It’s the Windows way. There applications typically also ship all dependencies. Either statically linked, or as a DLL files in their install folder.

It’s not a good solution, but for games that’s imho OK.

I’ll give you my point of view as game developer.

Disclaimer first: I work as a coder, everything I say about publisher interaction is second-hand knowledge.

We have made one Linux game. It was the first one of our two “indie” titles (quotation marks, because both of them ended up being partially funded by a publisher, so they weren’t really indie in the end), where we had promised a Linux build on Kickstarter, long before a publisher got involved.

The main reason why we did not do native Linux in our publisher-funded games is quite simple: Our publishers didn’t pay us for it.

There are actually some publishers who are very keen on getting native Linux versions for their games, but we sadly have not released a game with any of them yet…

The publishers we released games with did not agree to the buget that we think is needed to do a Linux port of sufficient quality. If we would lower the price for doing a Linux port to the point where our publishers would agree to it, we would take on a lot of financial risk ourselves, so this is sadly not an option.

If everything worked as it is advertised by engine developers, making a Linux version would be quite cheap: Just click a few buttons and ship it. This is, sadly, not the case in real-life, as there are always platform specific bugs in game-engines. Our one Linux game was made with Unity, and we had quite a few Linux-only bugs that we forwarded to the Unity devs (we didn’t have engine source code access), and had to wait for them to fix… For the engine we mainly use nowadays, Unreal, we have a rule-of-thumb: “Engine features that are used by Fortnite are usually well maintained.” There is no native Linux version of Fortnite… (We did try Unreal’s Vulkan RHI in Unreal 4.26 for Steam Deck support in one of our games. Let me put it this way: The game in question still uses Direct3D on Steam Deck.)

So, from experience we expect that the chance that we would have to find and fix Linux-specific engine bugs is quite high. Therefore we have to budget for this, what makes offering a native Linux version relatively costly compared to the platform’s market share. Costly enough to make our publishers say “no”.

This, by the way, also answers the question why publishers are willing to pay for the way more expensive console ports. There are also way more console players, and therefore potential customers out there…

(I can only guess, but I would expect publishers to be even more reluctant to pay for native Linux, now that WINE works so well that getting a game running on Linux needs typically zero extra work.)

As a gamedev I never saw this as a big issue. Just run Debian Oldstable on your build server, link whatever you can statically, and you are good.

(However, I am talking on a purely theoretical level here - we only released one Linux game, and that was before I joined the company. I will explain our actual reasons in a separate post.)

I just finished The Pristine Cut of Slay the Princess, and I fully agree that it should be the GOTY.

It’s amazing how different it feels when you play a really excellent game. With most games I regularly pause and tab out, to browse the web. With Slay the Princess I did not. It completely absorbed me, even though it was my second play-through.

• OpenTTD: Open Source and available for free.
• Settlers 2 via some DosBOX version. Back when I still used Android I used Dosbox Turbo, but it seems to have been removed from the Play Store. No clue which DosBOX build for Anrdoid is good nowadays…
• 2048: Open Source and free puzzle game
• Threes: Puzzle game similar to 2048
• Cogs: Puzzle game. No clue how to find it on the play store, but it’s available at humblebundle.
• Slay the Spire: Deck Builder roguelike.
• Space Chem: Zachlike puzzle game. (Actually not only zachlike - it’s form zachtronics)

and basically any Android game that ever was part of a Humble Mobile Bundle. Those happened before Humble Bundle was sold and consequently became boring.

It was there for certain.

In WoW it disappeared when the Dungeon Finder was added, which made social interaction and therefore being nice to each other optional. Before that feature, you had to chat with people in order to form groups for clearing dungeons - a step that the Dungeon Finder conveniently allowed to skip…

Don’t get me wrong, the Dungeon Finder wasn’t the start of it, but it is what accelerated it greatly. Before that social interaction had already been in decline, mostly because everything except for the end-game had been slowly turning into essentially a single-player experience. However, everyone (who stuck to the game) sooner or later reached the end-game content, and had to interact with other players. With the Dungone Finder, this incentive was lost too…

(I am maybe a bit too harsh on the Dungeon Finder - some end-game content was difficult, so you had much higher chances of success if you played with a team you knew well - and therefore had to form/join a guild.)

Yep. In addition, there is now a free build of version 50.xx on the official website, which uses the same code as the Steam version, but does not include the tileset and the soundtrack.

I tried that free build on the weekend (because I didn’t want to bother with installing Steam on my ARM64 laptop), and it still looks as amazing as always. Now I just need to learn the keybindings for the Steam version - because using a mouse with ASCII graphics feels just wrong 😉.

This, sadly, is no longer true for the Steam version of the game. It comes with a (pretty good) tile-set, which is enabled by default.

I still think, the old ASCII art and keyboard-centric UI was better, but well…

You can’t say “Losing is fun!” without linking the comic!

(Source: Dwarf Fortress Wiki article on Fun)

I am now at the point where I think there are two things happening.

• Actual technological progress.
• Marketing bullshit pushed by dazzlers.

Examples for the first one would be new battery tech for electric vehicles, new ways to harvest renewable energy, new tools that allow to make software more stable,… Examples for the second would be NTFs, Crypto-Currencies, “AI”, e-Fuels,…

Revisionist? I am old, I was there. But if you don’t believe me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

(And while I didn’t own a Symbian phone myself, a good friend did. Oh, but what I owned was a tablet computer. Way back in 2002. And now you will likely call me a Revisionist again, because I owned a device before Apple invented it…)

It’s funny that you mention the iPhone - a device that had zero innovation compared to its competitors, and just managed to take the market because of marketing.

While Visual Novels are not my favourite genre, there are a few entries that I would like to highlight, because I enjoyed playing them quite a lot:

• Pyre: While it isn’t marketed as Visual Novel, it pretty much is one. To be precise, it is a Visual Novel with sports-game elements. The world-building in this one is excellent, as is the art. The visuals alone would make this game worth playing, but there is also the soundtrack, and the gameplay of the sports events is pretty fun too. Oh, and the story. This game really requires tough choices. It’s from the same studio that made Hades, Transistor and Bastion, and it shows.
• Griftlands: Again, not marketed as Visual Novel, despite very clearly being one. This one is a Visual Novel with card battles and deck-building. Just as with Pyre, the world-building in this one is outstanding. The card battles are well done. It’s no Slay the Spire, but it’s still pretty good. Also, it has some of the best jokes I have seen in games recently.
• Loren the Amazon Princess: Again a Visual Novel that is primarily marketed as something else - this time Role Playing Game. And to be honest, it has everything you would expect from an RPG: inventory management, character stats, JRPG-style turn-based battles, trading, a world map,… But it’s still pretty much a Visual Novel with RPG elements. It has a massive scope for an indie game, and is overall pretty well done. To be blatantly honest, I played this mainly for the RPG parts, but the story isn’t bad either, once one gets past the initial “I see your party has no rogue, mind if I join?” part. The setting is still being actively developed by the studio behind it, who have released several other visual novels (with and without RPG elements) set in the same world, with recurring characters.

Yes. That’s why I was utterly confused when big companies dug out hat dead horse (yet) again.

And they are still trying to ride it.

It’s not “either side”. One “side” is making games, the other is screaming slurs.

Yep. And the worst part is the Fear-of-Missing-Out when disabling them.

Like, there is nothing stopping you from just not doing the kingdom management mini-game, except that nagging feeling that you might actually miss out on some content…

Currently? Potionomics. I just wanted something that I can finish quickly, because of the upcoming release of House of Light, but now I am still not done with my play-through, so I kinda cannot start House of Light just yet.

But in a couple of days, as soon as I am done with Potionomics?

House of Light. And that for quite some time, I expect.

And the predecessor, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is amazing too.

It depends on what kind of patent. I just googled the term I had used before, and it is indeed what I expected it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

And yes, that name is stupid. That’s why I am happy that my native language, German, has a better distinction between “Patent” (what you described) and “Geschmacksmuster” (design patent).

About patents being public: They are. That’s because the idea behind patents is that after they expire, anyone can use them to build the technology they describe. The temporary exclusive usage rights that they offer are meant as an incentive for inventors to publish their findings. The only problem is that the legal situation did not keep up with the creativity of patent lawyers… (I will stop now, otherwise this will turn into an endless rant about how broken the patent system is.)

I’m not sure how the term “patent” is to be interpreted here. It could be used like back in the days when Apple sued Samsung because their phone had rounded edges too…

Like a “design patent” (sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m unsure if this is the correct translation).

A lot of the pals in the game look quite close to Pokémon. Not identical, of course, but so similar that one just has to wonder if the design has been “inspired” by Pokémon…