Quoting: KoopaMy bet is most studios will stick with the less favorable option for gamers regarding price.

The rational choice is to choose the price that maximises profit in each region. Setting the price too high reduces the number of units sold, and so reduces profit.

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Quoting: vic-bayI am looking at hwsurvey stats again, and considering MacOS also got its share almost doubled, it is not error in counting linux share, but most likely the surveyed set of machines just happend to have lower share of windows.

No, it's that last month's results were broken by the well-known China overcount. Looking at any month's delta is entirely pointless. The useful thing to do is to look at the longer term trends, which Liam has helpfully documented.

Quoting: vic-bayChina has high Windows share, for some reasons.

Decades of intense directed effort at the highest levels from Microsoft.

Quoting: vic-bayIs there any legal issue with automatic data gathering?

Yes. And it's icky. Requesting consent to collect and publish a user's details at the point you do so is the only sane approach.

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Quoting: Phlebiac

recent shift in the VR market

Anyone know what this refers to? VR didn't take off like they hoped (just like the last few attempts)? Or something else?

The VR market is 80% Facebook, and Facebook have recently reorientated away from VR gaming - closing studios and calling off hardware partnerships, and making their VR ecosystem thing a phone app instead.

It would be quite a good time for Valve to swoop in with a cheap device that can play all those games without any retooling from game devs, but RAM crisis.

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Quoting: KrejsyLainenHow is this a thing? Almost every gamedeveloper nowadays are using unreal engine + they have the epic store, how are they this impacted by just Fortnite losing players?

"When Fortnite launched in 2017, Epic was a 500-person company—known primarily for producing the Gears of War franchise and creating the industry-leading game development software, Unreal Engine. It was booking about $100 million per year in revenue. A year later, Epic made a staggering $5.6 billion in revenue. Ninety-seven percent of it was from Fortnite."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattcraig/2023/11/10/epic-games-unreal-engine-fortnite-game-developers-sypherpk/ [External Link]

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Finally! They had controller support in the Switch version 3 years ago, but were dragging their feet on having the same in their PC version.

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"DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics"

That sounds chuffing awful.

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"We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time."

That "necessarily" negates the meaning of the sentence; it turns the statement into "we do believe in replacing humans with AI all the time, but there are some circumstances where we might not."

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The thing I'd like out of PEGI is for them to make it really quick and really cheap to get a PEGI rating. The whole scheme is of limited usefulness when only a tiny fraction of games are ever going to be rated.

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Quoting: grigiWow, did not expect this.

Is this the start of the Linux picks up mainstream developer mindshare thing?
Or is Unity just trying to have it covered in case that happens?

More the latter than the former, I expect. The last time we had Steam Machines announced we got 40% of games released on Steam having a native Linux build, and game engines stepped up their Linux support, based on the potential of a new market. Since those Steam Machines didn't really happen in the end, that support withered.

This time around I think there'll be less withering. The Deck is a proven market, and media are much more positive about Linux than they were then. Linux support is less acceptable to allow to drop than it was then. But the driving force to improve Linux support is the potential of a bigger future market, just as it was then.

Of course, back then, OpenGL support was about the same on Windows, Mac and Linux, so you could avoid duplication of work. Vulkan support on Windows isn't that great, and it's non-existent on Mac, so there'll be more platform-specific duplication of work this time around.

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So not only do games need their music licenses, but Valve as a store is supposed to have a license too.

I don't think they are. And Valve doesn't think they are, either. Obviously we'll see what the courts say. Licensing agencies like to do a shakedown on the off-chance.

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