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Valve has directly responded to the Steam communities' worries that Steam Machines and by extension SteamOS, Valve's Linux powered gaming OS, were silently being discontinued. tl;dr: No, they aren't dropping SteamOS or the Steam Machine. In fact, they have more in the pipeline for Linux so stay tuned.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/
We've noticed that what started out as a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation turned into a story about the delisting of Steam Machines. That section of the Steam Store is still available, but was removed from the main navigation bar based on user traffic. Given that this change has sparked a lot of interest, we thought it'd make sense to address some of the points we've seen people take away from it.
While it's true Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven't significantly changed. We're still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.
Through the Steam Machine initiative, we've learned quite a bit about the state of the Linux ecosystem for real-world game developers out there. We've taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed. We think an important part of that effort is our ongoing investment in making Vulkan a competitive and well-supported graphics API, as well as making sure it has first-class support on Linux platforms.
Recently we announced Vulkan availability for macOS and iOS, adding to its existing availability for Windows and Linux. We also rolled out Steam Shader Pre-Caching, which will let users of Vulkan-based applications skip shader compilation on their local machine, significantly improving initial load times and reducing overall runtime stuttering in comparison with other APIs. We'll be talking more about Shader Pre-Caching in the coming months as the system matures.
At the same time, we're continuing to invest significant resources in supporting the Vulkan ecosystem, tooling and driver efforts. We also have other Linux initiatives in the pipe that we're not quite ready to talk about yet; SteamOS will continue to be our medium to deliver these improvements to our customers, and we think they will ultimately benefit the Linux ecosystem at large.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:28PM (6 children)
Well, I haven't thought this out (which should be obvious from reading what I've written) but I was thinking about a division between the free software+nonfree creative assets version (the game sold to others) and the free software+level editors and samples "community edition".
Less of an issue if gamers came together and paid for the game to be developed ahead of time--but disrespect is an issue, and many do not respect the copyrights of authors and artists.
That's where the free software game + level editors + sample levels/assets came in with my mental model described above. They could carry the community version, which has had no nonfree content bundled with it. Thus, they would carry something that it would make sense to provide: A complete game, not just an engine + a sixteen page howto on finding the data files necessary for it to run.
I am a paid associate member of the FSF, and some of their deprecated words make sense, but others not so much, to me.
For example, content. Now, for me, that makes sense to describe the articles on my website separately from its layout and underlying content management engine (also deprecated because "content" is deprecated). The layout and CMS are a container, and the things that I write are the content that goes into the container. But they disagree, which is their right.
Even "intellectual property", which is a term meaning "Things covered by patents, copyrights, or trademarks as opposed to property you can hold in your hand, or drop and break." But they've gone a lot farther down this rabbit hole than I have, such that they deprecate this term because it "makes no sense."
I get that we want to be precise, but I am fuzzy on why the above cannot be, in any context, an acceptable level of precision. I am not saying I am right and these are wrong--just that I don't understand the reasoning.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday April 06 2018, @02:40AM (5 children)
So if Id were to switch to the "free engine from day one" model, then alongside Doom, it'd have to develop Freedoom. So now instead of having to develop one thing (a game on top of Unity or Unreal), a studio has to develop three things (an engine and toolchain, a sample free game, and a proprietary game built on that engine). This raises the threshold of the crowdfunding campaign by that much and makes it even less likely that the campaign will meet its threshold, especially if the studio has yet no finished projects of comparable scale.
Even if "content" isn't as bad as FSF makes it out to be, "management" is still too vague if "Naming Java Classes Without a 'Manager'" by Alan Green [bright-green.com] and "I Shall Call It.. SomethingManager" by Jeff Atwood [codinghorror.com] are to be believed. To be precise, your website runs on "website editing and templating software" (W.E.T.-ware).
As I understand it, Mr. Stallman has referred to the term "intellectual property" as "a seductive mirage" [gnu.org] because copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, right of publicity, mask work, and database laws differ more than they are similar. Proponents of broadening the scope of these exclusive rights have a habit of drawing Imperfect Parallels among these disparate areas of law that confuse the public. I've written more about that particular term as well [pineight.com].
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday April 06 2018, @01:22PM (4 children)
Said studio is already developing an engine, a toolchain, and various game levels, artwork, and other whatever-word-we-use-in-place-of-assets.
Even if it isn't obvious what will be in the "free" bag and what will be in the "for sale" bag, then at three o'clock on a Thursday, they can take 10 - 15 minutes and decide which things go into totally-for-sale.ISO (most of them) and which things go into community-edition.tar.gz. This short meeting is not the "raising the threshold by now developing three things instead of one" that you are describing.
In fact, Doom, the game in your example, was developed and released in a similar manner, with a for-pay "full" version and a gratis version with less content. At that point they had already developed a wad editor (though it sucked). This is a good parallel to our free software, free culture game. No sane person would have said "no we can't release a gratis version with less content because that would mean we would have to develop three things and raise our threshold."
In fact, lots of proprietary-but-gratis games over time have made their money by selling proprietary "additional episodes" or sequels. Doom, Jill of the jungle, Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, Rise of the triad, Quake, Hexen, hundreds more.
It's worked and made lots of people lots of money. That would not have gone any differently if the games had been free software with free creative materials, and studios selling nonfree "additional episode" or sequel data packs to load into the free software games.
Your examples show people misusing the word management to hide what a class, function, or method does; that doesn't make management a bad word, it just makes those people bad programmers.
I can define what management functions my cms performs pretty clearly if you're interested, and they're well-exposed in the interface, not hidden behind opaqueness.
Debatable semantics. What unites them is what they have in common, the "imaginary", "intangible," or "intellectual" bit. This is a very useful distinction, and like any description, it can be well-used, or it can be abused.
Perhaps they do. Whether that reflects poorly on those who misuse the term, or destroys the term itself, is an exercise I'll leave for the reader. (Also see "management", above.)
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday April 22 2018, @05:44PM (3 children)
The gratis episode was not libre, and the engine was not day one libre.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:25PM (2 children)
That's why "similar" and not "the same." It was done in a manner, to come full circle, with imperfect parallels to what I'm promoting above.
A. DOOM and 50 others:
-- GRATIS VERSION nonfree gratis version with nonfree gratis artwork and data
plus
-- FOR-SALE VERSION extended nonfree version for sale, containing nonfree artwork and data for sale.
B. My suggestion:
-- GRATIS GAME free-libre, gratis version with free-libre, gratis artwork and data
plus
-- FOR-SALE GAME extended free-libre version for sale, containing more artwork and more data that may or may not start out as nonfree but that are not gratis.
Similar, and proven to make great first-tier quality games, and to make authors money, if someone can make the leap from A to B.
I am not much of a programmer unless you count shell, basic, or php. Not a lot of first-tier games written in those. And I am not much of a gamer unless you count Super Tuxkart (an example of both how free-libre games can be really good and of how community content can jarringly clash and be "not ready for prime time").
But someone, somewhere is a 1-2-3-4 perfect storm of a 1. free software activist, who 2. games, and is 3. is a programmer and 4. an artist.
Or a 1+2 who knows a 2+3, and a 2+4.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday April 23 2018, @12:32AM (1 child)
You claim that this one person exists and is likely to be discovered soon. But it has been forty years since the invention of home microprocessor video games in 1977, and this one person has not yet been discovered in that time. What steps should I take to help the community discover this one person?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday April 23 2018, @02:49PM
I wish I could say that Mr./Ms. 1234 would be discovered soon.
The steps I take are mostly to point out to those that I encounter that nonfree things are nonfree, that campaigns to increase the penetration of DRM are just that, etc.
Example: "Hey, man, have you heard of the free games on Steam?" "There are gratis games on Steam, but they're nonfree. Steam is a DRM delivery device. I avoid it for those reasons. But thanks."
I come off as an extremist nutjob, and you may find a much better approach, but raising awareness is probably the best thing that will help cultivate the next generation of free software free culture thinkers. And the more we are, the larger our group, the more likely that found among us will be programmers, artists, and gamers.