Quoting: elmapul"I'm personally torn on it all. I don't particularly like exclusives, as I don't like any kind of lock-in but I don't blame developers for doing it"
i hate to break that for you but, there is no such a thing as an world without exclusives.
there is either:
a)what we have on consoles, where sony got a few exclusives, microsoft has a few exclusive, nintendo has a few exclusives and everything else is multiplatform.
or
b)almost everything is windows exclusive and we suffer to reverse enginering it to make stuff run on wine in many case years after its relased we may run it, that is, if we ever gonna run it.

You are making a fundamental mistake here by confusing exclusives with strategic decisions to concentrate on a single platform.

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.
Strategic decisions instead are the obvious decisions every executive has to make where he weights costs associated with an action compared to the promised returns (while weighting the risks in the process).

You don't see games releasing on Windows only because there is an artificial ban on linux. The ugly truth is that linux is that in the eye of developers the costs and risks associated to releasing for our platform are not worth the potential returns. It's not that Windows is bad, it's that Linux is not good enough. Same deal whenever a game releases on "Steam only" (whatever that means given that keys can be sold everywhere with no fee). There is no conspiracy behind. Just cost benefits analysis that lead certain devs to not re implement in house what Steam platform gives them for free. Sad? Maybe. But one can't blame Windows or Steam for being better or more convenient. In the end like any other job also developments is about doing more, better with less. On linux this worked the right way so eventually stuff like Vulkan was made and porting companies like Feral emerged which allowed to lower the risks and the costs that comes with releasing on our OSs and infact now we have many more games. Proton will further reduce costs and risks. 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.

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. On consoles people so pay more for getting worse games. And in our case Fortnite money allows an inferior service EGS, to starve the better ones and impose itself to the detriment of consumers. Those who thinks that overtime EGS will catch Steam in terms of features are delusional fools. That's not how Sweeney is selling his launcher to the other Publishers CEOs. The idea is to maximize margins at expense of users. And saving the money needed to implement and maintain any "platform feature" PC has is part of it. In a grim future where Steam and GOG are dead and EGS is a monopoly we people being forced to buy premium EGS passes to play EGS games in multiplayer or get cloud save games like as it happens on consoles. That should also be clear: for the guys at the head of Ubisoft, Epic or 2K PC it's just another platform among the many they support. If PC dies they won't shed a tear. Less platforms to support, less costs to sustain. They don't have the interests of PC gamers at their heart. If their actions lead to PC being less competitive than consoles (or streaming services) in the future they don't care.

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Quoting: finaldestThe biggest issue with any PC exclusive is that the game in question is locked to a specific launcher. If I could use any launcher or no launcher at all to download and play the game then the affect would be minimal. With EPIC for example, All Linux users are locked out before even entering the gates.

Careful here. Claiming that Steam, EGS, Origin and such are "just launchers" is part of Sweeney narrative. If you consider them just libraries of link to .exe for games that run on windows it's easy to agree with Sweeney that gamers are just being lazy and they just have get used to have more launchers as publishers do their dirty stuff at their back.

But Steam it's not just a launcher. It's indeed a platform that comes with several features many of which Steam itself brought into gaming first (like cloud saves and controller profiles). And as any platform it strives to hide the implementation details. That what steam play is all about: it should be transparent to you if you're gaming on windows, or mac or linux. While stuff like proton and vulkan try to bring this on developer side.

When you play a game on Steam, like it or not, you have a different experience. That makes a ton of difference in this matter. When Tim is left free to establish his narrative (basically always) he never admits that EGS and Steam are platforms or services. On the contrary he claims they are just launchers and that Windows is the platform and so 30% tax is not justifiable from Steam and that for gamers it changes nothing so they should just stay quiet and get raped. He's establishing a frame where where he's right and we're not. Then ofc even in his frame the man is plenty of inconsistencies. Like when he's ok with Apple having 30% tax on iStore because they made the platform so they deserve it, but then on Android he works to bring EGS to break the unfair toll. Ofc the only actual difference between the two ecosystems is that one is closed and doesn't allow competition while the other is open. But today his target is only Steam.

Also if you accept Sweeney narrative that Steam and EGS are just storefronts then it means that there is no platform nor a service to invest on. If your vision for your enterprise in this world is just to sell stuff by undercutting your competition, why should you invest on making better the ecosystem? There is no ecosystem int he first place! It would just add your costs without giving you and your millionaire publisher friends any additional monetary benefit. Especially when you can just grab users by pursuing lucrative exclusives. Which only come with the minor side effect of forcing a player to look for their .exes under a different launcher. But in exchange grants them the highly educational experience of paying more due to the payment method they use in their country.

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QuoteI’d like to challenge critics to state what moral principle you feel is at stake. If it’s okay for one company to avoid the 30% Valve tax by selling exclusively through their own store, why is it wrong for multiple companies to work together to achieve the same goals?

That has never been the issue. In fact pretty much everybody cheered when Epic announced EGS.

The main issue is him using his outrageous amount of money to actively degrade the PC experience of gamers instead of using it to produce a superior product that wins customer affection (something that shouldn't be that hard with all that cash).

I'm growing tired of all these bullshit articles made by bribed journalists who carefully avoid to pursue questions and arguments that might be uncomfortable for their hidden masters and instead help them establish their narrative.

When TS says that EGS allows small developers studios to avoid "steam tax" for instance, one should point out what actual guarantees are there that when a publishers gets higher revenues because of EGS this money goes to actual developers and not entirely to publisher shareholders. And when it comes to transaction fees I like the argument and I always have defended it (I genuinely think it would be better if CC fees were payed by CC users). But then you point out how it comes that Steam 30% tax is not 30% anymore if it eats up a 8% of transaction fee. And then you go on by uniting the points above and tweet him if it is better for PC gaming to make gamers pay more for less just so publishers can pay higher dividends.

I understand that gaming is not politics or finance, but it's not that gaming journalism couldn't use some actual journalists working in it.

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Regarding new videogames (and any other general purpose software) there is literally no reason to have 32 bit releases today. On Steam there might be old 32 bit games but its Valve job to keep their runtime retro compatible and they will. While Steam client itself it's about time that it goes 64 bit. Not because it will benefit from the architecture but because of the additional hassle to install it.

Generally speaking though 32 bit OS still have their niche use and are needed. The decision to drop the architecture has a lot more implications outside gaming. But Ubuntu is not Debian, its desktop images are general purpose in their scope. I would say that dropping 32bit is a wise decision.

Ofc Canonical as a desktop OS provider doesn't have the "power" to force software developers hand. But given that most developers that deliver on linux also delivers on mac and Apple already did it for itself I expect this to go quite well for them.

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Quoting: SalvatosEsperanto is basically the equivalent of the multiplication of standards in technology. Someone decides to make a new language that everyone could speak in common, and now there's just one more language that most people don't speak.

Nah. It's just a failed product of a restriced and exclusive club of men.
Just because there was never a militarily strong "national state" that adopted it as official language. Otherwise it would be have been a righteous tool for "the common good". So good to justify the eradication of the "local dialects" it pretends to represent.

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It's interesting to see how regarding this subject the specialized press is basically all sided with Epic and publishers while instead influencers are almost exclusively sided with the gamers that bake them. This is a classic example of how journalists in the end defend the interests of whoever pays their bills.

But for the same principle the developers -who are the main beneficiary of crowfunding, publishers actually would do better without- should pay more attention to who really is enabling them to stay in the business.

This trend to shit on gamers for a quick injection of money is extremely short sighted. It's informed gamers who end on crowfunding sites, not the casuals. Compromise the trust of gamers in this tool and the next time you will have a good idea but no money to work on it, crowfunding won't work. So you will find yourself at the mercy of publishers.

Imho if devs were a little more long sighted they would not accept money to hand in the future of their profession to publishers.

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Privacy, manipulation, world conquest. Very interesting points of view here.

So, when do we get Nekopara on Stadia?

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Quoting: ArdjeI would pay that subscription money if I could just run my own steam games.

That would be the advantage of any Google competitor if it ever appears. If Valve or Epic would launch a stadia like service in addition to their regular platform (so you can always pay 10 bucks for a month of streaming on your whole library if your rig is broken or whatever) they would have the best offer. But Epic is uninterested in spending money to add value its library and from Valve it came no indication whatsoever that it might launch a cloud service, although with SteamOS and steam link they would have the majority of the software components just ready.

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Different opinion here. Imho Stadia has a very compelling case when it comes to pricing. It's a free 7-8 years old PC/ console at 1080p and for 4K 9 bucks at month is a nobrainer deluxe hardware for any PC gamer and is a very competitive price for consoleyards.

Then price aside, I see Stadia as the ultimate console killer. On consoles people is used to buy games that are so bound to a console that will literally die with the console itself after a few years. With Stadia they could even see added value as the platform won't And the convenience it offers can hardly been beaten. Microsoft and Sony did well to ally against Google. Unless Google screws up hard with their cloud (unlikely but possible) they will erase xbox and ps simply because consoles are inferior platforms and there is nothing they can do better than Stadia.

But we PC gamers? We are a different kind. Stadia offers none of what Steam offers in term of features. No mods, no support for old titles, huge freedom and flexibility when it comes to input/output devices and so on. But it's all stuff that the guys at Google can figure out eventually.
And admittedly the fact remain that we pay a huge premium for those perks in terms of personally owned hardware. Is it really worth it? Build/buy a 4K PC that runs modern games is an expensive affair. Many PC gamers could just decide that it's not worth the money and just use Stadia when the time comes to upgrade their rigs.

so I won't be so fast to dismiss Stadia. Its extreme convenience and cheap prices are hard to beat. And even if present day PC gatekeepers like Valve and wannabe Epic decide to respond in kind by launching their own cloud, Google is undeniably advantaged on that side because they own their cloud.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: Whitewolfe80doesnt the epic store work perfectly under lutris it did last time i checked in with it now yes ill never buy anything epic related but if you got bl3 with a graphics card cant see the harm

Right. And since windows bloatware is included in the package why not installing windows too? I've heard that the last iteration is very stable and performing plus it's supported by virtually every PC game out there.

Sorry you are comparing lutris to windows because ?

I'm comparing nothing. EGS and B3 supports Windows not Lutris. If you deliberately spend money to buy Windows stuff it's only logical that you install Windows to take full advantage of it. AAA games are a conspicuous investment of money after all even without the DLCs. You don't want to gamble on Lutris just to remain locked out of your purchase when a random patch breaks wine compatibility (assuming that B3 will be wine compatible).

Then if one is not willing to cede to EGS petty little shakedown it's advisable to put the (quite large amount of) money into hardware and software that are officially supported on linux. Like a card package that comes with linux supported games. Or a cheaper package with no game included. But hei! That's just me! Everyone is free to spend their money how they see fit.

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