Rating Steam Games

[jsims2359]

Hi everybody!

Is it possible for a STEAM game to be platinum in AppDB?

This may be presumptuous on my part, but I would think that most people running STEAM through wine would have to use WINEDLLOVERRIDES="gameoverlayrenderer=", or disable gameoverlayrenderer in winecfg, if they are not compiling (or using prepackaged) wine with an older version of gcc. If the rating guide is followed to the letter, this setting should force the rating down to Gold. Furthermore, for many games, STEAM installs various flavors of directx and msvcrt into your wine prefix providing native DLLs, again, forcing the rating of a flawless game down to Gold.

There are cases were no additional MS dependencies are installed - Titan Attacks, Dungeons of Dredmor, Legend of Grimrock - but if gameoverlayrenderer is disabled, the game would be rated Gold. Does this mean that until Bug #24064 is resolved, many STEAM titles can only achieve a Gold rating?

Should the disabling of gameoverlayrender be counted against the rating of an otherwise flawless video game?

Should the installation - by Steam - of native MS DLLs count against the rating?

I'd appreciate some guidance on this to ensure that I and others more accurately rate STEAM titles in the AppDB.

Thanks!

P.S. The new forums look great! Many thanks to jnewman.

[dimesio]

If an app or game successfully installs native dlls as part of its normal installation, that counts as working "out of the box," and the rating can be platinum. Gold is for cases where a user has to do anything beyond just running the installer to get it to work. Having to disable gameoverlayrenderer is a manual tweak, so if a given user has to do that, they should not rate the game higher than gold, while users who do not have to do that because they are still using gcc 4.5 can rate the game platinum.

[DanKegel]

Ditto. Any manual tweak disqualifies a game from Platinum.

[jsims2359]

Fair enough.

Thank you for the feedback!

One last question, if I may, for further clarification.

If the Steam client installs Visual C++ 2005 libraries successfully prior to launching into a flawless game then that would be considered platinum, as you stated, but if I (the user) successfully install Visual C++ 2005 libraries prior to launching a flawless non-Steam application, is it then considered "third party software" or "native DLLs" and thus require a Gold rating?

[DanKegel]

Correct. It's the *manual* twiddling that disqualifies an app from Platinum.
If Steam does the twiddling without any user intervention (clicking "OK" doesn't count as intervention,
since Windows users might get the same prompt), then the app can still be platinum.

In other words: to be platinum, a game has to be runnable by an impatient 8 year old (or for that
matter 48 year old) who doesn't want to think about anything, they just want to click 'play'.

[etwineb]

Wait a second, if manual intervention is needed in Wine exactly as in Windows it is still Platinum, isn't it?
(example Carmageddon)

[dimesio]

Wait a second, if manual intervention is needed in Wine exactly as in Windows it is still Platinum, isn't it?
(example Carmageddon)

Yes. The goal of Wine is bug-for-bug compatibility, so problems that exist on Windows, too, should not downgrade the rating. But if that's the case, you should explain that in the Extra comments section of the test report.