The guy is misinformed. Valve introduced the 30% cut by its own. And at that time it was super convenient because physical distribution cut was around 50%. Ah the golden ages before steam: when nobody cared that the developers were making less money than the distributor and publishers made less money without becoming outraged in the process. Will we ever see them coming again?

Sarcasm aside, I used to believe that someone could actually do better than Valve and challenge them if they tried. But when an intelligent and competent man with an endless amount of money like Tim Sweeney says that it's impossible to do better and the only way for he and his big publishers buddies to get higher margins is to remove all steam features, all steam services while keeping the consumer prices unaltered (or even increased a little because, why not? Monopoly FTW)... well I believe him. I'm now genuinely convinced that 30% is the best price possible for that kind of service.

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Quoting: dubigrasuJust somewhat on topic: What is the purpose of linking your Steam account to the Paradox account?
I have several Paradox games on Steam (also I bought just right now Surviving Mars) and not one is listed on my Paradox account (or available in the launcher).

Them gathering info on you. You gain the medals and some avatars depending on what you bought when posting on their forums.

... and I guess you have access to their launcher if want to try it. Before they announce that they ditched Steam and make it mandatory (because we all know this day will come).

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Quoting: 14Paradox is one of my top developers and publishers. Most of what they've put out that I had interest in worked natively on Linux, including Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which is a very memorable RPG for me. I would be more sad losing Paradox than most other developers or publishers.

Yup. But today they've grown into a big publisher and they are publicly traded company. We all know what this means in the medium-long term. One should be emotionally prepared. :(

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Quoting: slaapliedjeAlso the shenanigans of Ubuntu trying to drop support for 32bit compatibility doesn't help. How many Ubuntu users are just going to go back to Windows rather than distro hop?

Imho: no one. Though I agree that this was handled poorly and it became bad PR that might confuse and keep away non techie people that were undecided if leaving windows or not.

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It's obvious that their relative Linux sales decreased since they also started to sell in China. But absolute as well? This is not a good sign.

Although, truth be said, I'm among these ones (I didn't like the recent Pdx releases, both gameplay and quality and I also abandoned Stellaris after they changed it in 2.0, so I only keep buying DLCs for their older titles) I see on their forums and reddit that it's plenty of people who have 0 issues with that and they can't all be based on windows.

Are there other indications out there that shows that linux sales are slowing down?

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[quote=elmapul]

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: elmapul"I'm personally ...

i will not quote your entire comment in the quote section because it would be to ugly to waste space and i need to quote parts of it again, so...

"Exclusives are artificial limitations whose sole purpose is to manipulate "market" allowing a less efficient party to impose itself thanks to resources that are external to the market itself."

WRONG, exclusives were born in an era without standards for development (such as openGL) back in the days it was an matter of tecnology, its much harder to support mips, x86, powerpc and everything than to only support one architecture, consoles had an different hardware back then that created an cost to port games from then to other platforms.
you may argue that exclusivity deals like the epic store are an artificial limitation, but you cant say the same about every exclusive.

"It's not that Windows is bad, it's that Linux is not good enough. "
again, its not about the quality of the system, its about the marketshare.
gamecube was better than PS2 in terms of hardware, but playstation had more games wich lead to more consoles being sold wich leads to more marketshare for sony and less for nintendo, an trend that nintendo couldnt reverse.
its not about the system being good, its about the ecosystem.

"If instead Gaben used his money to buy games and make linux only releases we wouldn't have any of that. There would be AAA linux games, but they would be lesser games that what they are now."
nope, because it would expand the market, take a look at the console market, it starts with almost no game and end the generation with 3.000 games and dozens of millions of units sold.
playstation went from nothing to 100 millions of unitys sold in a single generation, ps2 started from 0 and reached more than 150 millions of unity solds.
linux has the same 1% of the market for over 25 years, if its markershare grow we would have more games nor less then projects like wine would skyrocket anyway.
valve tried to launch an console without exclusives and it floped, helping wine was the last solution remaining.
yes, they should do it anyway but playing the 'cat and mouse game' will never solve the issue, linux will always have only an subset of the games that windows have.
just look at it from an gamer point of view.
this A platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, some of the old generations plus halo
this B platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, some of the old generations plus god of war
this C platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, some of the old generations plus mario
this D platform has every <multi plat> game from the current gen, all of the old generations plus league of legends
this E platform only a few games from the current gen, only a few games from the old generations, what would i do?

of course, buy the platform A and C, dont buy playstation because i dont care about god of war and play lol on my old pc since it can run even on a toaster pc. about the D? i will ignore it, there is no reason to care about it.

how the hell we will reverse this marketshare with an situation like that? we cant.


"Exclusives are the opposite of this. It's about someone distorting a market with resources obtained from outside that market to give an unfair advantage to an inferior and less competitive service/product. "

it dont matter if its an distortion, what matter is: ITS FREAKING WORKS!
and the value of the product is on the ecosystem not on the system.

I never argued that exclusives don't work. They are small monopolies carved in the market and they do work. What I've argued is that they produce worse products and worse services and higher consumer prices which is the exact opposite of the reason why the vast majority of the world (supposedly) set to use free markets to run its economy.

If the lawmakers were less corrupt exclusivity deals would not be a thing for any digital good.

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Quoting: elmapul"I'm personally torn on it all. I don't particularly like exclusives, as I don't like any kind of lock-in but I don't blame developers for doing it"
i hate to break that for you but, there is no such a thing as an world without exclusives.
there is either:
a)what we have on consoles, where sony got a few exclusives, microsoft has a few exclusive, nintendo has a few exclusives and everything else is multiplatform.
or
b)almost everything is windows exclusive and we suffer to reverse enginering it to make stuff run on wine in many case years after its relased we may run it, that is, if we ever gonna run it.

You are making a fundamental mistake here by confusing exclusives with strategic decisions to concentrate on a single platform.

Exclusives are artificial limitations whose sole purpose is to manipulate "market" allowing a less efficient party to impose itself thanks to resources that are external to the market itself.
Strategic decisions instead are the obvious decisions every executive has to make where he weights costs associated with an action compared to the promised returns (while weighting the risks in the process).

You don't see games releasing on Windows only because there is an artificial ban on linux. The ugly truth is that linux is that in the eye of developers the costs and risks associated to releasing for our platform are not worth the potential returns. It's not that Windows is bad, it's that Linux is not good enough. Same deal whenever a game releases on "Steam only" (whatever that means given that keys can be sold everywhere with no fee). There is no conspiracy behind. Just cost benefits analysis that lead certain devs to not re implement in house what Steam platform gives them for free. Sad? Maybe. But one can't blame Windows or Steam for being better or more convenient. In the end like any other job also developments is about doing more, better with less. On linux this worked the right way so eventually stuff like Vulkan was made and porting companies like Feral emerged which allowed to lower the risks and the costs that comes with releasing on our OSs and infact now we have many more games. Proton will further reduce costs and risks. If instead Gaben used his money to buy games and make linux only releases we wouldn't have any of that. There would be AAA linux games, but they would be lesser games that what they are now.

Exclusives are the opposite of this. It's about someone distorting a market with resources obtained from outside that market to give an unfair advantage to an inferior and less competitive service/product. On consoles people so pay more for getting worse games. And in our case Fortnite money allows an inferior service EGS, to starve the better ones and impose itself to the detriment of consumers. Those who thinks that overtime EGS will catch Steam in terms of features are delusional fools. That's not how Sweeney is selling his launcher to the other Publishers CEOs. The idea is to maximize margins at expense of users. And saving the money needed to implement and maintain any "platform feature" PC has is part of it. In a grim future where Steam and GOG are dead and EGS is a monopoly we people being forced to buy premium EGS passes to play EGS games in multiplayer or get cloud save games like as it happens on consoles. That should also be clear: for the guys at the head of Ubisoft, Epic or 2K PC it's just another platform among the many they support. If PC dies they won't shed a tear. Less platforms to support, less costs to sustain. They don't have the interests of PC gamers at their heart. If their actions lead to PC being less competitive than consoles (or streaming services) in the future they don't care.

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Quoting: finaldestThe biggest issue with any PC exclusive is that the game in question is locked to a specific launcher. If I could use any launcher or no launcher at all to download and play the game then the affect would be minimal. With EPIC for example, All Linux users are locked out before even entering the gates.

Careful here. Claiming that Steam, EGS, Origin and such are "just launchers" is part of Sweeney narrative. If you consider them just libraries of link to .exe for games that run on windows it's easy to agree with Sweeney that gamers are just being lazy and they just have get used to have more launchers as publishers do their dirty stuff at their back.

But Steam it's not just a launcher. It's indeed a platform that comes with several features many of which Steam itself brought into gaming first (like cloud saves and controller profiles). And as any platform it strives to hide the implementation details. That what steam play is all about: it should be transparent to you if you're gaming on windows, or mac or linux. While stuff like proton and vulkan try to bring this on developer side.

When you play a game on Steam, like it or not, you have a different experience. That makes a ton of difference in this matter. When Tim is left free to establish his narrative (basically always) he never admits that EGS and Steam are platforms or services. On the contrary he claims they are just launchers and that Windows is the platform and so 30% tax is not justifiable from Steam and that for gamers it changes nothing so they should just stay quiet and get raped. He's establishing a frame where where he's right and we're not. Then ofc even in his frame the man is plenty of inconsistencies. Like when he's ok with Apple having 30% tax on iStore because they made the platform so they deserve it, but then on Android he works to bring EGS to break the unfair toll. Ofc the only actual difference between the two ecosystems is that one is closed and doesn't allow competition while the other is open. But today his target is only Steam.

Also if you accept Sweeney narrative that Steam and EGS are just storefronts then it means that there is no platform nor a service to invest on. If your vision for your enterprise in this world is just to sell stuff by undercutting your competition, why should you invest on making better the ecosystem? There is no ecosystem int he first place! It would just add your costs without giving you and your millionaire publisher friends any additional monetary benefit. Especially when you can just grab users by pursuing lucrative exclusives. Which only come with the minor side effect of forcing a player to look for their .exes under a different launcher. But in exchange grants them the highly educational experience of paying more due to the payment method they use in their country.

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QuoteI’d like to challenge critics to state what moral principle you feel is at stake. If it’s okay for one company to avoid the 30% Valve tax by selling exclusively through their own store, why is it wrong for multiple companies to work together to achieve the same goals?

That has never been the issue. In fact pretty much everybody cheered when Epic announced EGS.

The main issue is him using his outrageous amount of money to actively degrade the PC experience of gamers instead of using it to produce a superior product that wins customer affection (something that shouldn't be that hard with all that cash).

I'm growing tired of all these bullshit articles made by bribed journalists who carefully avoid to pursue questions and arguments that might be uncomfortable for their hidden masters and instead help them establish their narrative.

When TS says that EGS allows small developers studios to avoid "steam tax" for instance, one should point out what actual guarantees are there that when a publishers gets higher revenues because of EGS this money goes to actual developers and not entirely to publisher shareholders. And when it comes to transaction fees I like the argument and I always have defended it (I genuinely think it would be better if CC fees were payed by CC users). But then you point out how it comes that Steam 30% tax is not 30% anymore if it eats up a 8% of transaction fee. And then you go on by uniting the points above and tweet him if it is better for PC gaming to make gamers pay more for less just so publishers can pay higher dividends.

I understand that gaming is not politics or finance, but it's not that gaming journalism couldn't use some actual journalists working in it.

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Regarding new videogames (and any other general purpose software) there is literally no reason to have 32 bit releases today. On Steam there might be old 32 bit games but its Valve job to keep their runtime retro compatible and they will. While Steam client itself it's about time that it goes 64 bit. Not because it will benefit from the architecture but because of the additional hassle to install it.

Generally speaking though 32 bit OS still have their niche use and are needed. The decision to drop the architecture has a lot more implications outside gaming. But Ubuntu is not Debian, its desktop images are general purpose in their scope. I would say that dropping 32bit is a wise decision.

Ofc Canonical as a desktop OS provider doesn't have the "power" to force software developers hand. But given that most developers that deliver on linux also delivers on mac and Apple already did it for itself I expect this to go quite well for them.

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