I made the mistake of buying the Europa Universalis IV base game, and getting 3 months of subscription for all DLCs… Im playing the Anbennar mod, which is a fantasy total conversion of the game. There goes the little bit of spare time I still have…
They only mention “payment processors”, not Visa, MasterCard, PayPal,… So, this does not answer which payment processor(s) are behind the push.
Sorry for being pedantic, but the only confirmed information in that article is “payment processors”. The author seems to just assume that this means credit card companies (what is a reasonable assumption, as said), but it does not sound like that part is confirmed…
Are there trustworthy sources that it’s VISA/MasterCard, or is this speculation?
I mean, I would not be surprised at all, since they have a history of misusing their power (iirc they were the reason OnlyFans nearly went SFW), but before calling names, I’d like to be certain.
This article has a screenshot listing some removed titles (and I think also a link to the original source): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/07/valve-gets-pressured-by-payment-processors-with-a-new-rule-for-game-devs-and-various-adult-games-removed/
If you count DOSBox as emulation (what it definitely is - unlike WINE it actually emulates an x86 PC and peripherals):
I’ve played both on the Deck, and they both work great. (Btw: I did not use Settlers 2 as an example for my DOSBox setup guide by chance. I picked it because it is an amazing game and still fun nowadays.)
Signed Kernels are problematic for some users. While the distribution-supplied kernel binaries are fine for most users, there are always those who want to (or need to, due to hardware quirks or bugs) tinker with the kernel compile-time configuration, or the kernel source code itself…
In Physics we mostly used right-hand, but X-right, Y-up, and Z pointing towards the viewer.
But that’s details. The only important choice is between left- and right-handed, as that affects the signs in the cross product (and some other formulas - generally everything that cares about which rotation is considered positive).
Near-Mage. It’s a point-and-click adventure from the same studio that also made Gibbous, and set in the same world. However, the theme is much lighter. Gibbous was (while still a comedy) about cosmic horror. Near-Mage is fantasy.
While I definitely recommend the game, it is lacking a bit when it comes to riddles. Most point-and-click adventure games have lots of them, where you need to think, give up, and then just try random stuff until something happens. This is almost completely missing in Near-Mage… There is almost always a quest goal that directly tells you what to do - up to the point that situations that give you a choice are explicitly marked as such.
On the other hand, just like Gibbous, the game is beautifully drawn and animated, and all dialogues are fully voiced. The characters are likeable and - call me a furry if you want - really cute. What keeps me playing is mostly the world - there is always new stuff to discover, even in late-game, and the mix of fantasy and (what I assume to be) Romanian folklore is great.
I have to both agree and disagree here.
Disagree because it doesn’t look that bad.
Agree because there is a reason I haven’t used the Deck with a big screen in months.
Two things to add regarding question 1:
The Steam Deck GPU is optimized for the built-in screen, which has 1280x800 pixels. FullHD is more than twice the number of pixels. The GPUs fragment fill rate will therefore not be sufficient to play many games at FullHD native. The Steam Deck has built-in FSR upscaling though, so if you are not sitting directly in front of the screen, it will look OK-ish…
The second thing is refresh rate. On the deck itself you can set the screen refresh rate to 40 Hz. For many, many games the built-in GPU will not manage 60 FPS even at 1280x800, but it quite often manages to do 40, which still feels OK-ish.
Most external screens don’t support 40Hz though, so you will be stuck with either limiting your framerate to 30 FPS, or you will have to live with either tearing or unsteady framerate.
I now have run into the issue that I myself cannot play Minecraft on my Linux laptop, which is an ARM machine and the ARM Mali GPU does not support the OpenGL version that Minecraft requires. (It also needs some hackery, as the Java-written Minecraft uses some native code libraries.)
I’m now playing VoxeLibre instead, which runs mostly fine on my laptop.
This. So much this.
The “backlog” is not something to work through, it is a lesson to learn: Do not buy a game unless you have time and are motivated to play it that very moment. If you buy it to play it “later”, or “next week”, you very likely are not going to play it, and it is just wasted money.
(The same is true for books, by the way. And when it comes to books, I refuse to learn this lesson.)
What is stopping you from playing Minecraft itself on Linux?
I haven’t played it in a while, but it did work perfectly fine last time I tried it. It is written in Java, after all.
While I am not aware of any way to run custom software on the Steam Deck while it is on standby, you can drastically reduce the power drain if you shut it down fully instead of leaving it on standby. You can either use the “Power” menu after pressing the steam key, or long-press the power button to get the option to do so.
I would not say “lazy”.
There are a lot of bold promises in Unreal Engine 5 advertisements, that get taken up by publishers and producers - and then end up in the game budgets…
And then, near the end of the project, when it turns out that performance isn’t good because the advertisement promises have been a bit too bold, there is no money for optimization left…
Also, if I am allowed to do some absolutely shameless self promotion: Bus Simulator 21 is verified, and 18 is playable.
I need to give two perspectives here. One from my day-job as a gamedev, and one from my hobby as a gamedev.
The main difference is that in my spare time I do not have to suffer working on Windows.
So, first about work: I have switched from an nVidia card to an AMD one in 2022, because my work PC’s nVidia card had too little VRAM to run the editor of Unreal Engine 5. Editor performance was abysmal (due to the nVidia card’s limited VRAM) and running out of VRAM also frequently caused the editor to crash.
After I switched to an AMD card, those crashes were gone and performance of the editor was way better too (because it now had enough VRAM to no longer fall back to system RAM). However, Unreal kept complaining about a driver bug regarding synchronization, that never led to any observable issues other than running into a (continuable) assert on editor startup. I am still using this card, and after some driver update, that warning went away.
The AMD card is working flawlessly for me, and I honestly do not want to switch back.
There is one thing that I need to highlight though: The nVidia rendering debugging tools (most important: nVidia Insights) are locked to nVidia hardware. AMD’s tools are not locked to AMD hardware. So, if you use an nVidia card, you get access to all tools, while on AMD cards you need to make do with the tools you get from AMD (or Intel, or Microsoft).
In my spare time I luckily don’t have to use Windows, and on Linux the AMD drivers are, in my opinion, superior to the nVidia drivers in almost all aspects. The most important thing about them is that they are open source, so you can actually edit the drivers, and mesa (the open source project that contains the OpenGL runtime) has some pretty amazing debugging features.
The AMD Linux drivers also integrate way better with the various desktop environments. With the nVidia drivers you more or less need to use the nVidia Control Center for some settings, what is not the case with the AMD ones.
The one drawback I see on Linux, compared to the nVidia drivers, is that setting up OpenCL is a little bit more involved with the AMD drivers - but since you nowadays can combine the open source drivers with the ROCm OpenCL runtime, that’s not that a big deal any more.
Last, but not least: In my experience the AMD drivers are “more strict” when it comes to using graphics APIs and shader languages correctly. Back when I still used an nVidia card, I caused several bugs that only surfaced on a coworkers’ AMD card. In all of those cases the bugs were actual bugs in my code, that only worked because they accidentally did the right thing on nVidia due to implementation-defined behaviour…
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.
Afaik you can only develop UWP apps on retail Xbox. Aka Windows Phone apps. Aka “those shitty programs with horrible UI that made Windows 8 everyone’s favourite Windows version”.