Quoting: dannielloNetflix in browser means that quality of picture will not be good - 720p max. Officially only Microsoft browsers are allowed to play in 1080p/4K quality. There is external addon to enable 1080p in Firefox, but from legal point of view it is "hack" so definitely it cannot be integrated in commercial product like Atari VCS.

Really?! Son of a bitch. And our legal system just lets that be the case.

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I'm not too surprised Epic's store hasn't taken much of a bite. In another conversation around here, I was motivated to go try to find out just how much share Epic was taking. I found a recent article citing how much Epic said sales on their store had been, and it was one of those numbers that sounds fairly big until you realize the size of the broader context (in this case, the size of the total PC game market), at which point you realize it's actually very small. Also notable was that sales of non-Epic games accounted for like a third of total store sales, so like the big-sounding number was mostly Fortnite.
I don't think they've taken much of a bite out of GoG, let alone Steam.

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Quoting: einherjar

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: einherjarIsn't that bizarre?
If they do something bad -> They get hated
If they do something god -> They get hated

I'd find the opposite bizarre. You can't switch between love and hate every other day. You take into account what someone is doing and judge based on that. Of course, this judgement may change over time, but it shouldn't completely switch sides with every new action.

I do not hate and I do not love them. But I judge things they do. And even when a person/company I dislike, does something good, it is not automatically turning into something bad.
To sad that the world is not only black and white, eh?

You are missing the point and your insinuation is unwarranted. If someone has proved a few times that their motives are suspect, then it is not unreasonable to interrogate their motives if they do something that does not seems consistent with your assessment of their motives and personality.
Look, I've been on a union negotiating team at contract time. And I will tell you, that while sure, sometimes a management negotiator who was perfidious before may turn over a new leaf and decide to believe in win-win, if they told you they were making you a great offer, and someone on your team was willing to just assume that was true, you would not call your fellow negotiator "Someone who sees that the world is not only black and white", you would call them "an idiot".

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This discussion is reminding me that I never finished playing Nightside, even though I was quite enjoying it.

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Quoting: docofkultI have been contemplating doing a retro build for some time specifically for playing the Loki games. However, besides some dabbeling with Red Hat around the turn of the century, most of my Linux knowledge have been gained after Ubuntu came around. My initial idea is to do a close to contempary build with a contemporary OS as to not have to fight issues like described in the article. Hardware will likely be Pentium III and a 3dfx graphics card. Not too sure about which sound cards actually had good support at the time. I would appreciate any suggestions as to which OS to go with and any sound card recommendations.

My personal opinion, if you're going to do an old school Linux, go with Mandrake/Mandriva. They were the king of user friendly before Ubuntu came along. They were I believe the first to do for Red Hat's rpms what apt does for debs. And for someone whose early experience was Red Hat, well, Mandrake was based on Red Hat in somewhat the way Ubuntu is based on Debian.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPA game that is mostly finished, but just needs some more months in the oven for bugfixes, balancing and "polish", would be done right.
As would be a game like RimWorld or Rise To Ruins, where even the unfinished state is actually very polished and fun already and just grows from there.

These days, isn't that the point where most studios do the official release?

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OK, I don't know anything so this may be bogus, and anyway it's kind of shooting a mouse with an elephant gun, but . . . if worst came to worst, couldn't you run a VM and stick a whole old Linux in it and run the game in that?

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Quoting: vmGuys. Guys. Do you realize how much money is $250k? It's nothing. It's a fat 1 year salary. OK, for maybe 2 people. It's not development budget for a large, complex software. It's sandwiches and beer for a couple of bedroom coders.. to last them a while. One extra fat salary does not turn Godot into a production software, or any kind of competition to Unity or Unreal.

That is only so relevant, for two reasons.
1. Man-months are mythical.
2. Godot is open source.

On (1): Big projects at big companies do generally end up more impressive than little projects at little companies. But value for money clearly goes way down. If you look at a good indie game and a good AAA game, the latter has probably had 1000X as much money spent on it. Is it 1000X as good? Does it have 1000X as many hours in the campaign? Is the dialogue 1000X as clever? No. It has better polish, a few more features, better graphics, and richer art (sometimes the indie's art will be cooler, reflecting a singular artistic vision, but still generally . . . sparser); it will have cut-scenes with full animation and good voice acting. Gameplay will be around even, maybe even advantage: indie. So $250,000 given to a major corporation will allow them to add that one more project manager to organize the pre-meeting to plan the meeting to organize the retreat, while $250,000 given to an indie could result in major code.

On (2): Yeah. Look at the Linux ecosystem. Open source stuff gets way farther on less money, it just does. Especially if it's hit critical mass, which Godot really seems to be doing.

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Quoting: Nezchan

Quoting: dejaime

Quoting: marcusUh ... besides that being irrelevant in total since Tencent has a minority stake in Epic, you need to compare the same unit and the same accounting category to make any sense. Tencent had a net income of 79.984 billion CN¥, which is roughly 12 billion USD.

Ops, my bad. I'll fix my previous comment. The number is much less scary now, but still significantly bigger than Valve's.

I disagree that Tencent's being a minority stake makes it irrelevant. It does mean that Tencent has minority vote, and Sweeney is officially still the one making final decisions. But that doesn't mean Tencent does not have any interest in EGS succeeding, thus being irrelevant.

It's worth noting that while Tencent is a minority on paper, in practice that 40% (which gives them the right to nominate Directors to Epic's board) and the amount of money they bring to the table means they pretty much set the agenda at shareholder meetings. They're anything but irrelevant, and you can see their influences in the manipulative monetization practices that have been incorporated into Fortnite as time goes by. Make no mistake, they're in the driver's seat no matter what Sweeny tells people (and likely himself).

I don't disagree about that. 40% is almost always a controlling interest. But on the other hand, Tencent's size isn't quite as relevant as it seems--that's spread across a lot of things they have fingers in. They're not going to ignore all their other businesses and shareholders to dump all their profits down an Epic drain just to try to take down Steam.

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Hmmm . . . Seems like snazzier Shadowrun, but without magic.

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