I have to admit - I didn't leave much chance for this one to last. I stand happily corrected and congrats on the first three!

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Quoting: eldakingThere is probably some mix of programmers who aren't burned out and non-programmers that are comfortable enough with some "light" scripting.

Oh, absolutely! They may be script hackers of the most enthusiastic order in their life outside of gaming. But core question here is: Do they WANT to spend their gaming time writing code?

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To be honest though - the concept of this game is really, really niche. Like, exceptionally so. Almost so I'd place it in a genre of itself. I have a background in coding and am not "scared" by the concept of writing code, but even I must admit that it's not code writing I'm most in the mood for when I fire up my Steam client.

So how do then the gamers out there with no coding experience (or interest!) see this game?

If I purchased this game it would be simply to test the concept. Not with any intention to invest a lot of time in it. So selling 200 copies a month of a game of this concept, with no marketing power behind it... My honest reaction was that it didn't sound that bad at all.

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Excellent!

Now, here's hoping they will follow up with a VR version this time too. Cause this kind of gameplay is fantastic in VR. One of my favourite experiences thus far.

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Quoting: HoriI too believe that flatscreen games and VR games need to coexist, and I'm sure without a doubt that this will be the case.

Oh yeah so do I. absolutely. It almost goes without saying. But I firmly believe they can also make RTS fully work - did you check the VR RTS game Patola mentioned earlier?

But look at us now! This is fantastic. I am thrilled about our current status quo! Think about it: Now we talk about if flat-screen games will still exist. It was NOT long ago (a few months!) we rather discussed if VR were here to stay or not!

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Quoting: tuubiIn reality, the PC gaming industry is bigger than ever.

Now, yes. Now it is bigger again - and it took a turn in parallel with the improved DRM and especially implementing online gaming as that was a perfect opportunity to add new levels of DRM. Massive difference.

So I talk about the period where piracy were at the heights, around 15-20 years ago. Before the online gaming became a standard component, before all machines were online at all times and the DRM systems were weaker than now. The reason I refer to that period is because it so exceptionally clearly showed us all what consequence piracy did to PC gaming. It was so crystal clear that nobody could even pretend they didn't see it.

Now, things are different because piracy is not as widespread as it was back then. So the consequences are not as glaringly obvious for all to see. But the consequences are there - this is why they still fight it.

But again, the only thing we really need to point at is that the industry would not have spent all these resources on fighting it if it "only lead to more sales". It's that easy, really. One have to be in complete denial to not accept that simple fact. So much so that it would be a waste for me to spend time digging up data, as that would be met with denial too.

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Quoting: PatolaAre there any actual statistics showing that pirates buy more (or less) games? If there are, I don't know. Care to tell the source?

Oh, there's plenty of stats that shows the correlation between availability of cracks and drop in sales. Plenty.

I remember an interview with a developer back when there were still gaming magazines, must have been early 2000, and he said that on PC they had a very tiny window to cover a vast majority of their investments, and that was from release day until the first cracked version popped up on torrent sites. From that day on the sales plummeted, died out completely. Anything not earned from then on was lost.
One could also see on the overall PC games sales when a new version of a widely used DRM system was cracked. It caused *waves* on the sales charts.

It became so bad that at one point, before DRM became better, there were hardly any money left in PC gaming. Plenty of developers - especially the mid sized ones with large projects but not strong enough backs to carry too heavy losses - left the PC game market and focused on console exclusive releases.

But really, do we need numbers to believe this? Isn't it enough to use our own heads, our logic and rational reasoning?
Would the industry have invested such a massive amount of resources and efforts on intricate DRM systems, online verification etc, if piracy lead to more sales?
Like, seriously - are we really questioning this?!

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Quoting: TheRiddickIts the same deal with pirates, whom are MORE LIKELY to buy more games then a regular joe, simply because they get exposed to more games and are likely to buy stuff they enjoy. A regular joe doesn't know what he is missing, basically, thus spends less.

This is faulty logic that's long been proven wrong. Absolutely every statistics in the world will show you that.

And although highly anecdotal, I can with no shadow of doubt declare that I've never bought more games than after I stopped pirating. In fact, back when I was sitting there with torrents I hardly bought a single game. Or a single piece of software in general, for that matter. Including Windows.

And why should I, when it was all there right in front of me, for free?

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Quoting: HoriWell let's look at the full half of the glass: It's a success!
Unlike the Steam Controller (RIP, sadly), and Steam Machines (RIP but meh), this one is actually a huge success.

Oh absolutely! I am very thrilled by this, I want to see as many on the VR train as possible, for it to keep pushing forth!

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Quoting: jensDo you have any experiences with git and branches? Just consider "stable" and "vulkan-beta" to be long lived branches. Sometimes the commits from the "vulkan-beta" branch will be merged into stable (I guess at the start of a new major stable branch). At some point the "vulkan-beta" branch is rebased against the "stable" branch, thus all changes from the "vulkan-beta" will be applied on top of "vulkan-beta".

See eg. https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing [External Link]

So what you're saying is that the stable branch and the beta branch are two different branches who just so happen to have a version number very close to each other? So this beta branch is not branched off a 450.56 main code base (of whom 450.57 stable is a later version of), but is a version totally on it's own?

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