The thing that could be worrying would developers abandoning Steam(and GOG etc) due to Epic's 12% cut. If few or no new releases appear on Steam they are in trouble.

If Epic's store becomes dominant and it doesn't support Linux that would be bad for the Linux marketshare.

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The $1.25 billion investment might have diluted Tencent's share. Although it should have diluted Tim Sweeney's too...

Gameindustry.biz attributes the statement about Tim Sweeney holding the controlling interest to Epic themselves. Surely they know who their controlling shareholder is:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/amp/2018-10-26-epic-games-raises-usd1-25-billion-from-handful-of-investors [External Link]

It could be a case of different classes of shares with different voting rights as someone alluded to earlier with regard to Google(to be pendantic they presumably meant Alphabet Inc).

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Since some people have brought up the ownership of Epic, I would like to point out the following tidbit from the Wikipedia article on Epic. I am not claiming it is accurate, I want to bring attention to it, in particular the bit I bolded:

"Epic announced in October 2018 that it had acquired US$1.25 billion in investment from seven firms: KKR, ICONIQ Capital, Smash Ventures, aXiomatic, Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The firms join Tencent, Disney, and Endevour as minority shareholders in Epic, which is still controlled by Sweeney.With the investment, Epic Games was estimated to have a nearly US$15 billion valuation"

The sources they point to are the following:

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/epic-games-gets-1-25-billion-investment-from-seven-firms-1202998408/ [External Link]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-26/fortnite-s-epic-games-gets-1-25-billion-from-new-investor-group [External Link]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fortnite-creator-epic-games-valued-at-nearly-15-billion-1540577025 [External Link]

If it is true that Tim Sweeney holds a controlling interest and that 9 companies other than Tencent are shareholders, then I doubt Tencent own 48 to 49% or even the original 40% they bought.

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Liam mentioned this not coming to Linux natively due to some middleware. That lead me to thinking. Would it be possible to have a port of a game where everything was native except a piece if middleware was Wine wrapped?

Is there a mechanism for native code calling Wine wrapped code? If not could such a mechanism be developed?

I suppose that last question could be divided in to further subparts:

Would it be technically possible?

Would it be technically feasible?

Would it make sense/be desirable?

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Kristian"It should hopefully come to GOG to when the Linux build is officially released."

That sounds good, is this something they confirmed somewhere?

No, it's more what usually happens as Steam makes it easy for developers to have test builds up.

Okay, I was thinking the same. But then again there are plenty of games with Linux versions on Steam but not GOG. Let's hope that this is will not be one of those.

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"It should hopefully come to GOG to when the Linux build is officially released."

That sounds good, is this something they confirmed somewhere?

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: KristianBut if running a game under Wine reduces the FPS say from 150 to 100 or from 200 to 150 the general public will tend to perceive that as an utter failure and totally unacceptable. It will dissuade them from switching and the Linux marketshare will stay low.

Perception is everything.

I highly doubt you'll be able to notice framerate drop from 200 to 150 fps. As you said, perception is everything. So if Wine has some performance hit, but it's above noticeable - who cares.

My point was about various articles, reviews etc being published. When people read about those kind of numbers they react negatively.

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I have often seen Linux ports or games running under Wine reduce performance by double digit FPS and/or % and people hailing that as acceptable since performance is still good and they may have an otherwise great point.

But if running a game under Wine reduces the FPS say from 150 to 100 or from 200 to 150 the general public will tend to perceive that as an utter failure and totally unacceptable. It will dissuade them from switching and the Linux marketshare will stay low.

Perception is everything. So it is crucial to get Linux performance as near to Windows performance as possible,if it can be faster even better.

Edit:

If I remember the numbers correctly, The Witcher 2 ports performance was bad enough that it is a way way bigger performance loss than what the general public would accept.

Also another attitude I have sometimes seen is "Oh it is fine that game is not DX11 exclusive, its DX9 mode works fine under Wine" neither the general public nor hardcore gamers share that attitude. They think: "Why should I switch to Linux if that means giving up eyecandy or features?".

Which is why projects such as DXVK are so important.

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Great seeing the project make progress. By my count from the roadmap there are 14 milestones left after this. The roadmap being based on DX9 samples leads me to the following questions: Is full support for all the samples enough for a complete DX9 implementation? Does WineD3D support all those samples?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: KristianNot according to the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated [External Link]

Still open source, though.

The term "open source" can mean more than one thing. For example intelligence agencies use the term to mean something entirely different. But in the software industry, abuses of the term notwithstanding, "open source" refers to the movement in the late 90s for making "free software" more palpable to business that led to Netscape's source being opened. That movement created that definition. They get to define their term. Unreal Engine 4 is not open source.

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