Patreon Logo Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal Logo PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
Latest Comments by elmapul
Wolfire versus Valve antitrust lawsuit gets dismissed
20 Nov 2021 at 10:27 pm UTC

Quoting: TheSHEEEP
Quoting: CatKillerDevelopers aren't paying for anything, customers are.
That's semantics, really.
I'd say customers give 100% of the money to the developers, which have to forward 30% of it to Valve. Or customers give 100% to Valve, which withhold 30% from the developer - that's probably more correct.
Either way, developers lose 30% of what the customers were paying for their game. The developers are the ones losing more money in that scenario than they should.
Keep in mind that taxes go on top of that, in the EU that's about 20% gone additionally (unless you add 20% to the price in VAT countries, which I don't think anyone really does).
So from the get-go you lose 50% of value. Ouch. I'd be pissed about that, too.

Did Valve develop or market that game? No. They host its data and provide some (good) service around it - which is fair to compensate, of course, but 1/3rd is excessive. 1/4th or 5th would be much more reasonable, you don't have to do the lowballing that Epic does to just cover the expenses (of the hosting/service).
companies pay 20% of taxes, but they pay 20% on top of their income, not on top of the gross revenue.
in other words, if consummers pay valve 1 million for your game, you earn 700.000 from those 1 million, and pay 20% from those 700.000 as taxes, not 20% from the original 1 million.
valve has to pay their taxes too, but you wont see your money disapearing twice for that reason.

another thing to consider is game engine taxes, for instance, if you make your game using unreal, in that scenario, you also pay another 5% to epic, unless you relased your game in EGS, in that case they cut the engine royalites to 0, and their own royalites is 12%.

keep in mind that you pay 5% of gross revenue, in other words, from those 1 million that valve earned!
or at least, that is what i understood the last time i checked (but i might be confounding it with unity)

Wolfire versus Valve antitrust lawsuit gets dismissed
20 Nov 2021 at 9:50 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: jrtI don't think there is anything wrong with taking 30%. They don't have a monopoly, so they can set the prices and if you don't like them you can still use gog, itch or your own launcher. Ubisoft, League of Legends, Overwatch, Fortnite,... seem all to do fine without steam.
Also, as a Linux user, I don't buy games that do not run on my system. Windows only games that run through proton are therefore sales that wouldn't have happened without Valve's work. Keeping 70% vs. no sale at all sounds like a good deal to me.
that is non sense.
linux has 1% of marketshare.
valve takes 30% of all the sames on a platform with 90% of marketshare.
if you earn 900.000 dollars with an game and valve takes 30%, you end up with 630.000 dollars.
then you sell more 1% wich give you aditionally 9.000 dolars, and out of those valve take 30% and you end up with 6300 extra dolars thanks to valve making your game avaliable for linux.

you dont have to be a genious to realize that if valve changed their cut to 20% instead, you would end up with 90.000 more instead of 6300.

now, i know that some indie games were ported to linux in the 5 first humble bundles and 20% of their income came from linux users, but back then, there were almost no games avaliable for linux, so the lack of competition was the main reason for those extra sales, nowadays that there are plenty of games for linux, linux is just 1~4% of the sales of an game, and with proton, pretty much the entire library works on it, so its just 1% more.
so the only big thing that valve is doing to make an difference is steamdeck, that might be a game changer for sales, or not.

now, dont get me wrong, i apreciate what valve is doing for us, but the same can be said about any company, as much as i despise microsoft for being an monopoly on pc, if they werent arround maybe all the big games would be console exclusives nowadays, and consoles would be even worse than they are without an xbox competing on it.

KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system
20 Nov 2021 at 9:01 pm UTC Likes: 2

that is what happens when this type of bug get some exposure...
i mean, 1 million of users reporting a bug? nah that is not important.
one big influencer reporting it? oh, shit! we need to do something about it!

ok, to be fair, there arent 1 million of bugs reports on the linus incident because many people got stuck without an gui and cant use their computer anymore to report the freaking bug.
:whistle:

before someone say something like "this is a different bug" i'm talking about this class of bugs, system breaking bugs.
and yes, uninstalling an system essential feature because you dont know what you are doing is an bug, or at least an ux design flaw.

KDE developer thinks they will become the 'Windows or Android' of the FOSS world
15 Nov 2021 at 10:23 pm UTC

if steam deck sell well and many people dont install windows and use the desktop mode...
then it can be a game changer indeed, and KDE is the default on it, so it might work.

Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now
15 Nov 2021 at 8:26 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: whizse
Quoting: elmapulthat is a good metric because i see the numbers a lot of times to see if they changed.
the number of bugs being closed isnt changing too fast, unlike the number of new bugs being reported.
sure, people can open a bug report to report that something is working fine, but even if we filter out those (white list request) there are still too many bugs.

and if there are many duplicate reports, then the tag duplicate would be full of entries, unless no one is looking at this.
No, it's not even a good metric for this, since Valve uses one bug report for each game. One game can have zero issues, or a hundred.
fair enough, i'm making an script to meassure this.

version 0.9 of the script is done:
https://github.com/Elmapul/proton-good-metric [External Link]
i recomend reading the commit notes to better understand what it is:
https://github.com/Elmapul/proton-good-metric/commits/main [External Link]

sorry for the sarcastic name =p

Ryan Gordon gets an Epic MegaGrant to further improve SDL, helping with next-gen APIs
14 Nov 2021 at 7:04 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slembckeIt's frustrating that Khronos doesn't just make a swapchain + init library.
but i think there is a boilerplate code for it =p
not made by khrnos, i think it was lunarG or something like that.

Quoting: slembckeBah! Unfortunately I'm not sure I have anything truly constructive to say here.
lol, amusing, i know that feel, when i'm trying to write my stories.

Ryan Gordon gets an Epic MegaGrant to further improve SDL, helping with next-gen APIs
14 Nov 2021 at 3:27 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: elmapul"This sounds like a really great project, and hopefully one game developers will appreciate."
one or some?
one developers?
No, the grammar's OK. "One" here refers back to the most recent noun, "project", so the meaning is "and hopefully (a project) game developers will appreciate"
dammit, it would be so much easier to figure out if it was in my native lang...

Here's some of what we've learned about the Steam Deck
13 Nov 2021 at 11:44 pm UTC

Quoting: peta77
Quoting: elmapul"- SteamOS will have a read-only immutable main filesystem by default. Updates will be distributed as a whole image and so it will replace it. There will also be a developer mode to let you modify the filesystem."

that is the part i dont get...
how they plan to allow people to install stuff then?
i mean, either you will have to rely on stuff that dont mess with the filesystem (eg: flatpaks, app images) stuff that dont install, update or remove dependences.
or you have to use developer mode to install anything that is not on steam.
well, if you compare it to a real linux desktop it's definitely not understable... but in the end this is a mobile console, so valve wants to make sure the environment is in a state devs can rely upon, so they can be sure that what was tested in their lab behaves the same way for the users... just like playstation and others...
i also want to install additional stuff to use it partially as a small laptop, but i'm fine with appimage (don't like flatpak) as long as they keep their system updated in a reasonable cycle with most recent security fixes, etc.
hopefully there will be more projects releasing appimage version so one can directly use that on the steam deck... but i'd rather prefer having some community repository/-ies (like packman) included in steamos or be able to add that to the system... would make it much more usable and easier to use...
i can understand the point, its just that i dont remember installing something on windows and breaking some unrelated stuff.

the aproach of duplicate libraries for each program was seen as an issue on the linux comunity, but at least it never had the issue of some other program demanding to update the library, then breaking an software that had nothing to do with it.

as for app images, flatpaks etc, they all have some issues integrating with my system.
eg: libre office bibliography database may be a niche feature, but holy shit, this thing dont even works here! is there any one testing this thing?

i have 2 versions of retro arch and vlc installed due to an bug that i dont remember what it was nor know if its fixed already, and every time i open vlc i dont know if im using the correct version or the version who will cause me problem someday.
(i think one feature was only working on the flatpak other in the snap or something like that)

not to mention that if the user customize something like the theme, some of those formats will ignore any customization...

sandboxing is good for security and ensuring that stuff will not break on updates, sometimes the native .deb /.rpm/etc is the best version currently avaliable for the program.

Here's some of what we've learned about the Steam Deck
13 Nov 2021 at 11:35 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: soulsourceand the Gentoo team keeps releasing new levels for it. :grin:)
LOL

Here's some of what we've learned about the Steam Deck
13 Nov 2021 at 9:22 pm UTC

"- SteamOS will have a read-only immutable main filesystem by default. Updates will be distributed as a whole image and so it will replace it. There will also be a developer mode to let you modify the filesystem."

that is the part i dont get...
how they plan to allow people to install stuff then?
i mean, either you will have to rely on stuff that dont mess with the filesystem (eg: flatpaks, app images) stuff that dont install, update or remove dependences.
or you have to use developer mode to install anything that is not on steam.