The day they release Civ V on Linux was the day I stopped buying Windows games. I do still have a windows PC that the kids use sometimes but I have not used it since that day. And yet, this is the only game series that I really play continiously for the last few decades (god am I ever old!). My wife plays it... my kids play it... and now it might not come to linux. What a sad day. It will be a dramatic loss for me but I guess this will be the first Civ game that I will not be playing :( (I'm right now considering replacing my main board, so I can put a second GPU in to pass-thru to my Windows KVM (which is there since customers stubbornly require you to have Office and run obscure desktop sharing services :() - that's how far I would go to play this game!)

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Seeing people say things about their financial situation, well, I have news for you, you’re not entitled to anything. It’s a shame if you can’t afford it (and I feel for you!), but why should that entitle you to pay sometimes 90% less than the rest of us from a store that supports no one but itself?

Ohohoh... You do know that ethics are relative? I have two things to say about this statement:

1) How is it fair that companies divide up the globe into zones with different pricing and yet cry when we use means to circumvent this artificial division? Or to put it in your language: Why should living in a different part of the world entitle me to pay several times the money for the same product?

2) I did pirate games. Lots of them. That is now decades past. I could have never afforded a C64 and then buy the games for it, too - I was nine when I bought it and it consumed the money I had saved from previous birthdays and christmases. There was no way of me paying for the games, not even if I would have wanted to (with some rare exceptions for very special games like Civ, UFO, Laser Squad, Empire, etc.) - so I pirated them, played them and "stole" from the programmers since I used their code without giving them anything back. So here you come in, and tell me that I should not have played those games and waited a few years until I could have afforded them??? By then they would have been ancient, and there would have been no reason to buy them anymore -> no gain for the coders, and loss for me.

This is not a zero sum game - there are situations where both parties loose or at least no party gains. In my world I don't see how you could call this unethical, rather the way around: I would call companies that go after individual users without a financial perspective unethical. I also have a problem with companies that think that protecting their "intellectual property" is of higher importance than enabling their paying customers to enjoy their product (i.e. the ones with aggressive DRM). And by the way - I earn my money as a programmer. I release GPLed code, too. I contribute what I can - I run my systems on GNU Linux... and I don't pay the people that created that OS either without feeling bad about it.

To finish my story: Now that I make enough money to afford the games I would like to play, I buy them. Hundreds of them. More than I could ever play. Some of them just to support small companies or people whose games I enjoyed during the time when I did not have the money to buy them. I hardly ever pay full price - we're in a market economy after all, but I usually don't buy from the resellers (too shady). Having so many games lying around just means that I couldn't play most titles on release anyways (and mostly the linux version isn't available then) so there would not really be much of a point - I also do consider most games to be too expensive on release for the amount of time I will actually play them.

You could say my money also supports all those pirating freeloaders. Yes, that's right. But I can't object to somebody who could normally not afford playing a certain game from pirating it. They don't hurt me or the author. What I do object to is that there are people that do have the financial means but don't contribute their share, but that's hardly a problem specific to games and should not be solved by punishing paying customers (i.e. DRM).

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Quoting: sunbeam4please guys, stop giving us (linux users) a bad name, and put the hate aside.
even if you can't play it for the christmas holidays, the main thing is we get it down the line. everybody needs a break, and we're not lacking backlog.

If you delay something you promissed and took money for that and then take 1,5 years (or more) to deliver, the least we should be allowed to get out of it is a little fun!
Something that I still don't understand: All those devs complain that the linux market is not commercially viable... and then they release ports ages after the main release... at a point when their software is already sold for a tiny fraction of the initial release price. How does that and the cry for a commercially viable market go together?
I would assume it's more "release it when the price is still high, or not at all" from a business perspective. They miss the marketing and their gain/cost ratio is extremely low there already, so why do a port so late in the product's life cycle (that is not just a question for Larian, they're just the most extreme example I can think of).
Just wondering (for a while already).

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Quoting: NelAnd soon, they'll find out that elusive random memory corruption was actually hiding a larger conflict with random critical API that forces to redesign the entire engine from scratch.
You know...
delay...
computer stuff...

You think they already started to write actual code?
Elusive Random Memory Corruption: Somebody keeps steeling post-its from the interns' fridge.

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