The Paradox Launcher is now available on Linux

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: mylkawhats an uber AAA game for you? i think ubisoft has a lot of such games. more than EA and they can live without steam

Games which will make people install your launcher no matter if they like it or not. Battlefield, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, ...

I didn't use Steam for a very long time, until I had to, due to wanting Skyrim so much. Such games.

so ubisoft has their own big sellers. assassins creed, far cry, watch dogs, tom clancy, south park, beyond good an evil 2

do you think ubisoft would sell the same amount of copies, if they sell their games only on uplay?

Quoting: mylkaso ubisoft has their own big sellers. assassins creed, far cry, watch dogs, tom clancy, south park, beyond good an evil 2

do you think ubisoft would sell the same amount of copies, if they sell their games only on uplay?

I don't know, but these do sound like the kind of games I was talking about. I guess even Ubisoft doesn't know.

Quoting: devnullWarthunder

Wart what? What does "hunder" even mean? :D

Oh someone mentioned Manjaro earlier, just re-installed it. Apparently it needs some libraries that arent installed normally because they are in steam. If you install steam native in arch/manjaro it will work. Well the game will work the launcher itself works off the bat with no issues.

Quoting: devland

Quoting: STiATIt's a store and launcher, where the games are bound to your account. So of course there is DRM in some way.

So is Steam, yet not all games have DRM on Steam. DRM on Steam is optional. Game developers/producers decide if they want to use it or not.

Tropico 5, for example, is DRM free on Steam for Linux. You can install it via Steam, then run it after uninstalling Steam. Can you do the same with this launcher?

I believe that you can load Stellaris without Steam even for the Steam store bought version.

Quoting: mylka

Quoting: F.Ultra

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).

does steam really take 30%. assassins creed costs the same on steam and uplay. actually its now cheaper in the steam sale, than the uplay sale
why wouldnt ubisoft make their games like 10-20% cheaper in their own store? the customers would pay less, so they would get more costumers and they would make more money with each sale

why is EA selling their games only on origin, but ubisoft isnt, if they would save so much money?

Yes they take 30% (Paradox writes so in their Annual Report which I have in Swedish only but they might have it in English on their IR site) however there exists no details if large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are tied to the generic deal or if they are large enough to get a discount here.

That Ubisoft does not lower their own prices by the Steam tax is quite simple, that would #1 make them loose 30% there as well and #2 it would lower the value of their games. Say the price is 100 USD om Steam and 70 USD on Ubisoft Store then Steam users will complain en masse that the price on Steam is lowered to 70 USD as well which now means that Ubisoft gets 49 USD from each Steam sale instead of 70 USD.

And to move a substantial amount of your customers from Steam to your own store you probably have to do way more than just decrease the price of your wares by 30%. I wouldn't categorise Steam as vendor-lock-in but their store is convenient enough so that it's close to customer-lock-in.

Also for large AAA games it's not certain that a lower price yields more sales (or enough more sales to cover for the lower price).

I don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam since #1 no one in the industry have ever claimed that this is happening, #2 lots of both large and small publishers (e.g EA and Feral) have their own stores, and #3 that they simply do not need to force a specific price due to the mechanics that I explained earlier (i.e that if they lower the price in their own store then they ultimately lower the prices on Steam as well).

Quoting: F.UltraI don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam

I'm happy with calling it pure speculation, but unhappy with having it called "conspiracy theories". (The possibility of Valve forcing companies to do something is lacking enough parties for a conspiracy to begin with.)

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraI don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam

I'm happy with calling it pure speculation, but unhappy with having it called "conspiracy theories". (The possibility of Valve forcing companies to do something is lacking enough parties for a conspiracy to begin with.)

I think a spade is a spade. It's quite easy to begin publishing games on Steam. All you have to do is sign the agreements from https://partner.steamgames.com/newpartner/?signup_type=1 and pay the fees. I just tried with my Steam credentials and exactly nowhere in any of the agreements and NDA:s that they wanted signed was any reference to prohibiting you sale of your products on any other platform nor of any text regarding how you decide to set the price of your products either on Steam nor anywhere else.

So yes that is a conspiracy theory because all the open facts dispute it, it's easy to see since the agreements are public, both big and small publishers operates their own stores besides Steam, but still people "speculate" that this is the case. In my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.

Quoting: F.UltraIn my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.

I disagree. It takes more for a conspiracy theory than speculation. You're missing boxes, boxes which wouldn't tick.
But I don't think we need to discuss this further.
Your arguments about the real question are good; my speculation was most probably wrong.


Last edited by Eike on 29 June 2018 at 2:59 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraIn my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.

I disagree. It takes more for a conspiracy theory than speculation. You're missing boxes, boxes which wouldn't tick.
But I don't think we need to discuss this further.
Your arguments about the real question are good; my speculation was most probably wrong.

Ok I'll soon drop this :) but just wanted to point out that:

#1 A conspiracy is: "a secret agreement by people to commit something wrong or illegal. Depending on the circumstances, a conspiracy may be a crime, or a civil wrong."
#2 A conspiracy theory is: "an explanation of an event or situation that invokes an unwarranted conspiracy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy

Which is why I included the fact that all agreements you have to sign with Valve in order to publish on Steam is public in my previous post. I would say that both boxes are ticked ;)

However with this I did not intend to paint people in a bad light so I can stretch it to call everything posted before this very post as speculation and everything after as conspiracy theories (unless people bring up credible evidence of course).