Excuse me... but were these linux games? I think I've stumbled on them a couple of times but I don't remember them having the penguin badge (or maybe they were overpriced and I never got them in the catalog)

Anyway... that stuff is very old and also used to be very popular especially on consoles. At Disney they know that on PC we have emulators right? Because to me that doesn't look like a big idea. It will definitely hurt them more than us.

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Quoting: g000hI was under the impression that a site like G2A is involved with reselling unwanted game keys. You buy a bundle somewhere, you already own one game in that bundle and so the key is useless to you. You put the key on a site like G2A for a small sum back. It doesn't seem "so bad" viewed that way.

Then limiting the number of keys of the same game one account can resell per month should greatly mitigate the issue.

But the real issue is how Credit Card circuits works. If transaction fees were charged to the users instead of the sellers there would never be any problem (also: there would be more transparency on which circuit is the most efficient/convenient).

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Quoting: cprn"Epic is fixing it" while they have money... But they'll have to start making it at some point. And those extra data centres aren't free. Things like power, storage, transfer, backup, people and hardware redundancy cost a little fortune. That debt will sooner or later have to be paid. By us. So lets not fall in love yet. With any side.

I have a theory. Imho people don't understand that it's not loyal consumers Epic is after. The customers they have will just go back to Steam or Gog as soon as they have the freedom to do so. At Epic they are not so stupid to not see it. They can't be. Steam is superior and Epic has no intention to ever compete with them feature wise. Sweeney said that over and over.

Epic just want an install base large enough to convince the remaining big publishers to join their cartel. Including publishers with their own launchers like EA. The 12% thing is there to convince them that it would be much more convenient even for them to just let them handle distribution. Then they will have all the cards in their hand. And with that they will be able to dictate the rules: prices and conditions.

After trying to make a sense from what they are doing, I convinced myself that the real monetization they are after will come from monthly subscription memberships for all the on line features that as of today status quo are included a PC game price tag (the evil 30% steam tax) as opposed to pretty much every other console or stream service out there. Once they have all the large publishers on board, they will be able to force that kind of model on PC. And even Steam would not have the resources to challenge that (their full set of features benefit more small devs compared to big publishers which can invest in their own infrastructure. So in a sense big ones pays for small ones in Steam). The final objective is to make PC market more console like.

Ofc it's just theory of mine. But if I had to be convinced to invest ton of money and assets in this crazy adventure, that is the kind of argument that would convince me.

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Quoting: MunkI will never buy your game on EGS, Origin, and likely not on GoG.

Careful, that exactly the message that Epic is trying to pass. Which is blatant lie.

The day Steam competitors offers the same/equally worth/better features, people will naturally buy games from there too. It's a matter of value proposition. There is people who doesn't like Steam and value more GoG for instance. Other people would likely be happy to buy from present day EGS if they were discounted the value of missing features from the front price. That is way nobody has tried before (ofc they don't, in the end it's all about raping customers, not about fair deals).

In case of Paradox for instance if they put together a service with friends, multiplayer, mods, save cloud, guides/forums, automatic updates and patch management and such I'd say they would already have a compelling case for them going by themselves (though I would still miss streaming in my case and controller profiles for niche games like Magicka2, I absolutely love how they used Steam Controller api in that game it's fantastic). Ofc all that stuff costs and so 12% (which already do not contain transaction fees in Epic implementation, so they do sell at higher prices) becomes a chimera.

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The guy is misinformed. Valve introduced the 30% cut by its own. And at that time it was super convenient because physical distribution cut was around 50%. Ah the golden ages before steam: when nobody cared that the developers were making less money than the distributor and publishers made less money without becoming outraged in the process. Will we ever see them coming again?

Sarcasm aside, I used to believe that someone could actually do better than Valve and challenge them if they tried. But when an intelligent and competent man with an endless amount of money like Tim Sweeney says that it's impossible to do better and the only way for he and his big publishers buddies to get higher margins is to remove all steam features, all steam services while keeping the consumer prices unaltered (or even increased a little because, why not? Monopoly FTW)... well I believe him. I'm now genuinely convinced that 30% is the best price possible for that kind of service.

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Quoting: dubigrasuJust somewhat on topic: What is the purpose of linking your Steam account to the Paradox account?
I have several Paradox games on Steam (also I bought just right now Surviving Mars) and not one is listed on my Paradox account (or available in the launcher).

Them gathering info on you. You gain the medals and some avatars depending on what you bought when posting on their forums.

... and I guess you have access to their launcher if want to try it. Before they announce that they ditched Steam and make it mandatory (because we all know this day will come).

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Quoting: 14Paradox is one of my top developers and publishers. Most of what they've put out that I had interest in worked natively on Linux, including Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which is a very memorable RPG for me. I would be more sad losing Paradox than most other developers or publishers.

Yup. But today they've grown into a big publisher and they are publicly traded company. We all know what this means in the medium-long term. One should be emotionally prepared. :(

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Quoting: slaapliedjeAlso the shenanigans of Ubuntu trying to drop support for 32bit compatibility doesn't help. How many Ubuntu users are just going to go back to Windows rather than distro hop?

Imho: no one. Though I agree that this was handled poorly and it became bad PR that might confuse and keep away non techie people that were undecided if leaving windows or not.

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It's obvious that their relative Linux sales decreased since they also started to sell in China. But absolute as well? This is not a good sign.

Although, truth be said, I'm among these ones (I didn't like the recent Pdx releases, both gameplay and quality and I also abandoned Stellaris after they changed it in 2.0, so I only keep buying DLCs for their older titles) I see on their forums and reddit that it's plenty of people who have 0 issues with that and they can't all be based on windows.

Are there other indications out there that shows that linux sales are slowing down?

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[quote=elmapul]

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: elmapul"I'm personally ...

i will not quote your entire comment in the quote section because it would be to ugly to waste space and i need to quote parts of it again, so...

"Exclusives are artificial limitations whose sole purpose is to manipulate "market" allowing a less efficient party to impose itself thanks to resources that are external to the market itself."

WRONG, exclusives were born in an era without standards for development (such as openGL) back in the days it was an matter of tecnology, its much harder to support mips, x86, powerpc and everything than to only support one architecture, consoles had an different hardware back then that created an cost to port games from then to other platforms.
you may argue that exclusivity deals like the epic store are an artificial limitation, but you cant say the same about every exclusive.

"It's not that Windows is bad, it's that Linux is not good enough. "
again, its not about the quality of the system, its about the marketshare.
gamecube was better than PS2 in terms of hardware, but playstation had more games wich lead to more consoles being sold wich leads to more marketshare for sony and less for nintendo, an trend that nintendo couldnt reverse.
its not about the system being good, its about the ecosystem.

"If instead Gaben used his money to buy games and make linux only releases we wouldn't have any of that. There would be AAA linux games, but they would be lesser games that what they are now."
nope, because it would expand the market, take a look at the console market, it starts with almost no game and end the generation with 3.000 games and dozens of millions of units sold.
playstation went from nothing to 100 millions of unitys sold in a single generation, ps2 started from 0 and reached more than 150 millions of unity solds.
linux has the same 1% of the market for over 25 years, if its markershare grow we would have more games nor less then projects like wine would skyrocket anyway.
valve tried to launch an console without exclusives and it floped, helping wine was the last solution remaining.
yes, they should do it anyway but playing the 'cat and mouse game' will never solve the issue, linux will always have only an subset of the games that windows have.
just look at it from an gamer point of view.
this A platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, some of the old generations plus halo
this B platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, some of the old generations plus god of war
this C platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, some of the old generations plus mario
this D platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, all of the old generations plus league of legends
this E platform only a few games from the current gen, only a few games from the old generations, what would i do?

of course, buy the platform A and C, dont buy playstation because i dont care about god of war and play lol on my old pc since it can run even on a toaster pc. about the D? i will ignore it, there is no reason to care about it.

how the hell we will reverse this marketshare with an situation like that? we cant.


"Exclusives are the opposite of this. It's about someone distorting a market with resources obtained from outside that market to give an unfair advantage to an inferior and less competitive service/product. "

it dont matter if its an distortion, what matter is: ITS FREAKING WORKS!
and the value of the product is on the ecosystem not on the system.

I never argued that exclusives don't work. They are small monopolies carved in the market and they do work. What I've argued is that they produce worse products and worse services and higher consumer prices which is the exact opposite of the reason why the vast majority of the world (supposedly) set to use free markets to run its economy.

If the lawmakers were less corrupt exclusivity deals would not be a thing for any digital good.

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