Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: GuestThe video game market is broken as shit. You have publishers gouging money from gamers everywhere you turn, so people turn to other sources in order to buy games for less. Its been happening for decades. Remember when copied games were sold in the market for a fraction of the retail price?

(Not talking lootboxes and nonsense into account here..)
In my humble opionion, most games are way too cheap.
In the 90ies, a game usually costed 100 german marks.
With inflation, this translated to 83 euros / 93 dollars.
Back then a game was made by, dunno, a handful or two of people?
Nowadays, even productions by hundreds of people cannot ask for 90 dollars.
And productions by a handful of people are often condemned if they take more than 20 dollars...

If you where lucky back then you could afford one game per year, so the many hours we spent as kids looking at the backsides of games in the store so not to end up with the shitty game for the whole next year. O boy have the times changed, and then there are plenty of people crying all over the steam forums that 9$ for a game is a rip-off... Sometimes the old grumpy me wants to smack those kids on the head and tell them to get off my lawn!

But, remember that in the 90's it wasn't necessary to buy the games for to play them. We were able to RENT games for consoles like Sega Genesis, SNES and playstation Cd's, etc..
And We were able to rent games for computers with MSDOS, totally DRMFREE in Cd's, or even Floppy disks.
I miss that freedom!

Not back in the 80ies and early 90ies where I live (there might have been some NES games for rent in the later part of the 90ies in larger cities at the video stores however). Today however you can borrow PS2-4, XB360-One, Wii, WiiU, GameCube, DS and Switch games at our local library for free.

edit: some research shows that we indeed had NES rentals as early as 1987 in Sweden but this must have been in major cities only, I never saw one on the villages where I grew up.

edit2: seams to have been later than 1987, the company that did this was launched in 1987 but they only rented so called video boxes (VHS players) initially so I have no year of when they launched their NES rental business.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: GuestThe video game market is broken as shit. You have publishers gouging money from gamers everywhere you turn, so people turn to other sources in order to buy games for less. Its been happening for decades. Remember when copied games were sold in the market for a fraction of the retail price?

(Not talking lootboxes and nonsense into account here..)
In my humble opionion, most games are way too cheap.
In the 90ies, a game usually costed 100 german marks.
With inflation, this translated to 83 euros / 93 dollars.
Back then a game was made by, dunno, a handful or two of people?
Nowadays, even productions by hundreds of people cannot ask for 90 dollars.
And productions by a handful of people are often condemned if they take more than 20 dollars...

If you where lucky back then you could afford one game per year, so the many hours we spent as kids looking at the backsides of games in the store so not to end up with the shitty game for the whole next year. O boy have the times changed, and then there are plenty of people crying all over the steam forums that 9$ for a game is a rip-off... Sometimes the old grumpy me wants to smack those kids on the head and tell them to get off my lawn!

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: ThormackThe new Steam officially supported distro just launched.
Awesome.



(Just a speculation, for now...)

Nah, I don't think so.

There's a lot things to do after the installation. IMO they will support a more friendly distro, preferably with a corporation behind, like OpenSUSE or Fedora

Maybe they create a new distro for desktop use based on Debian.

I don't see where people get the impression that Ubuntu is more 'user friendly'. Nothing says that better than their python based installer that regularly crashes at the partitioning step with a bunch of exceptions that are surely easier to read for the average user than plain language.

Because the average used does not use whatever advanced setting that you are using that are causing those crashes. They will simply click "next" all the way. And once they have done so they will have a fully working desktop, and if they need further customization or changes then the Internet is full of blogs and nice looking guides for how to do this in Ubuntu.

That is why.

Agreed. Although I do have one minor peeve about that Ubuntu (and Mint) installer nonetheless. As a pretty basic user, I still tend to need to muck with the partitioning. Why? Because even the most basic user would be well advised to put their /home on a separate partition from the / with the actual OS. Eventually you're gonna update or reinstall or try a different distro or something, and when you do your life will be so much easier if your actual data you care about is on a separate partition from the one that's gonna get formatted. Sure, you should do a backup anyway, but having those two partitions is basic. But do they have that as an option, or even the default? They do not. If you want that you have to go into the full partitioning thingie and worry about swap and a little boot space and crap like that. Grumble mutter whine bitch.
(I swear I have a recollection of Mandriva having that option available in its installer in the old days)

What you cite is not an argument for partitioning, but rather for the use of LVM.

And frankly I don't know why anyone would partition any linux installation today (except for sharing a drive with Microsoft crapware, of course). It seems to me that this should have been abandoned in the nineties, when I fully switched to using LVM on every installation.

AFAIK you setup LVM in the Ubuntu Installer via the partition utility. At least you do in the advanced installer.

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Quoting: dvd

Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: ThormackThe new Steam officially supported distro just launched.
Awesome.



(Just a speculation, for now...)

Nah, I don't think so.

There's a lot things to do after the installation. IMO they will support a more friendly distro, preferably with a corporation behind, like OpenSUSE or Fedora

Maybe they create a new distro for desktop use based on Debian.

I don't see where people get the impression that Ubuntu is more 'user friendly'. Nothing says that better than their python based installer that regularly crashes at the partitioning step with a bunch of exceptions that are surely easier to read for the average user than plain language.

Because the average used does not use whatever advanced setting that you are using that are causing those crashes. They will simply click "next" all the way. And once they have done so they will have a fully working desktop, and if they need further customization or changes then the Internet is full of blogs and nice looking guides for how to do this in Ubuntu.

That is why.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

Just because being a hypocrite is solidly in your best interests does not make it stop being hypocrisy.

So what does his hypocrisy consist of? AFAIK he is not imposing a 30% cut of other companies to use the Paradox store?!

I feel like backing up a moment and talking about what hypocrisy is. If you don't agree with me on that, then obviously we're going to see different things as hypocrisy. To me, hypocrisy is when people morally condemn the same or similar actions in some cases but not others, usually precisely because they are speaking "from the viewpoint of" their personal (not necessarily monetary) gain. It's a violation of the "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" principle. Refraining from hypocrisy requires speaking not "from the viewpoint of your own company" but rather from the viewpoint of principle. That may seem like an unreasonable requirement, but it only kicks in if you're making ethical or normative claims--of course those should be based on principle because you can't have it both ways; if you want to talk from your parochial interests then you have no business bringing morality into it.

So here we have a guy who clearly charges what the traffic will bear for his products, condemning Valve for charging what the traffic will bear . . . and doing so in a disingenuous fashion which makes what are pretty clearly knowingly false claims about Valve's (lack of) expenses. So, clearly his condemnation is not made out of genuine moral impulses--he knows he's lying and he knows he'd do the same because he more or less does; he's just trying to put some pressure on Valve in hopes of getting a price break. The details are different, and no doubt he could defend his pricing practices, but he's making false claims about Valve's so it would appear he doesn't care about that kind of fairness. And of course another element of hypocrisy there is that he would surely object strenuously if someone claimed to him that all those DLCs cost Paradox nothing to make.

Seems to me like he's pretty clearly treating the Valve case very differently in terms of rhetoric and moral judgment than he would treat his own. And he is doing so in the interest of monetary gain. So that's hypocrisy.

If he just said "Valve's cut costs my company more than we want to pay, we don't want to pay it so we'd rather they reduced it" then he would be talking about his company's interests but not making a moral judgment and so would not be open to accusations of hypocrisy. One thing I find interesting is that in a world which is supposedly all about the dollars and cents, where the official ethos of the market is that there is no such thing as morality and profit is its own justification, CEOs very often end up reaching for ethical claims because in the end, no matter how much our system tries to explain them away, they remain compelling.

Thanks for clarifying your position! Laying out the details the way you did here I think that I agree with your position to 100%.

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Quoting: g000hEven if their source control server went down, it is usual for developer workstations to retain much of the working code. (True of git, perforce, subversion anyway.)

Exactly this. Where I work all the developers have each a complete copy of all our source code (myself I do a "svn up *" every morning) on our work computers, many of us have it on our home computers as well. Then the subversion server is backed up to a remote server in a different country. And we are a small 8-person company.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

Just because being a hypocrite is solidly in your best interests does not make it stop being hypocrisy.

So what does his hypocrisy consist of? AFAIK he is not imposing a 30% cut of other companies to use the Paradox store?!

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

It's the very definition of being a hypocrite. He's basically saying "do as I say, not as I do".

Not really, their per DLC price is not correlated to how much Paradox feels that a distribution channel is worth when it comes to a cut of the sales.

If not then anyone here is probably a hypocrite as well. Who here does not want to be paid more in salary while wanting to pay less for things like media, games, food and rent?

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Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: gradyvuckovicCounter argument for you Paradox:

• For their cut of the sale, Valve hosts your games indefinitely and provides countless services for free, such as free DDOS protection by running game network traffic through Valve's network, free cloud saves hosting, game streaming (Twitch style), free remote game streaming (Stadia style) which runs off Valve's network as well, plus provides features like Proton that gives Windows only games extra sales on Linux. How do you expect Valve to pay for all those things?


• 30% is the starting rate, it drops to 25% after $10m USD in sales, then 20% after $50m USD of sales. $10m USD in sales is easy to hit for a popular mainstream AAA game, for a game like Sekiro for example, that's only 166,666 copies sold, and $50m USD is only 833,333 copies. It's safe to say Sekiro has blown past both of those numbers. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, across all platforms (don't have Steam only figures handy) sold 2 million units in the first 10 days of release, at release it had 125,000 concurrent players on Steam, so it likely hit that 25% threshold in the first 24 hours and quickly hit the 20% threshold in the first week. It is highly likely several of Paradox's games have hit the 20% threshold, such as Cities: Skylines, which according to SteamSpy has sold between 5m and 10m copies.


• Paradox sell their games outside of Steam as well and have their own store, and because Steam allows for free key generation and offer an API for account linking and game activation, Paradox accounts can link with Steam accounts, so it doesn't matter where you buy your game (Steam or Paradox) your game will be activated on both accounts. Games sold from Paradox directly, pay no royalty to Valve/Steam at all, Valve effectively hosts those sold units of the game for free. For a game already at the 20% threshold, every sale outside of Steam just lowers the rate even further.
  
  (Personally I've bought my Paradox games directly from Paradox in the past to support them since they strongly supported Linux. Then I've activated those games on Steam, to enjoy Steam's service and keep all my games in one place. I'm sure others have too, otherwise Paradox would not have bothered setting up their store.)


• If we want to talk about 'outrageous fees', lets talk about how much Paradox charges for some of their games. The total cost of buying Cities: Skylines for example, is $30USD for the base game, plus $180USD for all the DLC, for a total price of $210USD for the whole game.

But looking at it not from an indie developer's perspective, and a single player game, much of what Valve offer simply isn't used, isn't relevent. And some of the services Valve provide are more to try lock developers into Steam than anything else.
Then "Proton" isn't expensive for Valve. Wine is free. DXVK was not started by Valve, but they do invest in it by paying a developer. Except that's not going justify 30% cut of every game. "Proton" and other investments are only Valve trying to make sure they're not beholden to Microsoft and Windows - they're not a service provided to publishers.
As for network infrastructure, forums, etc, well...I don't think it's worth 30% of every game either. Yes, they have to charge something. But 30%? That's probably a bit much for an infrastructure that is in place, has been paid for, and is mostly just maintenance. Moderation, curating, etc, are even pawned off to the community so Valve doesn't even do anything there.
Plus the more expensive and larger games are going to use more of their infrastructure than some small indie. Yet by earning a bit more, Valve will take less of a cut. Hmm.

I'm not saying Valve are evil. I might have given that impression, so allow me to say that they are investing in areas that are useful to GNU/Linux users. That doesn't mean they don't need a bit of competition though. That 30% cut is from lack of competition more than anything else, and I think developers are starting to suffer slightly from it. If only the epic store could adjust to being _healthy_ competition, then it might be alright.

Keeping such a network infrastructure that is needed for this is way more than just maintenance, as the number of users and published games keep increasing you have to constantly increase the bandwidth, number of storage units and so on. And that shit costs a lot of money, now I'm not saying that it costs 30% of all sales on Valve to do this (let's be honest here, Valve is making lots of money here) but it's a major cost item on Valves book keepings.

And this is the major point where Epic currently have the upper hand because they already need that enormous network to feed Fortnite so currently they give away that for free for their game publishers. Once Fortnite decreases in popularity they will have to stop subsidizing that network and then it will be interesting to see what happens to the cut that Epic takes.

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