Thanks to a hot tip from our Telegram Group, we've been notified that the Paradox Launcher is now available on Linux.
Announced on their forum:
I'm very pleased to bring you the news that after much anticipation and gnashing of teeth, the Linux version of the PDX Launcher is now available for download. At this time, only Stellaris is available for download and installation, but our other games with Linux support will be forthcoming (in a more expedited way than the launcher itself, fortunately!).
Caveat emptor! As much as the launcher is beta quality software, the linux version has had even less testing done on it. I do anticipate, however, that people interested in the Linux version will have the capacity to find workarounds for non-critical bugs.
As usual, we have some secret sauce on the cooker (this is the games industry after all) but we'll still try to get some QA and general quality-of-life fixes in during the autumn. In other news, Swedish summer vacations is almost upon us, so set your expectations accordingly!
What's the point in another client? I hear you ask. Well, it's a way for developers and publishers to have more direct control over the experience. It also likely means they take a bigger cut of any sales made, since they won't be giving a chunk to stores like Steam.
Personally, I will most likely stick to the Steam client since it does everything I want it to. However, I can appreciate for all those who would rather purchase elsewhere that this will be welcome news. It not only shows that Paradox is continuing their support of Linux, but also allows you to keep your games up to date, get cloud saves and so on.
See more on the official site.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Tried to create an account anyway. Hope they fix / remove capatcha. After 30min trying to solve the damn things and getting "unable to create account", I gave up.
I got the "unable to create account" because of my email address, had to use a different one to make it work.
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After leaving Stellaris to download for five hours last night (which, yes, seemed excessive), I gave up and shut down. Loading up the launcher today, it says it's ready to play, although I don't know if that's true yet.
So... yeah, still a bit buggy. Not too happy about the cloud saves either, if they aren't optional. But anything that loosens the headlock Steam has on Linux gaming can't be all bad. Not, as I've said before, that I'm too bothered about Steam, but any monopoly or near-monopoly isn't good.
So... yeah, still a bit buggy. Not too happy about the cloud saves either, if they aren't optional. But anything that loosens the headlock Steam has on Linux gaming can't be all bad. Not, as I've said before, that I'm too bothered about Steam, but any monopoly or near-monopoly isn't good.
Hey guys, do you know why I have a generic Xorg icon in my Latte Dock for the Paradox Launcher? I'm using the Numix Circle icons.Because nobody's made an icon for it yet, presumably.
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I use spamgourmet as long as it's allowed, might it be the same?Tried to create an account anyway. Hope they fix / remove capatcha. After 30min trying to solve the damn things and getting "unable to create account", I gave up.
I got the "unable to create account" because of my email address, had to use a different one to make it work.
Could be.. no error to that effect though. It's a throw away account. Their TOS/AUP/whatever (displayed on install, still never found it on their site) - is a fun read.
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The only two companies who managed to make their games non-steam and have their own launcher and are not selling on steam are Activision/Blizzard with Battle.net and EA with Origin.And a plethora of MMOs.
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It's a store and launcher, where the games are bound to your account. So of course there is DRM in some way.
So is Steam, yet not all games have DRM on Steam. DRM on Steam is optional. Game developers/producers decide if they want to use it or not.
Tropico 5, for example, is DRM free on Steam for Linux. You can install it via Steam, then run it after uninstalling Steam. Can you do the same with this launcher?
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If you mean nobody has made a Numix icon, it should still use the icon provided by Paradox. In fact, said icon is shown correctly in the menus (both on plasma and gnome-shell) but once the app has started the icon in the dock goes back to a generic one, a question mark on gnome shell and the xorg one in plasma. It's probably something related to wrong WM_CLASS property settings in the app itself or the .desktop file...Ah. Sorry. Misunderstood the problem. Yeah, it's probably something like that. I'm getting a generic icon in Plank, too. Usually when it falls back to the application's own, it's at a lower resolution, but it's not even doing that.
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does steam really take 30%. assassins creed costs the same on steam and uplay. actually its now cheaper in the steam sale, than the uplay sale
why wouldnt ubisoft make their games like 10-20% cheaper in their own store? the customers would pay less, so they would get more costumers and they would make more money with each sale
why is EA selling their games only on origin, but ubisoft isnt, if they would save so much money?
Steam is near to a PC games online selling monopoly. They could demand that games are not sold somewhere else cheaper. Not selling on Steam will cost you lots of sales if you don't have the uber AAA game.
whats an uber AAA game for you? i think ubisoft has a lot of such games. more than EA and they can live without steam
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I'm not sure if this is still the case, but years ago, EA games were removed from Steam because they breached Valve's policy of no in-game purchases.maybe they get more money with each sale, but now they have higher costes. own servers and linux programmer for the launcher
maybe gog follows
I think that it's simply that they have now grown big enough to where those costs are less than having to give away 30% of each sale to companies such as Valve.
Now I don't have longer data than back to 2013 in the database (they listed their share in 2016) but they seam to have made some nice increase in both sales and profit (ptp in the table below is the pre-tax-profit) and while not close to a behemoth like EA they are probably as I wrote before closing in on the kind of sales numbers where 30% suddenly are quite a lot of actual money (aprox 35M EUR in 2017 if we assume that all sales are from places like Steam).
does steam really take 30%. assassins creed costs the same on steam and uplay. actually its now cheaper in the steam sale, than the uplay sale
why wouldnt ubisoft make their games like 10-20% cheaper in their own store? the customers would pay less, so they would get more costumers and they would make more money with each sale
why is EA selling their games only on origin, but ubisoft isnt, if they would save so much money?
but ubisoft does it with games like far cry and assassins creed
i can say how its in EA games today. i dont play them. the last game in years was unravel
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whats an uber AAA game for you? i think ubisoft has a lot of such games. more than EA and they can live without steam
Games which will make people install your launcher no matter if they like it or not. Battlefield, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, ...
I didn't use Steam for a very long time, until I had to, due to wanting Skyrim so much. Such games.
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whats an uber AAA game for you? i think ubisoft has a lot of such games. more than EA and they can live without steam
Games which will make people install your launcher no matter if they like it or not. Battlefield, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, ...
I didn't use Steam for a very long time, until I had to, due to wanting Skyrim so much. Such games.
so ubisoft has their own big sellers. assassins creed, far cry, watch dogs, tom clancy, south park, beyond good an evil 2
do you think ubisoft would sell the same amount of copies, if they sell their games only on uplay?
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so ubisoft has their own big sellers. assassins creed, far cry, watch dogs, tom clancy, south park, beyond good an evil 2
do you think ubisoft would sell the same amount of copies, if they sell their games only on uplay?
I don't know, but these do sound like the kind of games I was talking about. I guess even Ubisoft doesn't know.
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Warthunder
Wart what? What does "hunder" even mean? :D
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Oh someone mentioned Manjaro earlier, just re-installed it. Apparently it needs some libraries that arent installed normally because they are in steam. If you install steam native in arch/manjaro it will work. Well the game will work the launcher itself works off the bat with no issues.
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It's a store and launcher, where the games are bound to your account. So of course there is DRM in some way.
So is Steam, yet not all games have DRM on Steam. DRM on Steam is optional. Game developers/producers decide if they want to use it or not.
Tropico 5, for example, is DRM free on Steam for Linux. You can install it via Steam, then run it after uninstalling Steam. Can you do the same with this launcher?
I believe that you can load Stellaris without Steam even for the Steam store bought version.
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maybe they get more money with each sale, but now they have higher costes. own servers and linux programmer for the launcher
maybe gog follows
I think that it's simply that they have now grown big enough to where those costs are less than having to give away 30% of each sale to companies such as Valve.
Now I don't have longer data than back to 2013 in the database (they listed their share in 2016) but they seam to have made some nice increase in both sales and profit (ptp in the table below is the pre-tax-profit) and while not close to a behemoth like EA they are probably as I wrote before closing in on the kind of sales numbers where 30% suddenly are quite a lot of actual money (aprox 35M EUR in 2017 if we assume that all sales are from places like Steam).
does steam really take 30%. assassins creed costs the same on steam and uplay. actually its now cheaper in the steam sale, than the uplay sale
why wouldnt ubisoft make their games like 10-20% cheaper in their own store? the customers would pay less, so they would get more costumers and they would make more money with each sale
why is EA selling their games only on origin, but ubisoft isnt, if they would save so much money?
Yes they take 30% (Paradox writes so in their Annual Report which I have in Swedish only but they might have it in English on their IR site) however there exists no details if large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are tied to the generic deal or if they are large enough to get a discount here.
That Ubisoft does not lower their own prices by the Steam tax is quite simple, that would #1 make them loose 30% there as well and #2 it would lower the value of their games. Say the price is 100 USD om Steam and 70 USD on Ubisoft Store then Steam users will complain en masse that the price on Steam is lowered to 70 USD as well which now means that Ubisoft gets 49 USD from each Steam sale instead of 70 USD.
And to move a substantial amount of your customers from Steam to your own store you probably have to do way more than just decrease the price of your wares by 30%. I wouldn't categorise Steam as vendor-lock-in but their store is convenient enough so that it's close to customer-lock-in.
Also for large AAA games it's not certain that a lower price yields more sales (or enough more sales to cover for the lower price).
I don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam since #1 no one in the industry have ever claimed that this is happening, #2 lots of both large and small publishers (e.g EA and Feral) have their own stores, and #3 that they simply do not need to force a specific price due to the mechanics that I explained earlier (i.e that if they lower the price in their own store then they ultimately lower the prices on Steam as well).
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I don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam
I'm happy with calling it pure speculation, but unhappy with having it called "conspiracy theories". (The possibility of Valve forcing companies to do something is lacking enough parties for a conspiracy to begin with.)
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I don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam
I'm happy with calling it pure speculation, but unhappy with having it called "conspiracy theories". (The possibility of Valve forcing companies to do something is lacking enough parties for a conspiracy to begin with.)
I think a spade is a spade. It's quite easy to begin publishing games on Steam. All you have to do is sign the agreements from https://partner.steamgames.com/newpartner/?signup_type=1 and pay the fees. I just tried with my Steam credentials and exactly nowhere in any of the agreements and NDA:s that they wanted signed was any reference to prohibiting you sale of your products on any other platform nor of any text regarding how you decide to set the price of your products either on Steam nor anywhere else.
So yes that is a conspiracy theory because all the open facts dispute it, it's easy to see since the agreements are public, both big and small publishers operates their own stores besides Steam, but still people "speculate" that this is the case. In my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.
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In my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.
I disagree. It takes more for a conspiracy theory than speculation. You're missing boxes, boxes which wouldn't tick.
But I don't think we need to discuss this further.
Your arguments about the real question are good; my speculation was most probably wrong.
Last edited by Eike on 29 Jun 2018 at 2:59 pm UTC
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In my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.
I disagree. It takes more for a conspiracy theory than speculation. You're missing boxes, boxes which wouldn't tick.
But I don't think we need to discuss this further.
Your arguments about the real question are good; my speculation was most probably wrong.
Ok I'll soon drop this :) but just wanted to point out that:
#1 A conspiracy is: "a secret agreement by people to commit something wrong or illegal. Depending on the circumstances, a conspiracy may be a crime, or a civil wrong."
#2 A conspiracy theory is: "an explanation of an event or situation that invokes an unwarranted conspiracy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy
Which is why I included the fact that all agreements you have to sign with Valve in order to publish on Steam is public in my previous post. I would say that both boxes are ticked ;)
However with this I did not intend to paint people in a bad light so I can stretch it to call everything posted before this very post as speculation and everything after as conspiracy theories (unless people bring up credible evidence of course).
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