Tribes was such a stupidly good game. It would kick the ass of all the battle royale shovelware nowadays.

It might actually be. Linux gaming has come an awful long way thanks to Wine, Steam, Proton, Wayland, etc. Driver support is improving with or without the manufacturer’s help. OpenGL’s constant playing catch-up with DirectX has given way to the limitless potential of Vulkan. The web has moved almost entirely to properly open standards like WebExtensions and Canvas, and has become powerful enough that many well-known apps are literally just Electron wrappers around a HTML/Javascript core that can run on any plaform. Likewise Mono has implemented almost all of .NET and even Microsoft’s own “.NET core” cross-platform (mostly so it can run on containers and cloud more effectively, not to help Linux specifically, but we’ll take it) All these buzzword technologies add up to a seriously strong open source gaming ecosystem, and distros like SteamOS, Bazzite, and others are finally starting to put all these pieces together and polish them into something seriously usable as a daily driver and for gaming.

And once you’ve got the gamers and enthusiasts, you’re on the cutting edge, you’ve got the tip of the spear, and the rest of the spear tends to follow where they lead. Is it happening? Too early to tell, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. The “Year of the Linux desktop” has always been a joke, but some people weren’t joking and have been seriously working on it. That work appears to be starting to really pay off. Combined with Microsoft’s various Windows 11 missteps continuing to fuel the fire, a lot of people are increasingly receptive to alternatives.

It’s not that weird. What they’re aiming to avoid is the situation where a developer does a bait-and-switch replacement of the original, advertised game concept to chase a new demographic with new money. If you have never experienced this, count yourself lucky. A shady developer can advertise/sell a great concept in some niche like a compelling roguelike, survival crafting game or even a cozy and artistic decorating game, and actually create a decent game with lots of potential… at first. And then when it’s collected a bunch of genuine good reviews and they realize either it’s harder than they thought to make, or it’s not making the cash flow they expected and not likely to, literally just replace the whole product, product page, everything with some generic shoot-em-up battle royale asset flip as an “upgrade” and alienate the early buyers to get a whole new audience to throw money at them until they realize the reviews are for what’s essentially a totally different game before it crashes into mostly-negative territory. You might not think something this egregious ever really happens, but it does, especially in the horrible land of Crowdfunding/Early Access.

The first example I can remember that happened to me personally was called “Star Forge” not to be confused with the more recent board game adaption of the same name. The linked post is about the internal development drama behind the scenes, but the bait-and-switch bullshit happened years ago and it went sideways very quickly and was eventually pulled from the store never to be seen again.

I didn’t know they hired Principal Skinner…