Games: Godot, Malware, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 03, 2025

• Godot Engine ☛ Godot Showcase - Somar

  We interviewed Frederic Plourde from Collabora and Daniel Castellanos from Decasis about the Somar project.

• GNU ☛ www @ Savannah: Malware in Proprietary Software - April 2025 Additions

  The initial injustice of proprietary software often leads to further injustices: malicious functionalities.

  The introduction of unjust techniques in nonfree software, such as back doors, DRM, tethering, and others, has become ever more frequent. Nowadays, it is standard practice.

  We at the GNU Project show examples of malware that has been introduced in a wide variety of products and dis-services people use everyday, and of companies that make use of these techniques.

  April 2025

  Malware in Games

  • Nintendo has devoted a lot of effort to preventing users from installing third-party software on its Switch consoles. These are now full-blown jails.

  Malware in Appliances

  • The company making a “smart” bassinet called Snoo has locked the most advanced functionalities of the Snoo behind a paywall. This unexpected change mainly affects users who received the appliance as a gift, or bought it second-hand on the assumption that all these functionalities would be available to them, as they used to be. This is another example of the deceptive behavior of proprietary software developers who take advantage of their power over users to change rules at will.

  Another malicious feature of the Snoo is the fact that users need to create an account with the company, which thus has access to personal data, location (SSID), appliance log, etc., as well as manual notes about baby history.
  

• Boiling Steam ☛ POLL: Your thoughts on the Switch 2

  The Nintendo Switch 2 is about to be released one month from now, on June 5th 2025. It’s going to launch with a new Mario Kart game (again!) so you should expect it to sell like hot cakes for a while.

• Boiling Steam ☛ The Steam Deck is Back in Stock in Japan

  As you may remember, the Steam Deck (and more particularly the OLED version) was constantly out of stock in Japan in the course of 2024. The situation has since changed, with proper stocks available on the archipelago. Except the older LCD version which is now out of stock (permanently?). This is probably because of two factors: - Larger inventory available worldwide - Potentially less local demand

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia RTX 50 GPUs make a small splash in the Steam Survey — AMD RX 9000 GPUs remain absent from the list

  The latest Steam Hardware survey does not include an AMD RX 9000-series GPU, despite a few new entries from Nvidia's RTX 50-series lineup.

• XDA ☛ This $30 app is the best purchase I've made for my Steam Deck

  Valve has done a remarkable job with the Steam Deck. The hardware itself is great, sure, but the bedrock of Steam makes it easy to transfer your progress from Windows to Linux without any fuss. Once you start going beyond the Game Mode interface, however, you'll quickly recognize a problem: Windows and Linux don't play nicely with each other.

  As a fan of retro games that uses the Steam Deck as my primary emulation platform, this is a problem I've been trying to deal with for a while. If you install a micro SD card in your Steam Deck, it'll be formatted to the EXT4 file system. Windows doesn't support the EXT4 file system. If you insert your micro SD card into a Windows PC, it'll be formatted to NTFS. The Steam Deck supports NTFS, but you'll need to manually mount the drive each time you reinstall your micro SD card. And, once you go back to Windows, you won't be able to read or write to your micro SD card. When you're frequently transferring ROMs and configuring files between a Windows PC and the Steam Deck, you can see the problem.

• Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, including World of Goo 2 and Replicube - 2025-04-30 Edition

  Between 2025-04-23 and 2025-04-30 there were 62 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 620 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 10 % of total released titles. Lots of good stuff in this week actually. This week marks the release of the sequel of one of the most famous indie games, World of Goo. I remember that was one of the first games I played on Linux, way before Steam had an official client for our operating system.