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Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) sees a first major release, Linux support in preview
2 Dec 2021 at 9:37 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: BlooAlienI got nothin' against this existing, if for no other reason than having one more choice available in the cross-platform game engine space. Still gonna use Godot myself, but happy there's another option out there, even if it's not the right choice for me. Looking forward to Godot 4.
Lotta people looking forward to Godot 4, near as I can tell.

Steam Next Fest gave developers a '500%' increase in converting wishlists to sales
2 Dec 2021 at 7:02 pm UTC

Quoting: PhiladelphusWow, having demos available increases sales?!? Who'd've thunkit?? :tongue:

I've definitely bought a few games after trying their demos at previous Next Fests (Webbed and Per Aspera, off the top of my head, and I'm waiting for Terraformers to release).
Oh, Terraformers had a Next Fest demo? What's it like?

November marked 7 months of Linux rising on Steam & 5 months above 1%
2 Dec 2021 at 5:37 pm UTC Likes: 1

Well, let's not lose hope. Last month I commented that if the rate of increase continued at a compounding rate, the exponential growth would lead us to world domination in ~9 years or something.
And today I'd like to note that if the rate of increase we saw over the last 9 months were to continue arithmetically, adding that same amount reliably every 9 months on average, we'd be at nearly 50% in only 100 years! :woot:

Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games appears popular with over 100K downloads
2 Dec 2021 at 5:33 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: fagnerlnI don't like epic and don't have an account on it, even with a lot of impressive games for free.

But I find fantastic that they at least "allow" third party apps, I mean, even Steam having a native app, it suck so much that I would use any alternative. Would be nice stores to Origin and UPlay too
Uhhh . . . does Valve do anything that would make a thing like Heroic impossible? I thought it's just nobody bothered because Steam is right there and mimicking the features would be a ridiculously big job.

GOG to go through some reorganization after suffering losses
2 Dec 2021 at 5:24 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: kuhpunktIt's not a technicality. There is a 30%/70% cut for everybody. If they had reduced the fees for big publishers like you say, they would have a 20%/80% cut as a default. That is not the case. How can you claim that they reduced the fees when they didn't?
Oh come on. If for a given group, their games get deal X 99% of the time, and 99% of the games getting deal X belong to that group, who was deal X made for?
Sure, this way it's future proofed for if someone else comes along and joins the group. And the deal has significantly better optics than "Companies A, B, C and D pay 20% and everyone else pays 30%". But the point of the policy was to appease the big publishers, not to give a bonus to indies with a flash in the pan.

November marked 7 months of Linux rising on Steam & 5 months above 1%
2 Dec 2021 at 5:09 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: elmapul370 million dollars may sound like a lot, but its not, the cost of production of an modern game can go easy to something like 200~250 millions, and those companies dont make games for margins of profit lower than 20%.
not to mention that the money dont belong to a single person who might be an good person that believes in linux/free software and want to see it suceeed, it belong to a bunch of stake holders so its very unlikely we can convince all of the parties involved to support us.
For big budget games, around half the cost goes on marketing (so platform doesn't matter). The biggest chunk of the remainder goes on asset creation - models, textures, motion capture, voice recording, scripts, and so on (where platform doesn't matter). The next biggest chunk goes on the game engine, with particular emphasis on the rendering loop since it's so critical to performance. Platform doesn't inherently matter here, but some platforms have poor support for some rendering APIs. The part where it really matters which platform you're on - your compile target, how you handle files, how you handle input - is a really tiny part of it. If you're not using a platform-specific engine, then adding another platform is cheap.

What isn't cheap, and what scares people away from new platforms (other than simply being bribed for exclusivity), is testing and support costs. It needs to be clear that those costs are going to be significantly lower than the additional revenue that they'll get from the new platform, and that they couldn't make as much extra money by doing something else (like adding new languages).
This is why it was such a huge win back in the day when engines like Unity added Linux support.
Not that the AAA are going to be using Unity, but in the lower tiers I wouldn't be surprised if we owe a lot of Linux native games to that.

GOG to go through some reorganization after suffering losses
1 Dec 2021 at 10:00 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: GuestWell, I hope everyone here is aware that the problems GOG has have absolutely zero to do with the (non)existence of a Linux client. The percentage of Linux users there is unlikely much different from the Steam one, and a 1% unhappy customers won't cause such a loss....
True enough. I think people are just sort of saying "I know I ought to be upset about the no-DRM store having problems, but this is why, from a Linux perspective, I don't much care."

Collabora announced Venus, 3D accelerated Vulkan in QEMU
1 Dec 2021 at 7:23 pm UTC

Quoting: JuliusClearly aimed at ARM based Chrome-books. Not much to see here from a "normal" GNU/Linux gaming perspective.
Well, and Raspberry Pi-ish things, no?
But still, yeah, right now that's true. I do get the feeling that ARM things are going to gradually creep into the main stream, higher powered stuff. So in the future, who knows?

PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 shows off big game fixes
1 Dec 2021 at 5:49 pm UTC Likes: 8

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis won't happen.
But, wouldn't it be cool if this were installed on the Steam Deck by default, Valve could get some of the developers of these games to put them up for sale on Steam (just ones that work pretty well), and the games kind-of-automatically used this the way Windows games use Proton, or at least it could be picked as an option like Boxtron? Maybe with a game-view option that would let you look through just PS3 games if you wanted?
Yeah, that would be cool. And you have to kind of think that Valve do have this idea at the back of their minds, since the "Force Compatibility Tool" lets you choose various options, such as Luxtorpeda. It would be great to see the older Uncharted games just sold normally, but behind the scenes, they're calling an RPCS3 back-end engine.

I suppose their biggest hurdle might be making this feasible on Windows. Or, as you suggest, making it a Steam Deck exclusive, which they are dead-set against.
Ehhh . . . it wouldn't be a Steam Deck exclusive. It's just, if you wanted to make things work in Windows, you'd have to do a bit more fiddling around than in Linux. You know, just because Linux is more user friendly. :grin:

PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 shows off big game fixes
1 Dec 2021 at 5:10 pm UTC Likes: 4

This won't happen.
But, wouldn't it be cool if this were installed on the Steam Deck by default, Valve could get some of the developers of these games to put them up for sale on Steam (just ones that work pretty well), and the games kind-of-automatically used this the way Windows games use Proton, or at least it could be picked as an option like Boxtron? Maybe with a game-view option that would let you look through just PS3 games if you wanted?