Loot boxes is a business model that needs to be banned, period. It's every bit as bad as gambling in a casino, except the casino is required to play fair by telling you your win chances and minors can't enter.

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Quoting: BeamboomGood!
The better curated and administrated the marketplace is, the better it will be for us customers.

It needs to be a good balance. I normally really like Steam's hands-off approach to the store, but humans always will find ways to abuse their freedoms, so in this case, Valve stepping in was a good thing. I can do without Steam adopting Apple-style "WE dictate what you can buy, sell and see on our store." methods, though.

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To be honest, I find asking Linux users if they want to have games available for Linux...a bit silly? What's the point of this question? They know (or at least should know) their target audience. Our market share is well-known and tiny, but they can safely assume that roughly the same percentage of Linux users will like their game as Windows users. If they'd be happy to sell to us under these conditions, just port the thing! If not, don't. It's really that simple.

For the record, this looks like a game I would almost certainly buy, but I am also not going to beg anyone to do business with me. While we -are- a niche platform, there are enough games to play to last a lifetime or two. The times when we had to beg are over!

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Exciting, indeed! Can't wait to get my hands on it! Godot is already a masterpiece, given the limited resources that went into making it (compared to the heavyweight engines, at least), and it will become so much better with Vulkan support.

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Quoting: EikeSo we can declare Game Over on native Linux gaming besides "retro-inspired"?

While its also my impression that native ports of AAA games are on life support, it sounds a bit worse than it is. Outsides of a very brief period of time when Feral and Aspyr were pampering us with multiple AAA ports a year, big-box games have NEVER really been a thing on Linux. Linux gaming has always mostly been about Indie games and the odd mid-range publisher that chose to support us, such as Paradox. Which is why Steam Play is so important for us to have - it finally gives us access to a vast library of big-budget games we never really had before.

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Not sure about this one. It's not that the WW2 setting hasn't be used enough to make me wonder if the world -really- needs more WW2 games, or so. How about something fresh, for a change? It's not that human history isn't full of wars that could be used as a setting, or so.
In addition, Hearts of Iron IV pretty much owns that genre, and I fail to see how any game could do WW2 grand strategy better.

I guess I am going to pass on this one.

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Other than native Linux ports seem to be dead (I can remember times when a lot more top sellers had ports), the thing that surprised me is that I have never heard of most of these top selling games before...

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Great to see Epic doing -something- not totally evil, for a change.

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Quoting: dubigrasuI think the future gaming will be predominantly like this, and local stored games will be a thing of the past.
I think we're dinosaurs and we don't know it yet.

Well, that's more or less my point. There doesn't seem to be a compelling use-case for game streaming, so the question remains, why would it succeed? Literally everyone goes "It will replace traditional gaming!", yet nobody could ever explain to me why people would even prefer it over locally installed games. It's pretty much like a few years back a lot of people went "VR will take over gaming!!!", which made me giggle in a similar way, because I failed to understand why it would become anything but the niche product it actually became.

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I do understand streaming music and videos. I don't understand streaming games. In contrast to music and movies, people generally play only a very small selection of games at the same time, so having access to a huge library has not a lot of appeal in the case of games.
Also, hardcore gamers don't care about spending money for a good machine, while they DO care about any sort of FPS drops or ping lag, either of which is unavoidable when streaming. On the other hand, casual gamers don't need to stream either, because their office PC or standard gaming console can run their handful of no-so performance hungry games well enough, and doing so is considerably cheaper in the long run than paying a Stadia sub.

I don't get it, I just don't. It's a bigger hype than Star Citizen, but call me unconvinced that it will succeed.

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