Slashdot Mirror

Should force Steam to issue refunds for anybody that wants one who bought before that point though.

Steam already has a consumer-friendly refund policy... They give full no-questions-asked refunds on all purchases within 14 days and 2 hours or less play time; and refunds within 48 hours of purchase as long as tradeable in-game items have not been used or sold. Read it here: http://store.steampowered.com/...

I think that's plenty flexible for someone to figure out if a game is living up to its advertising.

Windows 10 has an impressive lead on Steam.

There are no different classes of Steam keys at the moment - a key generated for Kickstarter is the same as one generated for your mother. No distinction can currently be made. The time delay seems pointless - devs are complaining that the lack of reviews is preventing their game from being found (which will be the case if they're zero weighted). Allowing reviews the devs have paid for after X days just goes back to the original problem.

Some games are refunded because they show their flaws very early on, or won't even run. Seems appropriate to have in the overall score.

80 hours play is ridiculous. Many games won't even offer this - some are complete, worthwhile experiences in only a handful of hours.

In a similar vein people do not need to complete something to form an opinion of it. The last half of a Call of Duty title is likely very similar to the first half of it.

I'm a little confused by your last point. I'd say the recent overall score they introduced in the last review system update already addresses the issue of games changing over time (or just being interpreted differently over time). Are you advocating letting devs wipe the slate clean by issuing an update? Seem like this would be a disincentive to make any updates at all after launch if it'd wipe out previous review scores.

SteamOS is based on Debian, and yes you can use any desktop you want with it.

Accessing the Desktop

HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY ASKED FOR A FUCKING STATEMENT FROM STEAM REGARDING THEIR REFUND POLICY ON NMS?

Let me address this:

Firstly Slashdot is a news aggregator. No one here will go out and ask anything. They will find links and post them for discussion. Let me do that for you now.
Steam will refund a game owned less than 14 days and played less than two hours. With lots of people reporting refunds after many hours of gameplay their policy or statement becomes completely irrelevant, as the story here is that they aren't following their policy. And neither is Sony.

Feel free to do your own real journalism on a real journalism site. After you're done maybe post the story to a couple of news aggregators like Slashdot.

But before you do fix your capslock key, shouting makes it looks like your have tantrum issues.

There's a much easier way to get steam. Details are available here.

You mean like Disgaea PC and it's sequel?

Steam for games? Got quite a large library for linux..
http://store.steampowered.com/...

And the Photoshop card again... How many people do you actually think have a legal copy of photoshop installed on their home-computer??
For the ones that actually owns a license - feel free to use Wine.

Office - For most home-users using LibreOffice or OpenOffice or one of the others is more than enough...
The level home-users use it may be to write some recipes or maybe invitations for an event or similar...
Main issue with OpenOffice/LibreOffice is the compatibility with MS Office of saves documents, not the actual functionality...

And for the ones that actually require MS Office - feel free to use Wine, or maybe Office365 in their browser with the plugins available for Chrome..

Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: TAGES

3 machine activation limit

Warning: This title uses 3rd party DRM (Tages)

Which still to this day reminds you what a horrible horrible company Ubisoft has been. No. No. No. No. No. A polished turd is still a turd, and it still stinks.

And while the first year of sales for Windows 7 was just the tip of the iceburg, with the free period and forced upgrades over Windows 10 adoption is likely to drop off steeply. Of course it will still gain ground, but that will in all likelihood be driven almost entirely by new PC purchases.

The Steam survey offers some interesting data. This is for gamers, who we might reasonably assume have more powerful and newer systems and are more willing to upgrade than the average home user. Look at the DirectX chart and see how rapidly Win10 gained market share for about the first six months after its launch, and how little it has moved since then. Those figures only distinguish Win10 from pre-Win10 for DX12 cards, so it's certainly possible that there are conflating factors (they show Win10 having nearly half the market overall now) but if the early rush and then a drop off like that are at all representative of the wider market then MS could have a real problem here.

2021, year of the linux desktop confirmed.

It's a lovely dream, kid. But the numbers tell a different story.

95% of Steam gamers run Windows. 43% have migrated to 64 Bit Win 10. That is up 3% in one month. 4% run MacOS. 1% Linux. Valve posts no numbers for Steam OS. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: June 2016

Steam Machine hardware sales have been pathetic.

I'm not convinced that anyone has the foggiest idea of how to position and sell these things. The Steam Machine with decent specs costs more than a video game console and with good specs more than a mass market Win 10 gaming system with better specs.

The ZOTAC NEN Steam Machine Gaming Mini PC (Intel Skylake Core i5-6400T Quad-Core NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 8GB Memory 1TB Hard Drive) is top of the line, at $1,085 from Amazon.com.
#7,205 in Computers & Accessories, #89 in Computers & Accessories > Desktops > Minis.

So what? Are you going to ask for a refund?

In other news, you can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam.

I just want my quiet little $4-$500 tv box upgraded every few years

You could always buy a $50 TV box that relays audio and video from your PC over Ethernet.

Unfortunately quoting the top played Steam games for the day does not really say what you think/want it to say. Of those top seven games, four share the same game engine (CS:GO, DoTA2, Gary's Mod, and TF2) and honestly can be looked at as mods for HL2. So your "Top 10" list is really a "Top 7" list. Of those seven games only a little better than half are available for Linux.

The second problem with those numbers is availability for Linux does not give any information about the number of those players running Linux. If you apply the Linux stats from the Hardware/Software survey you've got Linux at 0.84% of the Steam installed base. A full quarter of the Mac installed base.

You also can't simply point to Steam's stats and suggest Linux games are plentiful. The most obvious omission for those stats are competing platforms/publishers like EA and Blizzard. Since there's effectively zero Linux support for Origin or Battle.net using Steam's figures is a bad extrapolation of the games market. You're trying to pretend that Steam == the game market and the games the GP mentioned aren't by some metric "top" games.

I'd love Linux to get better support from game developers/publishers. I also really appreciate the fact Linux gaming today is far better than it has ever been in the past, including during Loki Software's heyday. It's a bit ridiculous though to point out obviously wrong or grossly misleading figures and make proclamations that Linux gaming is awesome and all the top games are available.

It's a small market, certainly, and inroads remain slow. Most high profile game developers, or at least the ones I've previously worked for, never even gave it a second thought. I think that's slowing changing, although certainly not as fast as in the indie scene.

A good question is still: Why? According to Steam's survey 95.42% run Windows, 3.60% Mac and 0.84% Linux - not sure where the last 0.14% went. The number of Linux gamers is not budging, it's the same hardcore 1% that's used it on the desktop for the last decade. Unless Valve starts to get serious about Steam Machines and Linux I really don't see much of a business case...

Practicing Rapid Un(?)planned Disassembly, about $39.99.
Being so wealthy you can practice with real matter? Priceless

Some things are priceless. For everything else, there's PayPal.

Here you go, http://store.steampowered.com/.... When I was young $5 would only get you shareware crap, games have not changed that much in price, the majority are pretty much at the same price they used to be and for the price of a new release you can buy a bunch of other games. Some of the really cheap games are really good, just old and don't sell any more. Seriously not worth taking the risk running an exe from an unkown source, when the starting price is 99 cents. Patience can save you a lot of money.

That just a natural response to steam/linux. I'm even surprised it took so long for them to enable any windows PC to run XBOX games since the XBOX is a PC running windows.

I don't think Steam on Linux requires responding to right now. It's still less than 1% of all Steam users.

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/...

http://store.steampowered.com/... Less than 7-8% total using 32-bit systems to run Steam. Games need to catch up to 64-bit land. It is a good/valid point that you need the libraries to run the games but that is slightly different than having to install them just to start Steam. It's also arguing towards the negative not the positive.. Mobile is going 64 bit also and I doubt it will remain very 32 bit compatible.

The only "striking" part is that instead of careful animation (which has been a progressively improving standard in the Wonder Boy/Monster Land/Monster World series) and higher detailed sprites (more light/shadows, not cheap ambidextrous sprites, etc), we're seeing all the "striking" work of animators who apparently have never worked on anything more detailed than a flash game.

But, yea, that's where "modern visual style" kicks in. Looks more like ass. Looks like something *I* could draw. Honestly, there are so many great game makers out there (Wayforward is a good example and so is GalaxyTrail) that really, one should just pass on this shit. Hell, even something like Curse of the Crescent Island DX would be a better homage to the Wonder Boy line even with all its many faults (and more limited backgrounds).

Maybe I'd be less harsh if they focused on the game play. Oh, right, if you want the game play you should just play the original. So, yea, fuck this remake.

If it is only gaming that keeps you on Windows, you might be in luck. Valve have been pushing Linux as supported platform quite heavily. There are over a thousand titles as we speak.

http://store.steampowered.com/browse/linux/

DX12 capable OS is now 40% of Steam users:
http://store.steampowered.com/...

Add up the Windows 7/8/8.1 users that can run DX11 and there aren't many DX10 users out there at all.

That is odd, because I know two very large companies are in the midst of rolling out Windows 10, as well my the company I am currently consulting for. As for gamers, well according to steam, Windows 10 passed by Windows 7/8/8.1 long ago.

http://store.steampowered.com/...

Desktop Linux is getting to a point where it is viable for day to day work tasks, and gaming is becoming not just a wish, but actually something coming around (slowly but surely).

If it was coming around any slower, it would be going backwards.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey: April 2016

Windows All 95% Down 0.3%
Windows 10 64 Bit 38% Up 1.4%

OSX 3.6% Up 0.3%

Linux 0.9% No change
Ubuntu All 0.4%

The "Steam Machine?" Doesn't seem to catching on:

Alienware Steam Machine ASM100-2980BLK Desktop Console #3,546 in Computers & Accessories, #172 in Computers & Accessories > Desktops > Towers [7:10 PM ET May 21]

The Mac Mini is hot right now at Amazon ---- well, as hot as it gets for a desktop these days ---- and there appear to be some good values in entry-level Win 10 gaming systems.

Linux has about 2% of the desktop market, Windows 10, 15%. Desktop Operating System Market Share - April 2016 A desktop market in decline is not healthy for Linux, which has always been starved of OEM support. Microsoft plays well with Linux if you are managing a server.

But it is also doing spectacularly well on the desktop side selling things like MS Office as a service.

totally irrelevant

Desktop Linux is getting to a point where it is viable for day to day work tasks, and gaming is becoming not just a wish, but actually something coming around (slowly but surely).

If it was coming around any slower, it would be going backwards.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey: April 2016

Windows All 95% Down 0.3%
Windows 10 64 Bit 38% Up 1.4%

OSX 3.6% Up 0.3%

Linux 0.9% No change
Ubuntu All 0.4%

The "Steam Machine?" Doesn't seem to catching on:

Alienware Steam Machine ASM100-2980BLK Desktop Console #3,546 in Computers & Accessories, #172 in Computers & Accessories > Desktops > Towers [7:10 PM ET May 21]

The Mac Mini is hot right now at Amazon ---- well, as hot as it gets for a desktop these days ---- and there appear to be some good values in entry-level Win 10 gaming systems.

Linux has about 2% of the desktop market, Windows 10, 15%. Desktop Operating System Market Share - April 2016 A desktop market in decline is not healthy for Linux, which has always been starved of OEM support. Microsoft plays well with Linux if you are managing a server.

But it is also doing spectacularly well on the desktop side selling things like MS Office as a service.

Wesnoth? I suppose I could play that. Or one of the many other free games that are worth playing.

Or I could play one of the thousands of linux native games available on steam (4321 games according to http://store.steampowered.com/...) or gog or from humble bundles etc.

Many or most of those 4000+ games are probably crap, but the same is true for Windows games. 90% of everything is crap (according to Ted Sturgeon's famously pollyannaish adage).

Or I could play one of the thousands more windows games that work in WINE.

10+ years ago, I used to play games exclusively with WINE on Linux. Several years later, I built a Win7 box to play the games I purchased that wouldn't run (or ran badly) on WINE (most of which run perfectly on wine now).

In a year or two, I expect I'll be dumping the Win7 box and switching to exclusively playing Linux native games + WINE for the handful of windows-only games that i actually care about. I have more games in my steam account (on both Windows and Linux) than I have time to play...I don't feel that there's any lack of games available.

I certainly won't be running Windows 10, because my computers belong to me, not to Microsoft. And I have no wish to become Microsoft's product to be sold to advertisers and other spies.

(and, yes, I have removed/disabled/firewalled their spyware from Win7 - whatever it takes)

Steam/Valve don't accept Credit Cards either.

Better tell that to Steam. They've sold me a couple dozen games while not accepting my Discover card, and their client software even stores the rejected card information for subsequent purchases despite their refusal to to accept it.

Man, the 194000 people who accessed this support page will be pissed.

Steam/Valve don't accept Credit Cards either.

Better tell that to Steam. They've sold me a couple dozen games while not accepting my Discover card, and their client software even stores the rejected card information for subsequent purchases despite their refusal to to accept it.

Man, the 194000 people who accessed this support page will be pissed.

I would if I knew how "relevant industry experience" and "financial stability" are measured.

Gonna throw a "best practices" reference in there too?

I was quoting a console maker's description of developer qualifications.

You do have "some" idea what those mean, claiming you don't is just a distraction

As far as I interpret them, one needs to have already developed a game that was published on another platform. This covers the industry alumni route that you have recommended and the PC-to-console route that others have recommended. So I guess the issue is to first come up with a game concept that's as at home on a PC as it is on a Nintendo product, which the Steam Machine and Steam Link extender make somewhat easier.

be happy playing Tetris

This talking point is years out of date.

you should be learning Unity

While I go about doing so: Why didn't the Unity 3D people sue when Canonical made its similarly-named abortion the default DE for Ubuntu back in 2011?

And by the way, you probably shouldn't cite Cracked as an authoritative source on your website It's a HUMOR site.

Cracked articles cite sources as much as any news article with a more serious tone does. "Funny" doesn't rule out "Informative" and "Insightful".

And how many of those Windows 10 installs sit on desks at workplaces and don't play games at all.

And how many of those Win10 installs at homes don't play any games other than free facebook games, Solitaire or Minesweeper.

His raw 200 million number was bogus, but the numbers still show PC gaming as easily above the Wii U and rivalling the other current-gen consoles. Even just Steam alone there were as many as 11 million people concurrently on Steam at points in the last 48 hours, for instance, so nearly as many people playing games on Steam at a time than have ever even bought Wii Us (source: http://store.steampowered.com/... ), so PC gaming is nothing to scoff at.

Well some people just want to watch a movie once, and that's pretty much the standard price across the various services.

http://store.steampowered.com/...

https://store.playstation.com/...

http://smile.amazon.com/Hunger...

http://www.vudu.com/movies/#!c...

https://play.google.com/store/...

http://www.gamespot.com/forums...
http://www.falloutfacts.com/ot...
(Doesn't say NV is better: http://forums.steampowered.com...)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallo...

So on so on. Google has the links.

The Linux kernel is ready. It runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers and everything in between, so unless he's starting a new project all he can do is sit back and watch. Not that Linux really needs a new DE, there's only so many ways you can start/switch/organize applications and if you look through Win95 to Win10 you're not exactly seeing a revolution. Nor did I see anyone really asking for all these widgets and portlets or system integration of contact management, notifications and all that into the desktop itself.

The OS is a means to run applications. And say what you want, but there's a lot more strange needs than there are OSS developers with an itch to scratch. Not to mention the "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" attitude that creates towards users. Without the Play store, Android would be nothing. AOSP + F-Droid would be roughly as popular as Firefox OS or Linux on the desktop. I'm not going to pretend that Angry Birds for $1 changes the world, but thousands of apps like that do. Open source wins by the long game, slowly improving stealing users and lowering the premium they can charge.

People don't want to make the big jump. Linux is too much new, all at once. And unless you're arrogant or delusional, they won't find good replacement for 100% of their softare, maybe 70%-90% if they're lucky often those are a deal killer. Paid/proprietary software is so obviously not welcome that only a few have dared try. Steam did but it's 0.85% of all Steam users now. In February it was 0.91%, January 0.95%, December 0.96%, November 0.98%... More games, less users that's not a trend which is likely to continue unless Valve can make Steam Machines popular.

If anyone can bring Linux mainstream on the desktop I don't think it's any of the existing open source distros, simply by nature of being just that. I'm guessing it'd be something like Chromebooks, if only Google would go on a full frontal assault on Microsoft. But then they're happy as long as people use Google's services, which they seem to do anyway so I can see why they're not in any hurry. After all Microsoft has a pretty big war chest that you don't want to pick a fight with for no good reason. If you're a business that is, OSS don't play by those rules.

It's a sham, it's a joke, it's a complete fabrication, it's utter bullshit, and it means NOTHING.

It means plenty when you look at the adoption rates for OSX and Linux as a client OS.

Valve is as big and Linux-friendly a presence in the PC gaming market as you will find on the planet. But 96% of Steam gamers run Windows. 34% have upgraded to 64 bit Windows 10. Only 1% run any flavor of Linux. 0.4% Ubuntu. 0.1% Mint. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: February 2016

I like steam but this is good that the ACCC took them to court and won. Their refund policy is BS. I bought payday 2 ( http://store.steampowered.com/... ) when it had just came out for something like US$25 full price. I trusted the word of the developer who said it would NEVER have microtransactions ( http://steamcommunity.com/app/... ) in the game. Those scumbag developers then added in microtransactions anyway turning it on a P2W game. I tried multiple times through steam to get it refunded and each time I got a template response from steam denying the refund. If this was sold in the shops in Australia it would be ILLEGAL because it was not what I bought nor was it advertised as such to have microtransactions.

I will never buy a overkill game again.

the poor guy who has to clean your gore and brains off the wall(s), ceiling, and floor

You can be that guy.

http://store.steampowered.com/...

There's http://store.steampowered.com/... but the reviews make it look like a mess.

Cry me a river.

Steam is as Linux-friendly a distributor you'll find anywhere. But this is the reality of PC gaming on Steam:

96% of Steam gamers run Windows. 34% 64 Bit Win 10. 3% OSX. 1% Linux. 0.4% Ubuntu. 0.1% Mint. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: February 2016

Steam Hardware & Software Survey: February 2016

Windows 96%

Windows 10 64 Bit 34% Up 1%
Windows 7 64 Bit 34%
Windows 8.1 64 Bit 13%
Window 7 8%
Windows XP 2%

OSX 3%

MacOS 10.11.3 64 bit 1%

Linux 1%

Ubuntu 0.4%
Linux Mint 0.1%

The $490 Alienware Steam Machine ASM100-2980BLK Desktop Console currently ranks #127 in in the catch-all "Desktop Tower" sales category at Amazon.com. A fully pimped-out $6,000 Cybertron Win 10 gamer's PC ranks #37. You'll find the MacMini here and the $99 Win 10 dongle as well.

It is all pretty good evidence that no one knows where the Steam Machine belongs in the marketplace or how to sell it.

I guess it's meta-news, the state of the Linux desktop in 2016... I found this piece from 2008 named The writers who cried YOTLD thats starts like this:

If you have followed tech news closely at all within the last ten years, you've probably heard the phrase year of the Linux desktop before. This is the year that Linux makes a breakthrough with home users, and suddenly Microsoft's dominant market share comes toppling down. I believe people have been proclaiming various years as the year of the Linux desktop since as early as 1998 (possibly even earlier).

The Steam client for Linux is now over three years old and market share is at 0.91% and falling, expand OS version line for the details. And AMD has been working on open source drivers for eight and a half years now. At this pace I'm mostly just wondering where it'll be when Win7 sunsets in 2020 and whether I really want to struggle with a 1% market share desktop again. When I ditched it for Win7 back in 2010 I expected it'd take a few more years in the oven, now I'm not sure even a decade will do. But at least I can put the menu on the bottom, unless that's removed again in the next "reinvention" of the desktop.

stuff that matters.

All the same, according to the Steam Hardware and Software Survey for February, about 40% of Linux gamers have chosen Ubuntu. Those are good numbers for a Linux distribution. It's a pity that they translate to a bare 0.4% of all Steam gamers, but you can't have everything.

I realize you can afford to get into gaming retail/steam/etc, but with Steam's Family Sharing* I can share my slightly obscene library with you to try out a wide assortment of old and new games if you like. It's all 100% above board and a nice way to legally try before you buy (a friend of mine has a library about double mine and I have tried quite a few games that way on his - saved me from a couple bad purchases :)); you've got my email, just ping me if interested.

Games are fun & you seem to occasionally have a little free time on your hands :) Also, in the past 15 years, indie games have exploded and the variety of games out there has never been greater (in my experience, I've been PC gaming since the mid-80's)

* Before anyone mentions 'he's not family', it's officially for family and guests and I checked, there's nothing against sharing with friends - in fact, the FAQ specifically mentions sharing with friends, though it is implicitly worded.

Another one, XCOM 2 ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/268500/
"AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported at time of release."

Another one, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/241930/
"AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance."

At least for XCOM2, "not supported" means you won't receive any support from the developers on any issues you might discover.
It has nothing to do with whether it actually runs or not.

Another one, XCOM 2 ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/268500/
"AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported at time of release."

Another one, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/241930/
"AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance."

At least for XCOM2, "not supported" means you won't receive any support from the developers on any issues you might discover.
It has nothing to do with whether it actually runs or not.

Same goes for GRID Autosport.

From the System Requirements section, for Linux:
Intel and AMD GPU's are not supported at time of release.

Another one, XCOM 2 ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/268500/
"AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported at time of release."

Another one, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/241930/
"AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance."

Another one, XCOM 2 ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/268500/
"AMD and Intel GPUs are not supported at time of release."

Another one, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor ("SteamOS + Linux" tab):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/241930/
"AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance."

"Ive been playing steam games in linux for the past few years with AMD cards with no issue."

How ironic that the subject of your post includes "fails to mention".

You failed to mention that plenty of Linux-supported games on Steam don't even support AMD cards.
There goes your "no issue".
Just to give you one example (quoting from the tab 'SteamOS + Linux'):
"NOTE: AMD and Intel graphics cards are not currently supported by Alien: Isolation. Game requires at least OpenGL 4.3"

SteamOS is downstream from Debian, which has not deprecated fglrx yet and probably won't until the new AMD driver comes out.

Ubuntu has 0.4% share of the Steam Market. 40% of Linux's pathetic 1% share of the Steam market. Steam Hardware & Software Survey: February 2016 Stats for SteamOS or the Steam Machine aren't to be found here, or anywhere else for that matter.

I suspect because the numbers are so bad no one wants to see them in print.

Exactly. I really don't know what they expected. Trademark law requires you to defend your trademark or you risk losing it. It would have made much more sense to just make a game that copied the style of the original game without making an outright copy. Konami is still selling games using the Metal Gear Solid name. So I could see why they would want to shut down this project to get rid of any confusion between the fan-made game and official releases from Konami.