I don't think that there will ever be a HL3 since it would to stand out from all other games in such a fashion that I don't think games can do any more (unless Death Stranding really will be a revolution) that it will get green lit by Gabe. Remember that any attempt to release HL3 now regardless of story (and I don't fancy the epistle 3 story very much) will just be another FPS and that is not what any one wants even though people some times claims that.

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It only shows Windows and macOS now?! Was just going to purchase it when I noticed that the steamOS icon was gone.

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Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: iiari

Quoting: NeverthelessWhy not purchase games cheaper on Epic? It will not defeat Steam, but it can hurt it.

Unless I've missed something, absolutely no one in this coming Store War has claimed Epic offerings will be cheaper for the *consumer*. Increased $ for the devs, yes, but no one has even made any symbolic lip service as to how the consumer benefits here. And usually, with exclusives, that implies higher prices too...

I would offer a little cheaper on Epic if were a developer, because I'd get more money of games sold there.
Edit: Of course, exclusives are always cheapest on the only store they are sold. ;-)

Such a move however could risk upsetting your potential buyers on Steam (or the other platforms) forcing you to lower your prices there as well.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ecosvaldoEven IF their store supported Linux, it still will not get me to use their platform. Why? One word... Tencent. They ALMOST have controlling interest in Epic Games (around 48 - 49%)!

Ehhh, for practical purposes that's controlling unless there are no small shareholders at all. I know, in theory you need 50%+1, but in practice you need more votes than will be cast against you, and there will always be a fair number of shareholders who don't get the memos or aren't interested and don't vote their shares. So 48% is plenty to win any plausible vote. You can often have control with 30% or so!

Epic is however a private company and not a public one so the other 51.6% is most likely owned by the founders or some other investors, but more important for the question at hand is that it's owned by a small circle of people so there will not bee a situation where some shareholders don't get the memo or aren't interested.

For public companies it's quite often (for the big ones) to have several share classes where the one listed on an exchange have either no or very little voting rights. One example is Google where Page and Brin owns 59.16% of the votes due to them owning a lot of the B class shares (their A class gives 1 vote, B class gives 10 votes and C class gives zero votes where only the A and C classes are publicly traded).

All very true. And of course they could also form some sort of alliance with one member of such a small circle of shareholders. So really it's very hard to tell from the outside just who has control. But I think we can suspect that Tencent wouldn't have accumulated that much of an interest in one company if they didn't have some hope of controlling it . . . so I guess we really don't know if they have control or not, but we can be pretty sure they were giving it a try, whether they succeeded or failed.

Edited to add: If the info Kristian cites is correct, they don't . . . or didn't at that time, anyhow. Or, Sweeney could be kidding himself. The emphasis on seven firms seems a bit off, makes it sound like oh, Tencent is just one small player among many . . . but they can't all have bought a 40% stake! One way or another, it's interesting information. Nobody's going in big like that without anticipation of payoff. Presumably a big deal like that was put together in anticipation of some major move by Epic which would cost a lot of money but have big profit potential . . . such as, say, creating a game store that could really grab some market share from Steam.

Perhaps a pity we have little choice but to be agin' it.

Well they also got two board members in the deal so they have _some_ control over Epic that is not just seen in the voting rights, this is the problem with private companies that the insight is close to zero.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ecosvaldoEven IF their store supported Linux, it still will not get me to use their platform. Why? One word... Tencent. They ALMOST have controlling interest in Epic Games (around 48 - 49%)!

Ehhh, for practical purposes that's controlling unless there are no small shareholders at all. I know, in theory you need 50%+1, but in practice you need more votes than will be cast against you, and there will always be a fair number of shareholders who don't get the memos or aren't interested and don't vote their shares. So 48% is plenty to win any plausible vote. You can often have control with 30% or so!

Epic is however a private company and not a public one so the other 51.6% is most likely owned by the founders or some other investors, but more important for the question at hand is that it's owned by a small circle of people so there will not bee a situation where some shareholders don't get the memo or aren't interested.

For public companies it's quite often (for the big ones) to have several share classes where the one listed on an exchange have either no or very little voting rights. One example is Google where Page and Brin owns 59.16% of the votes due to them owning a lot of the B class shares (their A class gives 1 vote, B class gives 10 votes and C class gives zero votes where only the A and C classes are publicly traded).

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Quoting: pbI recommend trying out LEGO City Undercover. It worked since the initial release of proton but the sound was glitched (background effects were at full volume without the way to change it). Since proton 3.16-5 the sound is fixed and the game is perfectly playable, my kids are 65h in, with 95% completion. It crashes occasionally but judging by the reviews, it's typical to Windows as well, maybe even more so.

That is one good game right there. Have it on my Wii U since it came out and me and the kids have spent houndreds of hours playing it together and just messing around those years ago. The Lego version of GTA.

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Quoting: flesk

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: TheSHEEEPIf I ever make a game of my own, I'll only actually distribute a launcher to each platform. That launcher will then take care of actually downloading/patching the game. Sure, it would mean having to maintain my own server(s), but I've been using Amazon S3 & AWS (and other providers) for quite a while now... it's not that difficult.

Seems to be the only way to prevent having to maintain different builds across the various platforms, each with their own uploading, etc.
Also has the added benefit of being able to serve as a built-in mod-manager.

Or perhaps why not create a cross-distribution build platform that can build and handle the distribution to steam, gog, itch.io and so on. Could potentially by worth some real money for game devs?!

Such things already exist and is known as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) in "regular" application development. The idea is that you use software (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Travis, Circle CI, etc.) to pull code from a repository when you push changes, and then build and deploy to the store fronts you want your game on, eg. whenever you version tag a commit. For this to work, however, the stores must have an API or software that makes it possible to automate the process. Itch has Butler, GameJolt has a similar tool that's in beta, and Steam has SteamCMD, though I've not used the latter.

Yes I know about such things but they are just building blocks, one could argue in a similar vain that this is all solved since we have access to a scripting language in BASH.

What I'm talking about is providing a full 100% complete service where game companies simply performs "make dist" at which point their game will be automagically be sent to all the preset stores, post the needed news posts etc. And this includes all the things that do not normally have an API and where the service instead would perform say HTTP POST:s to web sites and what not.

And when stores implements various changes this service should of course support it asap which of course would be #1 USP for the service. This is all practically doable for any one interested in creating a new service, the question as usual is if game devs will see it as a viable option or not (sometimes people and companies complain instead of seeking out the real solution even when it stares them directly in the eye).

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Quoting: SalvatosWell, that's assuming Epic and Discord are letting anything get onto their stores and not vetting games. Is that known at this point?

Well it remains to be seen how much vetting a 10% cut will afford. Salaries are normally the largest cost and vetting takes quite a lot of human resources so to speak.

But time will tell, I'm not on any mission play that Steam is the one and only viable platform and that a 30% cut is the only possible way. I'm simply concerned about these new stores that try to compete with a large discount while (some) people seams to assume that the service will be the same. Because I've seen this very same thing happening in my own business and quality went down the drain as a result but then games might be different than finance.

Quoting: Appelsin

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: AppelsinSteam need to get off their behinds, clean up their store for asset flip bloat and crap

My guess is that all those asset flip bloat and crap will be among the first to switch over to these new stores considering that the lower cut is so much more important to these people. And if the refund policy will not match that of steam:s (or even exist at all) then they should love it even more there.

That is of course a very real possibility. No refund, no reivews, a fresh start so to speak. It'll be interesting to see if they (Discord and Epic) have learned more from Greenlight than Steam (or Nintendo! seems to. GOG have largely kept out of this race top the bottom.

After checking, it seems they have refunds. Same as Steam (14 days, 2 hours played), but not covering DLC apparently.

Quoting: SalvatosWell, that's assuming Epic and Discord are letting anything get onto their stores and not vetting games. Is that known at this point?

Unsure, but I found the following on their page:

QuoteHere you’ll see a curated list of games for your buying pleasure! Our store has a hands-on personal approach to give you the best information about each game. Each game has a video preview on hover and a custom description so you know what the game is about so you can browse easily.

Hard to say if it's just the list you see that's "curated", or the entire library. I would assume thought that common sense dictates that if you're just starting up a store, you wouldn't want it to run over with crap from day one, so I would assume there's at least some level of vetting going on. But hey, common sense isn't everyone's cup of tea :)

Quoting: SalvatosWell, that's assuming Epic and Discord are letting anything get onto their stores and not vetting games. Is that known at this point?

Well it remains to be seen how much vetting a 10% cut will afford. Salaries are normally the largest cost and vetting takes quite a lot of human resources so to speak.

But time will tell, I'm not on any mission to pretend that Steam is the one and only viable platform and that a 30% cut is the only possible way. I'm simply concerned about these new stores that try to compete with a large discount while (some) people seams to assume that the service will be the same or better. Because I've seen this very same thing happening in my own sector and quality went down the drain as a result but then games might be different than finance so I might just be a grumpy old man here :)

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Quoting: Usual

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: UsualManaged to get an error trying out isaac rebirth on wine-staging. Do they accept wine-staging bug reports or just regular wine?

just curios on why you tried that game on wine when we have it natively?

I kept getting issues with my gamepads(ps3 controller, wireless 360 controller and logitech F310), so I wanted to see if they worked on the windows version. They did, but if you use the keyboard it doesn't work anymore.

Tried to contact Nicalis about the Linux version problem, but all I got was crickets...

Unrelated, but Super Meat Boy linux version also doesn't let you download the soundtrack. Would be happy if more users contacted Team Meat about it to see if they do something too.

I see, of course the more curious question is how anybody can play Binding of Isaac with a controller :). I've found anything else than keyboard completely horrendous in that game, but each to their own I guess. Sorry to hear that you have not gotten any reply from them, that really sucks.

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Quoting: lejimster

Quoting: CybolicIt's highly subjective. In general, humans perceive anything over 25/30 FPS as "continuous" and anything over 60 FPS as "smooth" but most can distinguish between 30 and 60 FPS and quite a few can recognise changes between 60 and 120 FPS. Above that, things get extremely subjective and most people can't see any difference.

I can tell the difference on my desktop between 144 and 120Hz. It shouldn't be that different but its night and day to me. So when people claim to be able to notice changes between even higher refresh rates, I'm not so doubtful...

This is why I'm excited about Freesync finally landing. I've never tried it as I'm Linux only and this might be the one thing that could fool my perception of frame rate.

If it's really "night and day" then it might be that your display simply behaves very differently on those two frequencies or that you really have not performed a blind comparison.

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