Quoting: wolfyrionI have seen only 1 movie of StarWars (that one with the young Anakin racing?) and played 0 games... :P
It seems that I cant find anything exiting about the franchise :huh:

Arguably, you've seen the worst Star Wars film ever made (arguably worse than Battle for Endor). In the full article, I spend some time digging into what I think makes Star Wars interesting/culturally resonant. If you're looking to understand why it's exciting to so many people, that section [External Link] might be worth reading.

Quoting: ShmerlIt's a shame Aspyr can't wrap things up and release KoTOR II for Linux on GOG already. It's playable in Wine though. Same as KoTOR I.

Yeah, it is a shame. I don't know what the ins and outs of Aspyr's publishing rights for KotOR 2 are. It's possible that there are some unseen hurdles in the way.

Inversely, it'd also be nice to get the DOSBox packaged stuff like Dark Forces up onto Steam as well, but I suspect that GOG are the ones driving that, so it's unlikely to happen.

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It's not quite ready to handle KotOR/KotOR 2 yet, but DrMcCoy's xoreos [External Link] engine will someday allow people to run both of those games natively on Linux in a F/OSS engine.

The project's always hunting for more contributors, so if you're mad keen on KotOR and want to help out, I'm sure that would be super welcome :D

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I helped Dan do his initial testing before releasing the Linux beta, and it's a fun game!

For anybody who would like to check this out, the beta branch is likely to give a better experience than the main branch.

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Quoting: natewardawgAs far as I know, the fee has always been $100, even when there weren't so many low quality games.

Greenlight existed for about two months before the fee was added. Here's some commentary [External Link] from developers on the fee when it was first introduced (which includes a prediction from Rami Ismail that it would probably rise to $1000).

Quoting: natewardawgIn all truth though, it really doesn't matter, any discussion in this forum isn't going to sway Valve one way or the other as to the cost.

For this article's comments specifically, you're probably right, but the attitudes that pop up in general discourse will have an impact. Robert Yang expresses [External Link] this a bit better than I could:

To the people who say I'm "sensationalizing" the outrageous $5000 proposed fee, which is the hypothetical worse-case scenario that is thus unlikely to happen [...] Also, Valve quoted that number out loud, in public, precisely to gauge your reaction to it. If you just shrug, what you're actually saying to Valve is, "yes, a high per-game fee is good, please raise the fee as close to $5000 as your conscience will allow it." If I were a master of rhetoric, I would purposely say "5000" so that "500" seems "reasonable" in comparison.

Quoting: razing32Have you seen some of the crap on the store ?
Have you seen how many "simulator" games there are that are just random joke thrown together unity assets ?
What about all the asset flips that are just a pre-bought unity project with a new name , no work on it whatsoever.

Sorry but have to disagree. That 100$ is not stopping the hacks.
The vote groups doing it for steam cards get the games on the stores.
And that 100 is a one time thing , so people can flood garbage after they pay it. Not hard to get , think there was a system that would keep your games open till you got all the cards , so use that , sell the cards on the marketplace, and there you go.

Is any of that really a problem? If card trading creates a self sustaining marketplace where stuff can exist, then why shouldn't it? As weird as I find it to be that they exist, I can't think of a reason why their presence can be seen as bad.

People who publish random joke games don't find meaningful success - outside of the Linux space where people still look at every single new release, there's little chance of them being heard of at all. Negative user reviews keep people away, and those that are overtly abusing the store and its customers get kicked off it the way that Digital Homicide did. More responsive actions to community reporting of problematic titles/developers would definitely be a good thing, but it feels like the people who are complaining about that instead are few and far between.

Some thoughts [External Link] from Rob Fearon earlier this month on "abundance", which were almost prophetically relevant:

Discovery in the digital age is a big task and it’s one that’s not made easier by making a subset of videogames go away. It requires time, effort, focus on what a whole lot of different people need – from folks buying games to folks making stuff in an environment that near as dammit insists that they must learn in a marketplace now.

We don’t need to raise questions as to how lesser works are allowed on stores, we need to ask how they’re going to help us find the things we want to find. It doesn’t need to be done at the expense of others. There’s so many other, better, ways to tackle this. All of them more useful than that.

That people feel like Steam is full of "bad"/"junk"/"garbage"/"trash"/"joke" games is a symptom. The actual problem isn't the content that's on Steam, it's that even with the relatively recent discoverability themed updates to the storefront Steam still isn't very good at helping people find games that they'd be interested in playing. A fee (any fee) doesn't really address that directly at all.

One last thought from Robert Yang (whose article [External Link] has a bunch of good points):

The shitty games are on Steam, and the shit is there to stay, so just embrace the shit and learn how to filter / curate / deal with it. For those indie business devs who cling to 2010, I'd say the days of scarce Steam storefront access guaranteeing sales are way long past. Now it's time to share the tent. This is not your golden platform anymore.

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Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTBut already right now it's hard to distinguish between good titles and garbage every now and then....

With the unconditional 2 week/2 hour refund system that Valve brought into effect last year, this is a non-issue. There's zero risk involved with picking up a game that looked good, but turned out to not be what you're after.

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Quoting: ShabbyXJust an FYI, Valve takes about 10~15% of the price. It's the consoles that take crazy numbers like 30~40%.

So far as I'm aware, 30% is still the default thing they offer. It's not something that many people are in a position to talk about though. A few years back, documents accompanying a backruptcy filing [External Link] gave some pretty solid confirmation.

Quoting: Solitary

Quoting: CheesenessOne person's garbage is someone else's personal touchstone.

Have you seen what is up on Steam Greenlight lately? Lots of the stuff can be objectively rated as garbage. Companies like Digital Homicide should be removed from Steam (thank god this one actually was), not given better opportunities how to plague the store.

I have, and I don't think that it's really a problem. There's plenty of stuff that's of no interest to me and/or has no potential that I can see, but I find it hard to feel that my opinions should in any way impact on any of that existing on Greenlight/the Steam store at all.

Everybody likes to moan about games that they don't like or don't see as well made ripping off poor Steam users, but the truth of the matter is that this stuff wallows in obscurity and make no money, so it's not really as big an issue as has been suggested. In the case of something like Digital Homicide, are ejected from the store if they actually are treating their customers poorly. Having communities and individuals flagging stuff that needs attention is IMO a far better way to deal with that than pre-emptive guilty-until-proven-innocent culling.

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One person's garbage is someone else's personal touchstone.

There's no way that algorithms or teams of isolated curators at Valve can pick games that are a good fit for everybody. I think it's a fundamentally flawed thing to expect from a monolithic storefront that attempts to cater to all people. This role is better filled by communities who can have deep context/genre/culture specific focuses, and most importantly can have overlap with and contradict each other about what's valued and what's not in ways that aren't possible for a storefront.

There's an interview with Gabe from a few years back where he talked about the idea of moving away from a monolithic Steam storefront and instead allowing communities, individuals and companies to have their own "Steam storefront" tailored to their specific needs and tastes. If this is still a direction for Valve (I hope it is, and replacing Greenlight with Steam Direct feels like it's in line with that), then removing store-level curation and other restrictions on what people can publish through Steam is an important step.

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Greenlight's fee was added after the service was launched in response to the number of "Half-Life 3" and other joke/not serious submissions. IMO the fee was a fairly ham fisted way of addressing that problem, but it seems like it was embraced by the developer community and is here to stay.

The interesting thing about Steam Direct seems to be that there's no indication of there being a voting process involved. Maybe we're about to see Steam move entirely away from curation and embrace the kind of anything-goes approach that Itch.io has (this would be good IMO).

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By the way, if anybody has any questions about the game (including more detailed questions about Linux support), there's a Q&A thread [External Link] up to collect stuff that the team will be providing answers for in a little while.

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Quoting: GuestDouble Fine new motto: "We can't finish our new games, so we just remake them from 20 years ago! Just give us money pls!"

Just to shed some light here, Double Fine is a studio that has multiple teams working on concurrent projects.

So far, every remastered project that Double Fine has been followed by the release of an original title (Massive Chalice followed Grim Fandango Remastered and Headlander followed Day of the Tentacle Remastered). Rhombus of Ruin will come out before Full Throttle Remastered, but since that's not out yet, a 1:1 ratio feels fair :)

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