Quoting: mylkamaybe they get more money with each sale, but now they have higher costes. own servers and linux programmer for the launcher
maybe gog follows

I think that it's simply that they have now grown big enough to where those costs are less than having to give away 30% of each sale to companies such as Valve.

Now I don't have longer data than back to 2013 in the database (they listed their share in 2016) but they seam to have made some nice increase in both sales and profit (ptp in the table below is the pre-tax-profit) and while not close to a behemoth like EA they are probably as I wrote before closing in on the kind of sales numbers where 30% suddenly are quite a lot of actual money (aprox 35M EUR in 2017 if we assume that all sales are from places like Steam).

+-------------+-------------+--------+
| sales (EUR) | ptp (EUR)   | period |
+-------------+-------------+--------+
| 82802623.75 | 34552570.25 | 2017   |
| 68283456.35 | 32235567.90 | 2016   |
| 65690763.75 | 26313802.50 | 2015   |
| 18811775.00 |  4644400.00 | 2014   |
| 22308151.25 |  3817602.25 | 2013   |
+-------------+-------------+--------+

edit: ok this is strange, the table is perfectly aligned in both the edit and the Preview but skewed when actually posted...

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Well this is what happens when a company needs to spin everything in order to keep the campaign going and thus squash each and every thing that questions the project.

I mean when he wrote "We clearly said that we were bringing engineering design models to GDC and lots of people clearly don't understand what that means" he clearly knew that the point of the article was that there does not exist a single working system yet and that their execs cannot answer a single question on it. Instead they try to weasel word their way out of it by implying that El Reg has an agenda.

The very fact that they brought "engineering design models" instead of a prototype is kind of the essence of the El Reg article...

And lets us not forget that this is not the real Atari either, it's just Infogrames with a different name.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraI can say that it's quite possible that Feral is obligated to release only on their own store+Steam with DRM

Why would 2K want Steam exclusivity with DRM for one version (Linux / macOS) and not for another (Windows)?

For total control. Feral wants to sell on GOG as well well then they have to pony up more money or a higher percentage. Now this is of course complete guesswork here and I do not want to put 2K into the EA corner here but publishers often have strange ideas on how to control their assets.

Now I work in a completely different market (finance) but I have seen and been involved with lots of strange decisions by asset holders. E.g one company decided that the data they sat on was so valuable that they could not set a distribution price for it and they went bankrupt due to not having any revenue...

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.Ultrait's also possible that their license covers the version released and this new non-DRM release on GOG is a new version that Feral does not have license to.

This is most likely the case, contracts are usually narrowly worded. But it's not a blocker, Feral can just make an additional contract or update the current one if the original publisher (2K) is OK with the idea to begin with.

Of course they can, but the macOS/Linux marketshare is a small one and perhaps they think (which very well could be the wrong decision) that they will get a better return if they invest in new ports instead of re-releasing old ports on other stores when the original publisher does what 2K did with X-COM. Doing the needed changes and supporting a new store is not free (also if there is some anti-GOG feelings among the top decision makers at Feral then they will not open themselves to the domino effect here where if they release one game on GOG the demand increases tenfold for them to release other games as well) so it has to be weighted against the possible revenue from such a move.

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Looks almost like a 16-bit isometric version of Resident Evil 1 :)

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: GuestTry as you might, there's nothing to indicate Feral's DRM stance one way or another. I put it to you that lack of xcom on GOG is about various business deals, distribution, quality control. Nothing at all to do with DRM.

:) You know, it is kind of silly to try to hide an elephant behind a straw:

• The DRM-free version of the game is already available on GOG, but Feral® explicitly said it is not interested in GOG release;


• Feral uses Steamworks (as none of their games are on The Big List of DRM-Free Games on Steam.

Their (awkward) reasoning is of no importance to me. The hard truth is: Feral Interactive releases all their games as Steamworks-exclusives and it is entirely Feral's descision to do so.
You can condemn or approve this descision, but stop pretending it is not their own stance.
Sorry, but no "Feral is tied up with contractual obligations" rubbish from now on, OK?

Quoting: TheRiddickSteam does not stop developers releasing products on other platforms, so the decision is up to the original developer.

Got any proof? Some Licence Agreement scans? Or, are you one of Valve employees and has explicit right to speak on behalf of Valve? And in this case the original developer had already desided do release the game DRM-free, but Feral is of different opinion on the matter.

Quoting: LinasWhy do you assume that they are even allowed to release the games as DRM-free? The majority of the games they port are not even available as DRM-free on Windows. It's not like when they make a Linux version it becomes Ferals(sic) property and they can do whatever they want with the game?

Eeehmm… Hello again! It seems you did not fully understand the whole meaning of the news. Well, just in case you missed (sorry for being Captain Obvious here), "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" is already available at GOG. DRM-free!

Well to be completely honest we have no idea what the deal between 2K and Feral looks like. Having experience with license deals (not on games though) I can say that it's quite possible that Feral is obligated to release only on their own store+Steam with DRM, it's also possible that their license covers the version released and this new non-DRM release on GOG is a new version that Feral does not have license to.

It's also possible that Feral (with their much smaller market share) decided that the effort to implement the changes needed for this new release is simply not worth it.

And it could be that Feral is pro-DRM, I know nothing about their company structure since they are a private enterprise but perhaps they have investors that require DRM (basically 100% of investors require shit like that).

Personally I dislike DRM just as much as you guys but at the same time I understand that it might be a necessary evil for small companies such as Feral to survive. Call me a sheep but when having to choose between no Lara Croft and Lara Croft with DRM then I choose the latter any day of the week. This however does not mean that people should not criticize Feral to let them know that there exists a market for non-DRM games, the end game is of course to go 100% DRM free.

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: F.UltraThe idea is to let his patreons pay for the porting, so what he is saying that he will port your game for free if you let him (and you are a game publisher/developer).

I'm one of his patreons and I somehow missed that in his fairly regular updates! Nice. I'd love if more devs actually offered him the chance to work on games. It seems weird to have what is literally a legendary porter putting his services free gratis, and he's not getting any offers!

IMHO the main problem is that the (large) publishers wants to be in 100% control of the process as well as holding on to the possibility that either they can license out the Linux-version for lots of money or that Linux someday will be the New Hot Thing that they ride the gravy train by releasing ports at that specific point in time.

For an example we can look at "No One Lives Forever" The Sad Story Behind A Dead PC Game That Can't Come Back. It's a good read to get into the strange thinking on the large publishers.

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Quoting: scaineThere are plenty of indies out there that would probably benefit from a pro like Gordon, but can they pay? I have no idea of the costs involved in freelance porting work like this. I'd say that Gordon's best bet is to leverage an outfit like Humble to hook him up with the indies that have a project they can use him on, and publicise his fees up front.

Would love to see him getting involved in some of the smaller indies with the bigger titles - Subnautica, Scrap Mechanic, A Hat in Time, They Are Billions or The Solus Project.

The idea is to let his patreons pay for the porting, so what he is saying that he will port your game for free if you let him (and you are a game publisher/developer).

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Makes sense. The people who are offended should instead utilize the Store Content Preferences and untick these two:

QuoteVIOLENT & SEXUAL CONTENT
Include products in my store that contain the following types of content:

• 
  Show products with frequent violence or gory content
  Applies to products frequently tagged as 'violent' or 'gore'. You may still see some of these products if they have not been labeled properly or if you specifically search for the title.
  


• 
  Show products with frequent nudity or sexual content
  Applies to products frequently tagged as 'nudity' or 'sexual content'. You may still see some products with this content for the following reasons: (1) If the sexual content or nudity is only a small portion of the product, (2) if the products have not been labeled properly, or (3) if you specifically search for the title.
  

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.UltraStill sad that still in 2018 things get's completely wiped on firmware updates. Wouldn't it be nice if vendors of controllers, BIOS/UEFI, Smart TVs and so on would put the configuration on a separate memory location that didn't get wiped.

Speaking of wiping things...

I was all happy, booted into Linux, launched Steam, which I thought pulled in the new version, but it doesn't auto-restart itself, so when I turned on the Steam Controller, nothing. Restarted Steam, it then said there was a firmware. Started the firmware update, but it said I had to plug it in.

Plugged it in and... my hard drive went away. Now I'm creating a LiveCD to fix my Debian install.... looks like grub got completely borked!

Hopefully my drive still has data on it... it literally started popping up a bunch of ext4 errors.. :(

I think this is one of the "don't confuse correlation with causation" situations. Unless it required you to be root I have a hard time seeing Steam being able to overwrite the MBR of your drive. Most likely is that there is some kind of problem with your drive that happened to show itself at that particular moment (perhaps the download of the firmware was the first time there where a write done on this particular partition for some time).

My theory is that it tried to mount the Steam Controller as a drive, and for some weird reason my BIOS decided that drive should be /dev/sdb (my Linux drive) because it acted exactly as if /dev/sdb had been unplugged. I ended up updating my bios there was a fairly recent update) and then doing the update again and it worked fine.

The thing is, clearly Steam doesn't have to be root to write the firmware to Steam Controller, it also doesn't have to be root if you have Linux set up to be able to mount USB devices automatically, which almost all desktop OS's are set up that way.

To be fair, it never actually got to the 'update firmware' stage, it gave an error that I needed to plug it in, I plugged it in, the dialog disappeared as did my system.. .for a time. Besides having to run grub-install /dev/sda and update-grub (after I got back into Debian to add Windows back to the boot loader).

So your hard drive was connected over USB? Well that might explain it then.

No, it is over SATA. I do have to point out that these two SATA drives I have do have a weird issue with randomly disappearing off the bus, causing the OS to crash, but this is the first time it has happened to my Linux drive (the other one has Windows 10 on it and has done it a few times.)

I think it is time for a reinstall of Debian Sid anyhow, something funky is going on, since it won't read Audio CDs, yet my Arch Linux install on another drive woks perfectly fine.

Sounds like the issue is more likely connected to your "randomly disappearing off the bus" then. An application needs to be root in order to write to the block level of any device, that you can upgrade the firmware of the SC without beeing root is due to it performing firmware updates as either normal file transfer or with their own protocol on top of USB/BT.

Except that some auto-mounting stuff happens when you plug in a USB Stick. While yes, ultimately root access is required for all the udev bits and pieces for that to work, that means access is there for when installing a new USB device, because that can load new kernel modules.

It's not entirely a random thing if it happened the exact moment I plugged in the controller. Who knows. Every time something similar has happened to me, it's always been caused by these two Mushkin SSDs. Let's just say next time I get SSDs for my system, I won't be buying them from Mushkin.

Edit: Model number is MKNSSDCR480GB-7 in case anyone else wishes to avoid them.

For mounting the drives yes, but that will still not give you the low-level access that an application needs in order to do block-level writes such as writing to the MBR. All a non root application can do with a mount is to transfer a file using the filesystem, and to be honest I don't believe that Steam have code in it to do low-level sector by sector writes either.

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Anyone that knows what have happened to the PadokaPPA? The stable one have not had any new builds for 4 weeks now and is stuck on 18.0.1 which breaks e.g Dying Light.

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