other versions is possible, again, at the developer’s convenience.
• No other launcher needed besides Steam (and Steam is very far from being only a launcher)
• Steam Workshop (because fuck Forge)

The only downside I can see is that Steam doesn’t have a way to maintain multiple instances of the same game.

Ah yes, the famous DRM.

Some launchers allow you to play fully offline, but only after you’ve authenticated and started the game at least once with a real Microsoft account. The launcher has a sophisticated validation mechanism to ensure this: a single boolean value stored in a JSON file. Set that to true and you’re good to go.

• Outer Wilds
• SOMA
• Red Dead 2
• Factorio
• Half-Life 2

Honorable mentions:

• Warframe should be the example by which live service games are designed and operated.
• Crimson Desert… is such a paradox of game design. In almost all aspects, 70% of the game is fantastic, but the remaining 30% is a shocking display of incompetence and/or indifference. The exception is player training, which is consistently horrible.

Those two are mutually exclusive. An application that uses Proton can’t be natively Linux-compatible, and an application that is natively Linux-compatible can’t run using Proton.

natively on a Windows PC or on Linux via Proton

Sounds like it’s a Windows build, but the developers also provide first party support for running it on Proton.

Linux (Proton) Native Compatibility

I had to sit down and drink a glass of anhydrous water after reading that…

Try decoding an AV1 stream from Sunshine without hardware acceleration. It takes a much higher compute performance than you apparently believe.

There’s not really a stable way to do that in Wayland at the moment. This post lists some options, but they’re not guaranteed to work in any particular compositor: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/786856/how-to-send-keyboard-strokes-programmatically-like-sendkeys-in-windows-to-a

My previous job at a factory with rotating day/night shifts gave me an apparently lifelong case of sleep disorders. My “eight hours of uninterrupted sleep” is more or less indistinguishable from my “one coffee after pulling an all-nighter in Factorio”.

Did it hurt to carve out the fevered flesh? Did it hurt to sever the gangrenous foot? The swines of the industry spent the last decade butchering their own carcass and selling it in pieces, now they’re horrified that they’re bleeding to death.

(I recently replayed Forgor: Hog Machine. Mandus kinda had a point.)

“The Serenity of the Hopeless”

My only major gripe with the SC2 is that the control layout makes the D-pad only accessible with the left thumb. I’m firmly an Xbox layout supremacist, and that’s partly because it allowed me to reach over to the D-pad with my right thumb without releasing the left stick (e.g. using a healing item while bravely running away).

Other than that, my main issues are related to Steam Input’s integration. If a game is running inside Gamescope, even if it’s launched from Steam, I can’t use the controller to send keypresses or mouse inputs to the game.

Fun fact: Xenia is canonically transgender, with the approval of the mascot’s original artist: https://xenia.efi.pages.gay/

Sure, but you paid $70 for it. In the business, people like that are called “suckers”.

Fuck.

The American taxpayers will save them, whether they want to or not.

Even if we ignore the silicon shortage, it doesn’t make sense for Valve to set up the facilities and supply chains to fully satisfy the day-one demand, only to shut them down months later when the demand falls off and no longer justifies the expense of operating them. The up-front cost of setting up additional factories, especially for the custom high precision optics, would be a massive waste. The other option would be to build up a larger stockpile before the product is released, but then you’d still be waiting all the same.

In terms of hardware, Valve is not a significant player. They sell niche products meant for enthusiasts, and the lottery is the most pragmatic way to get them into hands.