I know - people love to bash Paradox for their numerous DLC packs they release for all their games.

I love them (among things) for just that. No good old game is ever dead. They update and improve them for years. Yes, it costs money, but so does making these improvements. Can't have the cake and eat it.

I was hoping for Paradox to start making DLC packs for this gem of a game when they took over. Yes, I am going to buy this one!

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Let's not kid ourselves: It's a fairly massive price hike in disguise. As a current subscriber, I appreciate getting grand-fathered in the new program, but for newcomers, it might be the end of the line where it still might be considered a good deal, at least if you're constantly pausing months you feel aren't worth it (I never did, I am too lazy, so I just let it run and gave away games I don't need to family and friends)

The old program was a great deal, and I think it still will be a good deal. But one has to wonder if game subscriptions like this one will become the new Netflix. Which also used to be a great deal, before numerous price hikes combined with an ever shrinking library turned it into just another cable channel.

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I would be absolutely thrilled if the new game would be CK III. I love the setting, I love the dynastic gameplay and relative importance of individual characters, compared to other grand strategy titles.

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That's a welcome surprise. I've bought the game back then, but never finished it. Maybe now it's the time to! :)

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Quoting: SkipperroIf you want to have a game, that have hundreds of enemies (or players) at once in one place and simultaneously offers photo-realistic graphic, you won't be able to do it on a single CPU. Forget it. Your only option is a server cluster running massively multi-threaded API like Vulkan, using branch predictions (calculating possible frames before user input) and other advanced techy-stuff.

That's a truly good point! For some games, even modern day computing power won't be enough, and I guess the only way that kind of game can be realized is by it running in a cloud. Microsoft's Flight Simulator is a good example of that already happening.

My counterpoint to that would be that there is no reason for EVERY game to be cloud hosted. While a photo-realistic flight simulator has to be, Stardew Valley profits exactly not at all from being remotely hosted. Cloud hosted gaming isn't exactly a new thing anyway. My favorite genre is MMORPGs, and these have been remotely hosted even back in the days when they didn't re-brand the thing we used to call a cluster-server to "cloud". I think you're totally right that we're going to see more and more cloud-based games actually making USE of the cloud other than just being a DRM scheme. But while games like MS Flight might do that, streaming these games in their entirety is not a necessity, still. Personally I foresee more a future that will use the cloud for performance-heavy operations and let the local client process what makes sense to do there, which is probably the best of both worlds. That's what MS Flight is doing, after all.

Time will tell, I guess.

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Quoting: Skipperro

Quoting: Liam DaweStill, not entirely sure who their market is exactly...

As someone who works in the company selling Gaming-PCs I can tell you, because I've done research about possible Stadia impact on our sales.
If you are interested, I can share the details with you, but to get the picture - if you look at the Stadia not as as a service on your PC, but as a hardware replacement, it's a great deal.

There is no PC, that would play all the games they will have in 4K for 10$ a month (360$ given average PC lifespan of 3 years). Even if I calculated all the extra costs like extra money per month for faster Internet and ignored price for electricity, it's still, from economic point of view, in the best-case scenario - the same. If you want to have a PC for the Internet browsing and games, you will spend less money buying cheap, entry level PC and Stadia subscription than a 4K capable machine.

And if you only want to play in FullHD - I cannot even compare the prices, because local PC will always cost something and Stadia is free so... divide by zero exception!

I say it over and over again in every Stadia discussion - look at it from the perspective of someone who wants to buy a new Gaming PC, because it's meant to replace hardware and compete with local, mainstream gaming rigs. From this perspective, their market seems pretty big to me.

I dunno. At the same time, people willing to spend big bucks on gaming PCs are also the ones who optimize everything to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their rigs and who throw a tantrum when their ISP has a hiccup night, giving them an extra 2ms of lag. Why would these people want a service that's -guaranteed- to perform worse than their Alienware PC?
Likewise, casual players tend to not care about 4K and a few extra FX effects on their games. There are by far the the biggest slice of the market, and they happily play games on low-end machines that don't break the bank enough to warrant signing up to a streaming service ON TOP of owning a PC to run Office on etc.
On top of that, Moore's Law is (mostly) dead, and PCs last much, much longer than they used to. When in the 1990s you had to replace a PC every other year to continue playing recent games, you can now keep a gaming PC for 4 to 6 years and STILL play the newest games with (most) effects enabled. Which cuts the annual cost of owning a gaming PC down but a fair margin.

I suppose you guys put a lot more thought into this than me, but to me, game streaming still seems to be an equal opportunity offender without any clear target audience.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Kimyrielle*snip*

I'm sure I've seen you post something like this before, more than once...

I guess I might have? It just seems to get worse by the day, so this release reminded me of the less-than-awesome state of big-box native titles. Sorry if I have annoyed you (and judging by you pointing it out, I assume that I have). I will just shut up, I guess? In my defence, if people are discouraged from making the same point more than exactly once, I guess we need to stop discussing Proton and WINE in general, and several other Linux gaming topics too, as people tend to make the same pro and con points over and over there as well?

Feral, Aspyr and VP were pretty much the only ones doing AAA for us anyway. They all slowed down for one reason or another. VP do...well nothing? Aspyr do hardly anything either except update Civ and Borderlands 2/TPS (although Linux is STILL waiting on that) and Feral branched out to mobile and Switch as well.

Edit: Actually Aspyr also branched out to Switch now too.

I remember Aspyr announcing to move towards publishing original games a year back or two. I guess they still do Civ VI DLC ports because of their existing contract for that game, but I haven't seen them doing anything else substantial since back then, yes.
VP I remember getting burnt by users for that less-than-ideal Witcher II port they did using their translation layer. Not sure if that was enough to discourage them, but yes, I haven't seen much from them lately, either. Feral is the last porting house still doing ports for 3rd party publishers AFAIK, and their annual output is a fraction of what it once was. I am not privy to their numbers of course, but I can only guess that mobile and Switch games are more profitable than porting games to Linux a year after they appear for Windows...

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Is it just me, or is this November release actually the first Top 10 AAA title of the year getting a Linux port? oO

(and yes, I know that technically it's LAST year's Top 10 title, even. :S)

I really welcome this release and don't want to be a Negative Nancy, but at the same time I am a bit sad that native Linux ports of AAA games seem to be sort of dead. And if we're still getting any at all, they so old that you could almost call them retro-games. I honestly don't know if a lot of people are willing to wait THAT long to buy the game from Feral. I freely admit that I bought this game last year when it was new, same as with its predecessor. I am willing to wait a few weeks or even a couple months for a native game, but a year is just way over top for me.

Honestly, I catch myself more and more buying Windows games again (which I had completely stopped doing during the 2-3 golden years of Linux gaming we've had a while back), and play them with Proton, which - let's be open for a second - seems to become the go-to solution for Linux gaming, if we like it or not.

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Quoting: mahThis project really legal?
I seems, they can't clear copyright problems.

They didn't say in their announcement, but I can't imagine that it's technically legal, at least I can't remotely begin to imagine the manpower and time needed to track down and contact hundreds of copyright holders to get the necessary permission. And even if it's abadonware, you still cannot make it available in such way without permission. Copyright law is really clear about that you cannot do ANYHING with a protected work, unless with explicit permission or when the law explicitly allows it.

OTOH, I can't see anybody suing them over it, either. These games have no commercial value anymore.

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I am pretty sure I will get this. Sounds fun and different!

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