Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
store.steampowered.com
store.steampowered.com
I'm not sure the Witness can live up to Braid, but we'll see.
The famous quote in the epilogue makes you think of an important historical event, but plausibly that's metaphorical and the game is about something more personal, existential. Maybe the game isn't about anything but making you reflect. Maybe it's an expression of particular events in Blow's life. Maybe all of the above.
He also said he responded to people who emailed him their interpretation. At the time of the interview only one person correctly guessed Blow's own interpretation.
I can't even imagine what the real answer could be.
I remember when I was originally playing the game right after it came out, and I was stumped by a puzzle and then found the "official" walkthrough and it inspired me to try my best at the game to get through it. And it really made the game way more rewarding, enjoyable, and memorable.
(The game that did that to me most often was Catherine. At least five or six times. And given that I never got very good at the puzzle version (in the arcade game in the bar), probably still at least a couple more still lurking in there if I picked it up again.)
I tried my best to enjoy it (Fez too) but I can't seem to get past the fact that they are platformers, which I have discovered I just flat-out do not like.
I actually paid for Fez, apart from its little gimmick and art work, it wasn't really much. Never finished it even, and I finished Assassins Creed 1 ;-)
Blow just seems genuinely good at writing games/software and creating puzzles, but even better at finishing.
I am not saying he Stole Fez, I am saying he seems to have mistreated people who worked on it with him. In the end, Blow is a force of nature, Fish was lucky to have someone code the engine for him, period. Look through the videos on Jai, there is some good stuff there that's not related to games in general.
Edit: Sure, it's perfectly valid to extend the meaning of "steal" to include "be inspired by" or "copy", but that does nothing but devalue its original meaning.
http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/d...
Blow was treated very unfairly, imo. He's actually interesting to listen to and something of a deep and critical thinker. Clearly he's someone who understands that games can be a transcendent experience like any art.
I just hope he's working on a VR game soon. I suspect the Vive is going to change everything in a couple months. I'd love to VR in the kinds of worlds he builds.
> Tips for playing The Witness: give yourself a week or two, no hints, no reviews. Sleep on it. Take breaks. It's a big game. Nothing like it.
> If you can't spend all day every day playing The Witness, give yourself months. Engage deeply with The Witness and it will stare back.
> Don't watch twitch streams or look at screenshots or read reviews. Just play it, seriously.
I couldn't possibly agree more. But, just so others don't end up making (or not making!) a blind purchase, I present a spoiler-free summary:
It's a puzzle game. I'm likely not nearly done with the game and the puzzles have ranged from trivial to really, really, rather hard. The guy who made Braid is the designer of and one of the programmers of this game. It's also rather pretty, and the art (and foley) directions [0] are solid.
[0] Yes, plural.
My recommendation: http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/25/10817632/the-witness-review...
"The Witness is maze puzzles. Full Stop."
While this is technically true, I really think it gives people the wrong impression. The colored mazes are the universal UI widget but many of them are switchboards that control the environment in the game in ways typical to 3d puzzlers (turning on lights, moving platforms, aligning objects.)
Many of the puzzles are the sort of abstract logic puzzles you'd see in an IQ test or mobile game, but most of them revolve around paying close attention to your environment and seeing it in different ways. I'd love to describe a few of them, but wouldn't want to spoil the moments of euphoria from noticing them yourself.
It's unfortunate that the game starts with some of the more abstract ones, because the real joy lies elsewhere in the game, but I would say that if you don't enjoy an abstract intellectual challenge you probably won't enjoy it.
You cut out the important bit of the very next sentence:
‘That's also a highly reductionist take. It's like saying that a book is "just words."’
Agreed, definitely don't want spoilers.
I've set up a subreddit specifically for spoiler-free gentle hints: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWitnessHints/
The main /r/TheWitness sub is starting to get quite spoilery.
A quote in one of the audio logs is so exquisite that I just have to share.
One nature perfect and pervading circulates in all natures
One reality, all comprehensive, contains within itself all realities
The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water
And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one moon
The Dharma body [the Absolute] of all Buddhas enters into my own being
And my own being is found in union with theirs
The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame
Like space it knows no boundaries
Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness
It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it
You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it
And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way
You remain silent and it speaks, you speak and it is dumb
The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.
- Yung-Chia Ta-Shih
As someone who is colorblind, I've been happy to see many games come out with options to enable filters for one or more types of colorblindness. It's disappointing that such a feature isn't present in this game.
> “We definitely thought about colorblindness but ultimately there was not much we could do in terms of the individual puzzles,” the game’s lead developer, Jonathan Blow, told me today.
It's been a decision by the devs. Still, it would be nice if they updated the puzzles for those who are colorblind.
Sadly, having played through the puzzles that involve color, it's not superficial at all. The puzzles are fundamentally about how colors work and combine. There isn't an obvious way to make a colorblind friendly version...
I wish modern exploration/puzzle adventures in the Myst vein were made to be more easily navigated by my parents, who just can't handle FPS-style controls, quick action, jumping puzzles, etc. So I can't have them try Braid or Fez or most other modern games despite having some great puzzles. Machinarium worked great, Her Story was good but quite different, but other than that we'll probably never get to share that same Myst-style experience again. At least Cyan is working on a Myst-esque game again, Obduction.
The only downside is that it would be a very solo experience and certainly couldn't be enjoyed as a family.
http://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0015.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692332)
This is from a negative (but helpful) review of this game and it echoes exactly how I felt about playing Braid. His games feel like they're constructed so everyone will admire the genius of the creator for thinking up these kinds of interesting puzzles. And if the player ends up enjoying the game while they're admiring its creator, well that's an added benefit I guess.
For anyone that hasn't played Flashback, give it a go. The graphics while low res now, still look very much alive and nice to look at even on modern monitors.
It felt like each mechanic was introduced once I'd mastered the previous ones, and other puzzles made it worthwhile to replay things once I had already passed a level. To me, it felt like it did for Time what Portal did for space -- made me think about interactions in a new way. It didn't feel like it was trying to impress me, or wow me with the creator's brilliance (other than "this was made by one guy??") so much as make a game that made me think differently.
I think its similarity to Portal is something I hadn't thought of before now, but that explains a lot about why I liked it.
I hope Jonathan feels very lucky to have made this game. It is great and I find myself envious and over-joyed that he has had the time, privilege, and skill to build it (and many thanks to the team behind it as well).
It's surprising how similar the whole experience is to launching a startup!
While Jonathan's opinions can be a bit divisive, he is obviously a passionate programmer and gamer, and he financed the game from the sales of Braid, without kickstarter shenanigans.
(And of course the game appeals to me regardless as an old-school adventure games lover).
Currently Windows and PS4 only.
If you don't like something, you are much more likely to vent than when you like it. Besides, it's a new release, so those who like it are still busy playing it.
Looking through some of the positive and negative reviews, it seems like the positive reviews are fairly short and don't say much about the game, while the negative reviews are longer and the reviewers do mention what they thought did and didn't work about the game, so the longer reviews that have a negative opinion end up being the most helpful. Just telling someone you liked something isn't going to cut it for everyone.
I can only guess that everyone who wanted to write a more in-depth positive review was just so keen to get back to playing the game that they cut their review short ;)
Gamers these days are children.
That is why you were downvoted. Blow's fans are children.
Does anyone else smell something off about the response to the game so far? Have people convinced themselves that this is a great game before they started enjoying it?
Quite possibly. While it is an excellent game, the hype train has been rolling for so long that by this point it can't be seen as anything less than excellent.
See also the review cycle around the similarly hyped and long-awaited "That Dragon, Cancer".
I play puzzle hunts, and have played a whole lot of puzzle based games over the years. I do not like Braid that much. However, I think The Witness is, gameplay wise, better than Portal, Talos Principle, Myst, 7th Guest or anything from the Professor Layton series. The puzzles get to be very hard, but they never felt unfair.
If anything, the negative reviews come from how the very beginning of the game starts too slowly, making sure you understand a little piece of the game, when, in practice, there's a whole lot more to it. The tutorial area is simple and generic, on purpose. Right afterwards, you get to an area that is just confusing, with puzzles you really shouldn't even attempt. Go anywhere else though, and the real game opens up, and it's wonderful.
It's also a very simple game. There isn't a lot someone who likes it can say about it without spoiling anything. There are puzzles. They are good. The island is also a puzzle. It is fun to solve puzzles. Yeah, I can't really go on that way for very long, can I.
With the Steambox/machine now in production I thought the divide windows/Linux was shrinking rapidly. I'm not at all a gamer though.
I absolutely love the game, but for the sake of discussion, I have to admit that I'm slightly disappointed by the puzzle-paneliness of it all. I didn't read many spoilers over the 8 years of its development, but Jonathan Blow always made a point to emphasize the epiphany-based nature of the game. I took this to mean that as you gain knowledge from the panels, you slowly begin to understand how to use them to engage in more interesting ways with the world. Instead, the opposite is true: the world simply provides different kinds of masks to solve the puzzles with. In other words, the panels are still the beating heart of the game, while the world is mostly static.
To me, this goes against what I like most in games. I find that one of the primary advantages of this interactive medium is the ability to solve puzzles by intuition. Braid was particularly good at this: instead of having to stand in front of a challenge and reason it out in your mind, you could dive right in and play around with the mechanics until your mind took on the solution all on its own. Over time, you acquired a feeling of natural mastery over these new elements. The Witness does not feel like this; more often than not, you have to logic out the puzzles in your head or on paper, and it never feels as good as using the game world to interactively solve a problem.
(Yes, I'm aware of the obelisk puzzles, but it seems they still follow more or less the same formula. But I haven't gotten very far in that direction, so we'll see.)
The game also makes me think about the problem of hidden knowledge in open-world games. Most metroidvania-style games gate the player with keys or abilities, but a few are starting to add paths that are closed solely based on the player's knowledge. One of the first games I remember doing this is Super Metroid: the wall jump and high jump allowed you to get to a lot more places, but they were nearly impossible to discover without the bird helpers. Fez did this with its Tetris language. La-Mulana did it with its obscure inscriptions. And The Witness does it with the ruleset of its various puzzles -- more completely than any other game before it. Still, I wonder if there's a better way to stash away that kind of knowledge. The puzzle panels are a bit too abstract for my tastes. I'd love to see a game where the hidden knowledge you find is entirely ability-based, but not obscure like in Super Metroid.
Again, The Witness is a masterpiece and one of the few games I'd gladly call art. It would be worth $40 just for the opportunity walk around the incredibly beautiful world. Just some food for game design thought! :)
Look at a title like Talos Principle for example, which while not a like for like comparison has a quite clear sense of an overarching story and progression.
Interesting that you mention Super Metroid - I have some of my strongest and fondest memories with the things you mentioned, the wall jumps, blowing up the glass with the Power Bomb, etc. Things that felt surprising, not like deus ex machina, but which felt like genuine discoveries that made sense.
I think the Witness has these, but at a much smaller level. Discovering the rules for a particular puzzle gives that huge rush for me, but I haven't seen it translate to the game as a whole.
TLDR for the reviews - Only buy this if you like puzzles for individual puzzle's sake, not as means to unlocking a larger story.
"It will be released on the PC and the PlayStation 4 on January 26, 2016. The game will come to iOS some months after that, and other platforms a bit later." (http://the-witness.net/news/about/)
Fingers crossed for a Linux port at some point! For Blow's last game (Braid) I think the Linux port was done by a third party.
Or maybe it's time to get a copy of Windows and set up a VM with GPU passthrough...
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/09/how-sony-snagged-jonat...
For entirely selfish reasons, I'm now really hoping this release means he now has some breathing room to spend more time on developing his programming language, Jai.
Portal, The Talos Principle, all have the same goal.
I wonder if people could become excellent problem solver by playing these games instead of honing the skills in the mathematics, physics or similar frameworks.
It could augment your skills in mathematics. Most people are much better than they think they are or are given credit for.
I gave my niece the game, Set, over the holidays. She was able to beat adult players after a few rounds. Similar experiences with http://dragonbox.com as well.
Mathematics is a framework for problem solving which requires problem solving skills and knowledge of mathematics.
I believe anyone using a piece of paper and writing down their thinking is doing problem solving on problems that are presented in the game. Yes, it is probably equivalent to some algorithms present in computer science but they are (if not familiar) discovering everything by themselves.
The game provides the framework for problem solving, so instead of having knowledge of math/algorithms, you build that knowledge yourself and improve your problem solving skills as you go.
The way math is commonly taught seems to be knowledge oriented - which leaves a lot of people completely stuck when it comes to problem solving.
That's why I'm interested if you could, playing these games, improve your general problem solving skills, so that only thing you have to do, when you start with a different framework, is to get the knowledge - but your thinking previously trained without it and it should work now when you're familiar with the framework.
At least that is what I would expect form a general problem solver that got one's skills by solving problems in maths, or physics. I would assume that they could solve problems in other areas if they knew the terminology, if they acquired knowledge.
Maths is problem solving, recognizing patterns, and the ability to express those ideas and solutions. The language is rather difficult to learn but most people can do the former intuitively without being told they're doing maths.
Without giving away the game there are beautiful mathematical concepts built into it. You may not realize that as you encounter new puzzles and constraints you are internalizing a vocabulary for the patterns you start to recognize. Once you start writing down this language you will appear to be doing what people recognize as maths. However I find myself content with simply having the conversation... for now.
It is certainly tempting to start formulating a proper solution to some of the puzzles and write programs to test out my theories.
Regardless of what you want to call it I think you can certainly hone your "problem solving" skills in this game.
a couple of blog posts about the making of the trees: http://the-witness.net/news/2013/06/2157/ http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/witness-trees/
I’d love to see more videogames step away from uncanny-valley and ill-advised attempts at photorealism and instead embrace unique artistic style.
Some what spoilery I made a solver for one of its puzzles: https://gist.github.com/robo-hamburger/2269ef76603263ce1061
Amusingly I ended up not really needing it but fun to code.
You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you.
You don't remember who you are, and you don't remember how you got here, but there's one thing you can do: explore the island in hope of discovering clues, regaining your memory, and somehow finding your way home.
The Witness is a single-player game in an open world with dozens of locations to explore and over 500 puzzles. This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. There's no filler; each of those puzzles brings its own new idea into the mix. So, this is a game full of ideas.
Difference in the premise being instead of your amnesia and finding about you, there's a book and you're finding about island's characters.
It's one of those games that manages to push buttons in your brain you never knew you had, and make you feel like a genius when something finally clicks.
And it does all this without ever needing to explain anything.
Jonathan Blow's enigma variations. A meandering meditation on the means by which humans gain knowledge and understanding of the world, by standing on the shoulders of a hacking minigame.
Also it's gorgeous.
Did I mention it's BRILLIANT?
I understand your point about filler, but the puzzles are the game, and if you're enjoying them then it probably doesn't come across as filler, just more to get stuck in with (though I do wonder whether so many slight variations on a theme are required in certain areas).
Hyped it may be, but that doesn't mean that you absolutely have to enjoy it at all costs. There are other games, and other developers :)
I haven't found ANY puzzles where I feel like you're guessing at the solution. Every puzzle I've solved has had well defined rules. I don't want to give too much away, but broadly speaking there are two types of puzzles: Those that rely on the symbols, where whats on the screen in front of you is all thats required and those that...don't.
The first category, you slowly build up your understanding of the various rules as you progress, and they all play by the same rules. The second category though, the real puzzle is to figure out what you're missing, generally by observation.
But once you learn the difference between the puzzles that you can take a face value, and the puzzles where you should look around, it feels much more fair.
The only time I felt truly frustrated was the few puzzles that introduce audio as a mechanic. I think deaf players will be unable to 100% this game because of a handful of puzzles, and theres no indication that the piece of the puzzle you're missing is sound.
Though, I have to admit, I like giving this game my full attention. I don't mind the lack of music as the environmental audio fits so well in the "whole picture" of the game.
This is the first time I've seen this mentioned, so thank you. I've been thinking about buying a PS4 just for this game, so that's a major bummer. I hope there's a patch in the future for some kind of visual indicator or subtitle to make it a bit easier.
You don't need to complete all the puzzles to finish the game. A small minority rely on hearing.
(I agree it sucks... trying to be optimistic; not trying to argue with you :) )
Imagine if you paid for a book and there were appendices about characters or something extra, but written in a language you didn't know. It would kind of suck.
Edit: As a side note, these comments seem to be the internet equivalent of:
A: =~#$())##~
B: Sorry, what was that? I couldn't hear you.
A: Nevermind, it's not important.
Which I think most people would agree is incredibly rude and dismissive.
(You have to play the game to get why he can't give hints)
If you don't already know about it, you may want to check out the book Finnegan's Wake :)
Joking aside, I think you're right that there should be some kind of notice somewhere, in-game or out (even on the Steam page) that indicates that some parts of the game are difficult or inaccessible for players with a degree of hearing loss.
Even better might be to have an option in the game that turns on an additional visual cue that could augment whatever the original audio cue was. Actually designing it to make sense in the same way would of course be difficult, but I don't doubt that there are enough players that would appreciate that option.
So you can definitely finish the game without sound, but if you're a perfectionist aiming for 100% you'll need to resort to outside help, which does suck.
The puzzles don't even have a visual cue to let you know audio is important, so if you're not expecting it these puzzles just seem unsolvable.
This and no colour blind support are probably the two biggest criticisms I have of the game.
I must admit that I also sometimes fail to remember making the software I create accessible to deaf or blind persons. It's never because I don't want to, it's just that there's often nobody on the team that has this particular problem and so it is forgotten.
I think you'll still be able to enjoy the game.
On the other hand, there are audio logs scattered about which you might prefer to be able to hear. They don't tell a story though; it's more of an examination of things Jonathan Blow feels are important. I think that's a cool part of the game, even though I suspect that I disagree with him entirely.
The elephant in the room is obviously that there's no accommodation for the blind at all.
This does come at the cost of their not being quite as wholly integrated into the environment as some of Riven's puzzles, for instance, but it also means a lot of the arbitrariness and guessing is gone.
(There are environmental connections with the puzzles, just to be clear. The game is simply a lot more careful and conservative with them.)
There are well-defined (mathematically) and natural ways in which 6 is a better continuation to 1,2,3,4,5,... than say 15 or whatever else.
By which I mean, I think it's a common misconception amongst those that argue this is a common misconception that the knowledge which they possess and view as straightforward, natural and obvious, is neither straightforward, natural, or obvious.
Common sense is really just another phrase for popular bias...
1)Puzzles about getting a solution that follows a set of rules, which can be deduced, and are reused from puzzle to puzzle. The game just checks that the rules are followed, so there is more than one valid solution sometimes. The different solutions might even have different effects.
2)Environmental puzzles, where the right solution is indicated by the environment. Without giving too much away, imagine that there's a line near the puzzle, matching the puzzle's grid, and the solution is just to trace that same line in the puzzle.
So there's never an arbitrary rule that you can't figure out. That said, a part that is difficult for some people is that they make assumptions about what the rules of the puzzles are, and the assumptions might be incomplete, or outright wrong. There's typically simple puzzles that are trying to teach you the rules. Part of the game's progression is to find those tutorial puzzles.
I'm only about 100 puzzles in but so far some of the coolest "aha!" moments have been from this realization.
Made me very interested in playing it!
I saw it as a Myst-style game, where you have puzzles, but you also have a lot of interactive environment around you to explore.
Here, I was getting taken it by a lot of beautiful scenarios in the distance, only to realise that there is nothing to do there, but solve more panels. It simply feels like this beautiful island is going to waste, being a little more than a hiding place for the panels.
How's everyone feeling about this?
I'm feeling like you haven't played very far into the game. :-) And neither have I! The puzzles are definitely mostly panel-based, but the environment becomes very important to solving them.
I think The Witness is quite clever, so far. It's interesting how much diversity and playfulness can come from just these simple little grid-and-line puzzles.
The puzzles so far have rarely asked for more than 10 seconds to find a solution.
Navigating the island does feel like an artificial overgame at the moment. Some of the puzzles have caused changes in the 3D world but in very small ways.
I guess that things are going to get more complex soon though.
Slowly as you explore the the island and solve puzzles they become more and more intrinsically linked to the context you find the puzzles in - soon the puzzles demand that you become aware of the environment around you and look at things in new and surprising ways.
for myself i was never really expecting a deeply interactive landscape; i was slightly worried that the puzzles were just silly little doodads like a curio you picked up and soon forgot about, but as i've moved through the game solving them i've marveled at their cleverness and how they have encourage me to think.
perhaps the island is too static, but then again, back in the day so was Myst. the movement and interactions it encourages are up here taps head.
Hint: Look for large circles in the environment, and start dragging a line.
The game's idea of iterative puzzle design would have been close ti impossible to build without the grid-line conceit.
A couple of good, early examples (although they don't really show the game's real environmental power), are the temple in the desert, the temple in the woods, and the 'pink forest': All solvable without any information from a different part of the game, and absolutely not solvable by just staring at the panel itself: Entire series of 20+ puzzles have the EXACT SAME PANEL, just placed in a different location.
And panel solutions affect the environment. There are elevators operated by panels. a boat operated by panels. bridges built by solving panels that have more than one solution, in ways that match what you want to do physically in the game.
It's just a big pity that the beginning of the game shows so very little of that.
The only thing that I could even imagine coming close are some marble statues of men and women that appear throughout the island. They aren't all that creepy but an imaginative child see them that way.
It's rated E for Everyone:
https://www.esrb.org/ratings/Synopsis.aspx?Certificate=34184...
Edit: I'm reminded of this game from the New York Times from October: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick...
While I sort of agree, I must say that part of the fun of the game (and much of the challenge) is learning the 'language' of each puzzle. In the case of the little orange suns, it was like learning from scratch, one letter at a time.
First panel: "Okay, I can't go between them."
Second panel: "Oh, I can, but have to end up on one side... which amounts to having them in the same section. How is that different?"
Third panel: "There were 4, and the only path that worked divided them? What the hell?"
Fourth panel: "Oh with six I have to make them into groups of two - so maybe I have to divide them equally?"
Fifth panel: "Aha, no, it's groups of two!"
And now that's part of your vocabulary; you discovered it organically, not by bringing in some outside knowledge like symbols from off the island. Notice there aren't any numbers or letters? Like, anywhere? That's part of it...
And to that point, maybe one reason I've found so many recent major game titles boring recently is that there is no puzzle to them. They're just activities. Go here. Shoot that. Collect that. It's nice to actually be stumped. And not just frustrated by my lack of hand-eye coordination.
Q: I have three oranges and one grapefruit. I have to get all of them through a door that's been glued shut. There is no way to open the door. How do I get the fruit through?
A: Blend them and use the tube lying next to the door and pour them through the keyhole.
That's a non-intuitive puzzle. You can't intuit that there's a keyhole, a tube and a blender accessible. With creativity it's solvable, but then again, with creativity you also could argue you could use the hole saw nearby and cut a hole in the door and deposit the fruit on the other side. At this point you're just making things up.
"Oh here's my game on linux, please address any questions or problems to those shitty hardware vendors"
No, he's just going to release it on a platform where he can guarantee compatibility and functionality with minimum effort on his part.
He spent more or less all of the profits on his previous release on this new game. From the videos I've watched about the dev, he is somewhat of a perfectionist. It would likely rankle him to release a subpar experience on a given platform, which given the economic incentives, it would likely be.
Unreal maybe, but it also wasn't as viable a choice 8 years ago.
Source: I use unity professionally at my day job.
MINOR SPOILERS: Some of the later puzzle mechanics rely on playing with lighting and perspective in a way that seems to me would be difficult to implement in a stock engine.
I seem to be downvoted to death - the comments weren't meant in a disrespectful way - just wondered why the gargantuan effort with a DIY engine. The game itself looks really interesting.
Given that Jonathan Blow is in charge of the project, it's almost certainly because existing engines were inadequate for the task.
From what I can tell, Rust is the most ambitious Unity project out there. The Witness is substantially more technically ambitious than Rust. Additionally -from what I read on the Rust devblogs-, the Rust guys spend a large amount of time working around Unity's limitations, missing features, and parts of Unity that are just buggy. (Granted, the buggy stuff generally eventually gets fixed, but until it gets fixed (if it ever does), you have to work around it.)
There are some Linux sales figures kicking around [1] and they generally show that the Linux share is under 3%.
[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/sales-statistics-for-...
The Witness has has a peak of less than 5,000 players at one time so far.
The top two games (and basically the only active "pro" games at the moment), which together have about one million players playing at any given time are both carefully tuned to run on toasters according to Valve's hardware survey.
I like Valve's current micro transaction model. You can buy cosmetic items, but that's it. I can't speak for DOTA2, but in CS:GO they don't impact the game negatively like they did with TF2. Trading from free drops also allows kids and poor people to participate in the economy, which allows them to make more money for Valve than begging mom to buy a $60 game would.
I tested this with Quake III (a game from 1999!). My 2011 iMac could not render the game at 120fps, it managed somewhere between 50 and 70. I bootcamp into Windows, and I get a rock solid 120fps.
Depending on region and target audience, Macs show up between 1.5% and 3.5% of total player base in tracking (see Steam and Unity hardware surveys, and I also see those numbers in our own games), and these have been the same for 10 years. For comparison, Linux is between 0.5% and 1.0%. Most Macs are laptops with Intel GPU which are simply too weak for most current games. The Mac OpenGL drivers have a legendary reputation for being crap since they are controlled by Apple, not the GPU makers (although, native Intel GL drivers are not much better). Sometimes the reason is simply that the additional required customers support for Mac costs money and thus the development effort can't be justified.
I'm a daily Mac user and like it pretty much, but for games I also have a proper PC, attached to the TV. Most games I play there would run at most with 5fps on my MacBookPro.
I have high hopes for the beginning for the convergence (that is already happening with RemixOS) of ChromeOS and android during google i/o.
Frankly, Ubuntu 15.04 and 15.whatever_the_last_release_was have been really, really, really bad. I say this as a gamer, Linux power user, and sysadmin who's been using various flavors of Linux for ~fifteen years and who's quite happy managing his Gentoo Linux boxes, but really happy when he finds a largely-hands-off distro, because that means he can recommend a distro to his friends.
What's more, if you are using Ubuntu 15.latest, Steam doesn't work out of the box. It won't start. You get no error messages or anything. You have to move a bundled copy of -IIRC- glibc out of the way before Steam will work. Reports on the interwebs indicate that the moved file comes back when the Steam client updates itself, so this isn't a permanent fix!
Maybe Valve can't be arsed to target anything other than SteamOS, but it's not a good sign when the company that's -arguably- doing the most good for Linux gaming out of anyone out there doesn't ship a client that works on the latest version of one of the more (if not the most) popular Linux distros.
I'mma have to make a note to go back and remind myself about how dynamic linking and .so versioning works on Linux. I had thought that the tools to make this shit work correctly were widespread and relatively easy to use, but the state of Linux gaming leads me to question my memory. :/
I'm not sure that's going to incentivize anyone, especially if they're making plenty of money on the platforms they chose to release on.
Spending your money on existing Linux games in the same genre (and encouraging your Linux friends to as well) is more likely to incentivize devs. At least they can see that a Linux port sells, and they can find sales stats to assess whether the market for a particular genre is large enough to be worth the investment.
Inaction (i.e. waiting only) is not easily measured by game developers without spending money or doing additional work on market research or surveys. Waiting by itself incentivizes nothing.
Fundamentally, though, some kinds of customer aren't worth the trouble. I'm not going to sell Lamborghinis to people who don't really care about flashy cars. So, why would I expect to sell AAA polished games to people who won't install a gamer OS, out of principle?
FYI - I have only used Linux as my main laptop for the past 15 years. But he's right. I had really hoped that Steam Linux would be based on Android or something and build that friendly layer.. I'm still not sure why they went with Debian.
You appear to be completely unaware of the economics of game development. That coupled with the arrogant tone of your comments really makes you sound foolish.
Yes, I am arrogant by the way, I learned not to be afraid of standing tall with my own point of view.
Incorrect. The context is one of an indie developer trying to bring a product to market. This is similar to being a one-man startup (before hiring / contracting more staff). It is absolutely essential to make good decisions about scoping the project, marketing the project, and selling the project.
It is very common for technically-minded people to get into a pattern of addressing technical objections point-by-point, without realising that the technical objections are not the problem per-se, but just a symptom of a more important concern or problem.
If the goal is Linux advocacy, then nit-picking the tech objections isn't really that effective, unless you want to leave a rebuttal for future searchers. What would be more effective would be to try to understand why Linux was not right for this developer, on this project, at that time.
> Yes, I am arrogant by the way, I learned not to be afraid of standing tall with my own point of view.
Standing up for your beliefs is not the same as arrogance. Not realizing this is a sign of arrogance, and arrogance is not a good thing. It makes it harder to develop an accurate model of the world, and thereby makes it harder take effective actions.
EDIT> Part of the hostile reaction you're getting is because of the way you dismissed Jon Blow for not being able to install Linux. This is one of the best game developers out there. It's like calling some Nobel Laureate stupid because she decided not to use some particular niche app that you care about.
I'll let you pull your own estimate out of the air for how much extra development time/money supporting a decent cross-section of popular Linux distributions will take. Oh, and don't forget to add in time for testing it, too.
This may change if Valve can make the Steam Box happen, but right now it sure doesn't sound like a sound business decision to bother looking for those last few extra bucks from Tux. Honestly I'm surprised anyone releases anything for Linux or for Macs now that I look at the numbers; I suspect we have the rise of cross-platform general-purpose game engines (which this game doesn't rely on) to thank for that.
An open world puzzle game seems exactly like the kind of thing that might gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Plus it does make a nice change from reading the latest thing about React ;)
That said, I recently found, bought and played 'Pony Island' (if you don't know what that is: Do NOT watch videos. Think '6th Sense' - you'll ruin the game). That wouldn't have caught my eye based on random videos/screenshots either and it's right now my 'best game ever'.
Can someone explain why 'The Witness' is interesting? Why would it trend here? What's the relation between HN and Jonathan or this game?
If it's truly not your thing, then you won't understand why it's interesting. If it is your thing, then it's very, very, very interesting.
ROT13'd probably-spoiler-free-but-maybe-contains-tiny-spoilers overview of what makes the game good follows:
Gur Jvgarff vf n chmmyr tnzr. Gur chmmyrf enatr va qvssvphygl sebz gevivny gb irel engure uneq. Vg vf fvzvyne va fcvevg gb Zlfg, ohg abg ng nyy gur fnzr nf Zlfg. Gur neg naq fbhaq vf tbetrbhf. Gur tnzr'f cnpvat vf ernyyl tbbq.