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Quoting: tuubi

Well, I have to admit, I'm a little confused. The video game business since its inception was built on the back of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We create our games in computers with technology.

Give yourself some credit, won't you Mr. Zelnick? You're not just "a little" confused. You're either very confused or very stupid.

How do these idiots end up leading corporations?

Considering the last phrase you cited, I wonder if he wants to run for president.

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Quoting: tuubiHow do these idiots end up leading corporations?

I just have to assume all the other idiots with money see their fellow idiots and give them money, perpetuating the cycle of C-suite decay.

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: williamjcm

Quoting: Egonaut

Quoting: williamjcmThe reason the third-party sale numbers increased by that much is because they now include VAT, while previous years didn't include it to my knowledge.

That makes no sense, where in the world do we have 57% VAT?

I mean, it would still have increased compared to the previous year, just *much less* than what Epic's claiming. For example, if we assume that everyone on the EGS paid a 20% VAT, then the "before VAT" spending would have been around 333M$, which would seem much less impressive.

Not everyone pays a VAT and the largest gaming market outside of China is the USA.. the USA alone is the largest market by a long shot compared to any country that pays a VAT. Point is that math don't math.

The math doesn't math. But the US is a small part of the world's game market.

The USA is the SECOND largest market at around $50 billion.. the next closest market is Japan at $17 billion.. like I said the math he put up does NOT math for obvious reasons

I agreed with you that the math doesn't math?!?

It doesn't matter if they're the second largest or the largest or the third largest. What matters is their size compared to the sum of the others. Well, in the end to the others that take VAT, but I won't try to figure that out.
My point was that the US is a minority in the whole PC gaming market. Depending on whom you ask it may be below 20 or around 30 percent, but either way a minority.
(I had deleted my post because I decided not to go into this deeper, but you were too fast. ;) )

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Quoting: eggroleI don't get the hate for Epic. I've never bought from them because I didn't want to have more launchers, but now that I use Steam and Heroic I have no real reason not to if the price is right. I get all their free games and have played plenty of them with no issues.

I am glad Epic is doing better. More competition means that Steam (and GOG) won't be able to sit around.

Now, I'm not saying everyone should start buying on Epic - you do you - but clearly enough people are buying that Epic isn't failing, and that IMHO is a good thing.

Well said! Steam is a monopoly, however benign, and competition is essential. I am also happy that they're doing better.

I've gotten pretty much every free game Epic has given away and have played quite a few - there's very little effort involved in getting them to run on Linux, either through Wine or through Steam/Proton or with launchers like Heroic, especially since most of them are DRM-free. I've even purchased a couple of games on Epic because they were great deals at the time compared to Steam: Subnautica: Below Zero and Outer Wilds.

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I'm disappointed by the lack of double entendres in the headline. Consider this post a sternly worded letter to the editor.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: williamjcm

Quoting: Egonaut

Quoting: williamjcmThe reason the third-party sale numbers increased by that much is because they now include VAT, while previous years didn't include it to my knowledge.

That makes no sense, where in the world do we have 57% VAT?

I mean, it would still have increased compared to the previous year, just *much less* than what Epic's claiming. For example, if we assume that everyone on the EGS paid a 20% VAT, then the "before VAT" spending would have been around 333M$, which would seem much less impressive.

Not everyone pays a VAT and the largest gaming market outside of China is the USA.. the USA alone is the largest market by a long shot compared to any country that pays a VAT. Point is that math don't math.

The math doesn't math. But the US is a small part of the world's game market.

The USA is the SECOND largest market at around $50 billion.. the next closest market is Japan at $17 billion.. like I said the math he put up does NOT math for obvious reasons

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Quoting: williamjcm

Quoting: Egonaut

Quoting: williamjcmThe reason the third-party sale numbers increased by that much is because they now include VAT, while previous years didn't include it to my knowledge.

That makes no sense, where in the world do we have 57% VAT?

I mean, it would still have increased compared to the previous year, just *much less* than what Epic's claiming. For example, if we assume that everyone on the EGS paid a 20% VAT, then the "before VAT" spending would have been around 333M$, which would seem much less impressive.

Not everyone pays a VAT and the largest gaming market outside of China is the USA.. the USA alone is the largest market by a long shot compared to any country that pays a VAT. Point is that math don't math.

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Well, I have to admit, I'm a little confused. The video game business since its inception was built on the back of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We create our games in computers with technology.

Give yourself some credit, won't you Mr. Zelnick? You're not just "a little" confused. You're either very confused or very stupid.

How do these idiots end up leading corporations?

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Quoting: SzkodnixI'm still worried about the price. Even the most pessimistic scenario of $1,000 is becoming less and less realistic option.

They claimed "mid range pc" pricing ... which is totally fine by me for what it is. So as long as they stick to that, I'm all good.

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I remember having fun with the game when I played it back in 2018. Definitely worth the measly 3.75€ it's going for on Steam currently, if you enjoy the genre.

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most cursed game name of all time?

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Quoting: Egonaut

Quoting: williamjcmThe reason the third-party sale numbers increased by that much is because they now include VAT, while previous years didn't include it to my knowledge.

That makes no sense, where in the world do we have 57% VAT?

I mean, it would still have increased compared to the previous year, just *much less* than what Epic's claiming. For example, if we assume that everyone on the EGS paid a 20% VAT, then the "before VAT" spending would have been around 333M$, which would seem much less impressive.

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I don't get the hate for Epic. I've never bought from them because I didn't want to have more launchers, but now that I use Steam and Heroic I have no real reason not to if the price is right. I get all their free games and have played plenty of them with no issues.

I am glad Epic is doing better. More competition means that Steam (and GOG) won't be able to sit around.

Now, I'm not saying everyone should start buying on Epic - you do you - but clearly enough people are buying that Epic isn't failing, and that IMHO is a good thing.

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I'm curious to see what the future holds for the Epic Games Store. It's well known that Tim Sweeney is very anti-Linux and with more and more people leaving Windows behind, sooner or later he will have major problems with that attitude.

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Quoting: GustyGhost

Quoting: scaine[Duckduckgo did a survey](https://voteyesornoai.com/) asking their userbase if they wanted AI features. They closed the poll after a week or so, 175K votes counted, and 90% said no, they don't want AI.

Yes, it's very skewed - DDG's userbase is privacy-focused. But "tiny but super vocal butt-hurt minority" is a shitty and antagonistic way to describes people's perfectly valid dislike of this planet-burning technology.

Asking in good faith: If non-local AI features were able to operate in an ecologically viable way, would you then not dislike AI? Are there other aspects about ML/AI that keep you from engaging with it?

I've already answered the bulk of this here, so no point repeating it: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/valve-tweak-steam-ai-disclosure-form-for-developers-to-clarify-its-for-content-consumed-by-players/?comment_id=288587.

To answer you more specifically, a few of those issues I outlined could definitely be addressed, yes. Will they? Probably not. I suspect the ship has sailed on most of them, such as plagiarism / non-attribution. We'll see.

Quoting: NociferAI is selling like hotcakes, so Mozilla have decided that they need to provide these cool new trendy AI features out of the box

I don't actually think that's the case. Which is why they're adding adverts to ChatGPT, for instance, and also see Satya Nadella's plea that more people need to use it. Perhaps it's selling better in the Enterprise/Corporate world, and maybe that will fuel the AI growth that Nadella is desperate for - but you should be going into any AI tool with eyes wide open here - this technology is front-loaded. It is NOT paying for itself, and so it will either become heavily subsided by adverts, or sustained by a significant monthly subscription.

And the advertising element gives me serious concerns. It's bad enough that I'm profiled by Google via email, calendar appointments or searches... imagine what insight ChatGPT would get if it had all my "private" conversations with a chatbot over years of use. Does ChatGPT have an incognito mode? Yes, it does. Do you trust it? I don't.

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I seriously hope all the AI enthusiasts just hook up to that thing and stay there. 😝

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Quoting: QuadrantThreeA sizable portion of it is probably from Unreal Engine. UE5 is currently the industry standard game engine, being used by both indie and AAA. Unfortunately, UE5 being the popular engine also means more money goes to Tim Sweeney.

It's just the third party purchases from the store - licensing fees for the engine would be extra.

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It probably means new AMD GPUs are also not going to come out until 2027.

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Ripped from the headlines of tomorrow: "xAI revealed Project Grokie - their new experiment to have generative AI create exploitable interactive worlds"

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Quoting: kuhpunktI'd be curious how much of those $400 million even ended up in Epic's pockets.

Technically they take 12% - so 48 million would be the maximum. But they don't charge for the first million at all. And then they have that reward system as well where you get money back for your next purchase. Wasn't that like 20%?

How much money have they lost running the store this year?

A sizable portion of it is probably from Unreal Engine. UE5 is currently the industry standard game engine, being used by both indie and AAA. Unfortunately, UE5 being the popular engine also means more money goes to Tim Sweeney.

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Quoting: ArehandoroSame. I read, on RPS I think, that the Frame could probably be also around that. I hope that doesn't mean that the controller will go up to the $100 mark.

While I don't know what they are going to charge for the controller, I am pretty sure that it doesn't use any kind of memory, so it should not be directly impacted by the current insanity regarding prices.

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Quoting: ArehandoroUnEpic however is a great Metroidvania parody (although the humour is very teenager-stoner like 😅)

I was about to post the same. And the humor is what makes it so fun. 😄

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Quoting: neolithYou guys know about Valve Time, right? 😆
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

yes, that's why valve is also releasing the ' Zimmer-Frame ' to account for the time it will take to release the product.

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Imagine the computation cost of that nonsense 🤣

"Heat a village by creating slop"

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Quoting: beko

Quoting: LoftyWhen you say you use ReShade is this on Linux ? Why is is needed for this, i get that OpenTrack is needed for head movements. What is handling the 3D'ification of the XR glasses for games.

Sorry for the late reply. Must have missed the notification mail. There are various shaders for ReShade that split and shift the image for stereoscopic 3d. This requires access to z-depth buffer maps (and sometimes it picks up the wrong but this can be fine tuned per game).

External Media: You need to be logged in to view this.

In theory this could also be done with Vulkan but vkBasalt (which seems to be rather dead?) does not expose the depth maps at all so it's either native SBS or SBS with e.g. the Depth3D shader. ReShade requires DirectX so this works AFAIK(!) only for Windows games and this also works fine via Proton where the render pipeline with Wine/Proton looks like this: DirectX => ReShade => Vulkan.

The steps to get this running are exactly the same as on Windows. Install ReShade, fire the game up with the DLL overrides and configure the paths to the shader folder. There is a nifty script on Github that eases the process but it is really not required.

Thanks for the info. Not to be lazy but i do sometimes wish Linux had more native apps with an actually decent GUI for doing cool stuff like this.

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With Firefox's shrinking market share, they better start listening to the users they have left. This could have been an extension so those who want AI can add it, it also would keep the browser from getting bloated with frivolous features.

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Quoting: ArehandoroIf we're too late to say "Happy New year" to friends we see for the first time in 2026, we are too late to say "Early 2026" for this as well. Or maybe May counts as early as it's in the first half of the year? Do they mean early financial year?

P.S: I'd like the devices out now, please.

In some interviews during the first hands on reports Valve said it would launch in Q1. Does that mean it will still happen that early? Not really. But that was their target.

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Quoting: kuhpunktYou're just playing a video stream, not a static product. Nothing "exists" here. It's just so dumb.

in before speed running Google maps.

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I'd be curious how much of those $400 million even ended up in Epic's pockets.

Technically they take 12% - so 48 million would be the maximum. But they don't charge for the first million at all. And then they have that reward system as well where you get money back for your next purchase. Wasn't that like 20%?

How much money have they lost running the store this year?

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Quoting: SzkodnixI'm still worried about the price. Even the most pessimistic scenario of $1,000 is becoming less and less realistic option.

Same. I read, on RPS I think, that the Frame could probably be also around that. I hope that doesn't mean that the controller will go up to the $100 mark.

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