Not really my style of game, but I love "the world's 2nd best adventurer, Ohio Jack."
Still better than being the world's third best, Kansas Smith, and certainly better than the world's ninth best, Maryland Johnson.

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Quoting: KimyrielleOther than Crusader Kings III, this was the Paradox title I was most looking forward to in the recent years. I am a sucker for Ancient Rome. It's one of history's most interesting settings, IMHO.

Shame to see it die. :(

Well . . . it's not like you couldn't buy and play it today. They've just stopped adding stuff faster than in most of their games.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Guestwow everyone here is an expert at games development and marketing!1!

So if I'm decoding the sarcasm correctly, what you're saying is we should all shut up because we're not technocrats. Our overlords the corporate executives know what's best for us, after all.

No answer?

Wut?

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Quoting: Guestwow everyone here is an expert at games development and marketing!1!

So if I'm decoding the sarcasm correctly, what you're saying is we should all shut up because we're not technocrats. Our overlords the corporate executives know what's best for us, after all.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: omer666

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: toorI feel now that my money should rather go to Valve than to them for sure.

They haven't been a part of Humble Bundle for years.

Rosen and Graham have been CEO and COO of Humble Bundle up until 2019, and are still in the company today as "advisors" after stepping down. Source [External Link]

I think the confusion is that Wolfire sold Humble Bundle to IGN in 2017, even though the CEO's of Wolfire stayed on the Humble board as advisors, while also being CEO of Wolfire. A bizarre arrangement.

Quoting: scaineThese aren't popular games, but they're solid games that used to get exposure. Now they don't. So the 30% cut by Valve, for these devs, is particularly insulting, because Valve is adding precisely no value. Indeed, many of these indies saw (for the first time, ever, over years) greater sales via Itch, than on Steam.

The algorithm is a real problem indeed, but it doesn't mean the cut is unfair. People these days want to get everything for free and they realise later on why it was so cheap. Steam does take 30% but they inject it back in functionality, infrastructure and (sometimes open source) development.
Epic spend most of their money into buying exclusives, which are AAA games. In the end both consumers and indie developers get screwed but no one seems to care.

I'm tired of arguing this on behalf of the various indies I follow on Twitter, but I'll say it one more time - these Indies used to (past tense) get great value from Valve, by way of large customer base and a tiny bit of exposure to engage that customer base. As of the 2018 change, that is no longer the case.

There's simply no point in justifying a 30% cut by promoting services that will never be used... because no-one knows these games exist, since the algorithm doesn't give any exposure. It used to be a tiny sliver. Now it's not even that.

Personally, I suspect that Valve realised that a non-curated store was a terrible mistake - it led to uninteresting, fringe and plain "bad" titles being surfaced on its front page. Therefore this is simply a way to push those titles to the bottom of pile without actually taking the bad press that shutting them out would generate.

Just a shame it pole-axed the indies at the same time.

Andyou still speak in past terms, still referencing the 2018 stuff.

And now you talk abot the non-curated store that led to "uninteresting, fringe and plain "bad" titles being surfaced on its front page" - what? How many of those unsatisfied devs are actually the ones that people complain about?

What's your point. What are you asking me? I'll do my best to answer on behalf of the devs I'm now apparently defending.

You continue bringing up the 2018 incident and not what happened after. That seems disingenous.

What happened after? You mean the Covid-19 pandemic? Lots of things happened after, are any of them relevant?
Some "things that happened after" may even have been changes to the Steam store, but all in a sort of edge-tinkering sort of way as far as I can tell. I haven't seen any plausible argument or evidence that they would have nearly as big an impact as many people's documented experience of the algorithm change's impact.

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Hrm. My feelings on this are complicated.
1. I kind of like Valve. They're not as evil as most companies their size and for reasons of their own they do nice things for Linux.
2. I kind of hate Epic, who certainly have a hand in this lawsuit. Their "competition", as some have pointed out, is really just a strategy of operating at a loss to force competitors to also operate at a loss, so they can use their (and their sponsors') deep pockets to outlast the competition, drive them out of business, and thereby get a monopoly of their own, at which point they will jack up their cut. Anyone who thinks they won't jack up their cut the moment they have marginalized the competition, is naive. Luckily, I think they will fail.
3. The lawsuit is unlikely to succeed, very likely has little merit in US law, and is largely a sort of publicity stunt, an attempt to blacken Valve's name in the media.

However.

1. Valve is in fact a monopolist, and if the world had a level of antitrust protection ideal for fostering a competitive capitalist economy, they would be cut down to size (along with a bunch of others like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon et cetera). They didn't become a monopolist by being bad people (like, say, Microsoft did), they aren't even as nasty as most of their competitors (except Itch, who are sweethearts), but the fact remains--they dominate the space, their network effects and actions create barriers to entry, and this kind of thing causes problems for capitalist economies.
(1a. Not that I care in a sense, since I'm not a fan of capitalism anyway)
2. That thing Scaine is talking about with the algorithm, that's terrible, and very real, and everyone trying to persuade themselves the algorithm can't possibly be important is brandishing some major league denial. The basic facts Scaine pointed out make it utterly clear: If only one major, sudden change happens and immediately afterwards your sales get divided by ten, the causation is pretty obvious. It's about at the level of, someone hits you upside the head with a baseball bat and afterwards you have a headache. All the counterarguments seem to be less arguments as such than sort of instinctive rebellion against the idea that the world could work in a way they think it shouldn't.
So, to be clear: Stuff about gradual changes over years in the gaming world that could affect indie profits does not explain sales dropping by a factor of ten in a day. Stuff about "Oh, they must be lousy games because good games will magically get found" is not even relevant to sales dropping by a factor of ten in a day. Stuff about some good indie games occasionally still breaking through does not explain sales dropping by a factor of ten in a day.
(2a. A fair amount of the objection to the idea of the Steam algorithm having a very large impact on sales seems to be based on the idea that fair competition is some kind of law of nature, and so it's just inevitably the case that good quality games will sell well. It's like if anything seems to be unfair enough that it could make good quality things fail in the magical marketplace, that must somehow be an illusion. This is nonsense, and gives me vibes of "all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds".)
(2b. The relationship between quality, marketing, sales, and even sales potential is complicated, and sheer dumb luck also looms large in the equation. For example, something can be very good and yet have a very small potential audience--there are niches not many people are into, and if you do an excellent job filling that niche, it's a very good game even if it has low sales potential)
3. It's unclear whether 30% is too much, but frankly it probably is. And the idea that it must be OK because that's what Apple charges makes me laugh maniacally.

To sum up: Valve is a decent company, and Epic is crap, and this lawsuit is going nowhere and is probably bogus publicity bait, but Valve is a monopolist, the game economy would be healthier without a player that could warp the conditions of the whole market, Valve should really do something to the algorithm so it stops hosing indies, and 30%, despite a lot of uncertainties, seems a tad high.

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Sounds lovely . . . 70 gigs? 70 GIGS?!

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Starvation for example was extended

Another of those sentences one never expected to meet. :grin:

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Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: poiuzThe whining about GOG is really bugging me. If you're happy with your DRM gods & Proton then good for you. Just stop the constant complaining about GOG. That's not "ignoring GOG".

Sorry dude, It's popular to hate on stores that aren't Steam here, with the exception of Itch.io, mostly because no one considers it a "real store".

Something, I do find interesting, although a bit tangential to this topic is what we as a community are willing to sacrifice for our comfort or easiness, myself included.

I saw a few posts above lamenting how it's not easy to play a Linux game from GOG and how antiquated the concept of downloading the game off the website is. Yet, we spend a lot of effort adding PPAs, learning the CLI (talk about something actually from before 1998), ldd, protontricks, winecfg, mesa, kernel stuff, tinkering, hacking, sometimes just to get mostly functional desktops.

I wonder how many of us really want to "play on Linux" (sorry for the pun)? The more I think of it, the more I wonder if I really do. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and I like Tinkering with it in ways that I could never do with windows or Mac. I'll never go back! And haven't in over a decade.

But when I want to play a game, I find it really frustrating when I'm missing a library that I have to hunt down or a new kernel doesn't play nice with my graphics drivers or have to tweak wine/proton with my limited game time. It's like I'm frustrated because I'm reminded I'm on Linux with it's flaws and complexities. I just wanted the game to work without problems and relax!

Maybe for us the problem isn't GOG's Linux support. Maybe the problem is more that GOG reminds us we're still on Linux when we'd rather not be reminded of such.

Perhaps that's part of the allure of Steam. It's makes effort to make the Linux-ness of the system not apparent. With proton in the background, many things just work, like on Windows or Mac.

I find this an interesting contradiction and by looking at the comments, I think it's one many of us, myself included, are comfortable with having.

An interesting rumination. In my personal case, I didn't start using Linux to tinker. I'd prefer never to have to. It was partly because I like the concept of Free Software, and partly because Windows was annoying (and still is, although in somewhat different ways). Although I suppose the ability to tinker was part of the appeal--I find that often if something is wrong with Windows it's because that's how Microsoft wants it and there's nothing I can do about it, whereas if something is wrong with Linux it is actually possible to do some tinkering and fix it.
Example: I just recently set up a cheapo little box to hook up to the TV; we decided to stop paying for cable and my wife would just basically "watch the internet". There was a little wifi antenna thingie we were attaching to the cheap box and I wasn't totally sure about Linux drivers so I thought, eh, Windows is already on it, all I'm going to run is a browser, maybe I won't bother ripping it out and putting Linux. And yet with just that--doing literally nothing except run Firefox--Windows still manages to be annoying, always nagging about how you should be using their browser instead of Firefox or you should be handing over more of your data or whatever. My wife isn't very computer literate, so she's always calling me over to ask what the ominous messages mean, and they always just mean Microsoft are being tools. Drives me nuts! I'm totally going to rip Windows out and put in Mint because Mint doesn't jerk me around.

So the bottom line is, I run Linux because it doesn't mess with me. I don't run it with the aim of fiddling with it; I'm quite happy for my whole experience with Linux to work without problems and let me relax! So that's quite consistent with liking to use Steam.

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Quoting: Anza

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI only have one question in all this--why does growing plants on an island stop it from sinking?

Maybe it's some kind of metaphor for global warming. If planet doesn't warm up, water levels don't rise.

Well, yeah. It's just . . . yes, putting vegetation back is a good idea, would be a carbon sink and so on. And yes, if the planet doesn't warm up, water levels don't rise. But, like, greenery is just a small piece of the puzzle, and putting grass back on a few islands is surely just a small piece of the greenery puzzle, and I don't see how it could possibly work on a one island at a time basis where if you re-green one island, that one island doesn't sink, which seems to be what's implied here . . . oh, hang on, from the article

and some unhappy gods

Never mind.

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