I just hope Gaijin doesn't drop the support for other titles too. I'm playing War Thunder actively and also spent some money in it. It's the one title that I am regularly playing with my Windows friends. I really don't like dual booting anymore.

It's sad when existing mature games are dropping Linux and one of your favorite titles that worked just fine go unplayable (like Battlefield V).

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This sounds really awesome. I hope Proton backports this patch, because Once Human suffers sometimes from extreme loading on Proton and they use .NET too. However, this game has a lot of other issues too.

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Looks like they are getting very desperate now. This will be a big motivation for indie developers, because having 100% revenue is possible nowhere else. It could motivate some developers to move away from Itch.io (lowest fees) as their standard platform. Even the small number of developers that use self-hosting could then move to Epic to avoid the payment processing fees. Let's see how it develops.

From a customer perspective, purchases on Epic already look promising with incentives like X$ Coupons (for game purchases) and 5/10% cashbacks. Nevertheless, the client still misses soooo many features that is part of the Steam ecosystem to make it competitive.

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:grin: I'm currently playing the first one. It is actually really good for an idle games. It was freebie on Epic, it doesn't have any microtransaction and is single-player. So it was perfect to just try it out. Some minor things to note:

* Offline progression is capped to 24h. However, this can be fixed with a mod from a large library. Although, it appears the game isn't designed for that, I love this playing style that you don't needing to login every day.
* Runs some kind of chromium. Had some issues with wine at the beginning, but now works out of the box without issues. Still, pressing the back button the Mouse returns to the main menu, which is annoying. However, this only applies to the Epic variant. Sounds great that they now use Godot.

In general it provides a lot more mechanics than a typical number crunching idle game. In my opinion a good recommendation. Lets see how good the squeal actually gets when it releases. Although the graphics and features look nice, it appears very similar to the old game to justify a new purchase for existing owners.

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The improved media encoding performance is definitely needed for years now. So far I had to rely on CPU encoding for video stream on Twitch, because the encoding quality was so bad. If Twitch would finally enable HEVC or AV1 streaming, we would have a workaround until this card will get affordable.

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Deliver it at all Costs

Really good game. Chaos in a noir setting.

Game of Thrones: Kingsroad

Although it will be a free-to-play MMO, the beginning is actually really good. It has nice graphics and good gameplay IMHO. The demo is also really long. I played it now for multiple hours and have not reached an ending.

However, it should be noted that a lot of content has WIP placeholders like subtitles or lore pages, which can be annoying.

The King is Watching

Rougelite game where you move small area around to activate buildings that should produce resources or entities.

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The Steam features like family sharing or the social features (e.g. screenshots, achievements, steam profil, etc.) are big motivation factor for me as well to buy on or rather for Steam. The Steam key system is contributing to this. I can go to any other official store like listed on https://isthereanydeal.com/ [External Link] and get a Steam key often cheaper. Although, Steam doesn't get money here, I might get an DLC or other game since I'm already on their platform.

They are right that their target scope was too small. If they only want to build a store, then they would compete with others like Fanatical and would need to sell game keys too to have a standing. However, If they want to build store + library/launcher, then will need many years of development to compete with Steam. Otherwise, they would only steal marketshare from smaller platforms like GOG.

Even Epic is still years away from Steam. So for example the store experience on Steam is a lot better. Steam has an actual user review system, recommendations and often gameplay screenshots or videos. Often I have to go to YouTube or even Steam if I want to know if that game is something for me, because it's that bad on Epic. Then there is workshop support, discussions, guides, etc. Even finding DLCs for your games from your library view is a lot easier. At least they know about these issues and have improvements on their roadmap https://www.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/1c44ylv/epic_game_store_20242025_roadmap/ [External Link] . Although it will still take a while, because currently they only have achievements and friends on profile pages and that was planned ages ago.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't forget that most people will be driven by money. You can actually get a lot of games cheaper if you factor in Epic's coupons during sales and the cashback system (Epic Rewards). However, there is strong competition with all the other stores. Furthermore, sometimes the game giveaway have good titles in it, but unless the other issues are addressed I'm not really motivated to buy something if it's not a lot cheaper.

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I think they are only optimizing their profits. Now that they have an established standing, they could reduce their team. Plus, I expect that salaries in China are lower than in the US, so they are more likely to expand the core team in their home country where they don't have a language barrier or other issues.

I only know the name Netease as one of the formerly top sponsors for Blender...so this is what they do.

Well they publish/develop mostly free-to-play titles, mobile games. However, they have some popular titles like Once Human, Diablo Immortal or Naraka Bladepoint. Besides they developed some mobile ports of popular games like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. However, other than that, you missed nothing.

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I missed Playnite on Linux too. It looks better than all the other clients, integrates with a lot more stores, including even Itch.io, and the metadata feature is also nice to have. Currently, I use Heroic or the official clients directly (e.g. PrismLauncher via KRunner), but I don't use my computer as an HTPC, where controller input and easy setup are important. I think this is where Playnite would be a perfect as a universal launcher for all games, an idea I gave up before.

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Quoting: megaReally wish they'd just make a deb repository already so I don't have to manually update with the .deb method every other day. It seems like people ask for it all the time but they never respond to it for some reason.

That why I switched to the Flatpak version. The maintainers get a notification [External Link] for new releases and publish them very quick after it. As users, we can use Discover (KDE), flatpak update or similar without any other manual steps.

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