Slashdot Mirror
Street Fighter V Announced For Linux and SteamOS
An anonymous reader writes: Capcom has announced that their upcoming Street Fighter V game, one of the most anticipated games for 2016, will also be available for SteamOS and Linux. Already in place is support functionality for the Steam Controller, Valve's game controller that was recently updated with some new features. Ever since Valve launched Steam for Linux, the number of native Linux games has positively exploded. But will it be enough for gamers to choose a Linux distribution as their gaming platform?
Meh, you really need a 6 button controller for Street Fighter. The 6 button Genesis was the best hand held controller ever.
I play games on Linux. I loved the Portal games, and I'm spending more time than is perhaps good for me in Kerbal Space Program. Got XCOM waiting for me once I take a break from KSP. On my laptop I play FTL, and I've slowly playing through Baldurs Gate; something fun to do during business trips.
If I didn't have these games on Linux, I would not be playing on Windows. Dual-booting is completely impractical, since you'd have to close your work and shut down just to play a game. I'd not use Windows; I'd probably just get a game console instead. Or be content with the games I can play on my tablet. Without Linux games, I would not be playing PC games at all.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I dunno about that. The most difficult thing about gaming on Linux is that troubleshooting is HARD. For example, imagine running a game and it doesn't even start, it just spits out the message "segmentation fault". Uh yeah...let me just type that into google...and...nope, just a vague description of a memory error. What could be wrong? Well, a lot of fucking things to be honest.
Don't get me wrong, I use Linux every day (and in fact admin at least 20 of Linux servers) and it's a wonderful kernel for server OSes, but I've just never seen the appeal of running it for anything desktop related. The only way I foresee that is if basically everybody who would like to see Linux on the desktop could all get together and decide on the same software stack for use in practically every desktop environment (kind of like how every Android device runs essentially the same or at least 99.99% compatible stack.) The problem is, coders (and engineers in general) have their own way they like seeing things get done, and don't like doing it anybody else's way, thus when they work on their own and for their own benefit, there's no unified desktop environment that application developers can get behind.
What Valve is doing with SteamOS is a good start (i.e. establishing a common set of libraries that are required,) but IMO they've got a ways to go.
And yet right now, on Windows, the SF5 beta is crashing for me. There's even less I can do because there are no messages at all.
Worse, Ultra Street Fighter 4 randomly crashes out on me. No errors, no messages. Just up and vanishes mid-game. Other games give me, occasionally, random crash dialogs. So I doubt the troubleshooting situation can truly be worse on Linux.
> But will it be enough for gamers to choose a Linux distribution as their gaming platform?
That's not the point of putting a game on Linux. What this means is that, if you are running Linux, you can play this game. This is GREAT news. The issue facing Linux gamers isn't that there are no good games- it's that of the games made, many never get a Linux version. This is a great game that is getting a Linux version. That's seriously cool!
Most gamers have at least one game that they can't make work on Linux- this means that Street Fighter V will NOT be one of those annoying games. Solid.