Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraI don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam

I'm happy with calling it pure speculation, but unhappy with having it called "conspiracy theories". (The possibility of Valve forcing companies to do something is lacking enough parties for a conspiracy to begin with.)

I think a spade is a spade. It's quite easy to begin publishing games on Steam. All you have to do is sign the agreements from https://partner.steamgames.com/newpartner/?signup_type=1 [External Link] and pay the fees. I just tried with my Steam credentials and exactly nowhere in any of the agreements and NDA:s that they wanted signed was any reference to prohibiting you sale of your products on any other platform nor of any text regarding how you decide to set the price of your products either on Steam nor anywhere else.

So yes that is a conspiracy theory because all the open facts dispute it, it's easy to see since the agreements are public, both big and small publishers operates their own stores besides Steam, but still people "speculate" that this is the case. In my book this ticks all the boxes needed for a conspiracy theory.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestI bought Dying Light one year ago. Actual play time 0 minutes, it never worked on my machine, neither with Mesa or Mesa-git. So if they release it for Linux, they hopefully make it work as well. Otherwise I can't see what's the difference to a Windows only release. I paid the full price for this game, but so far I got 0 fun and 0 service. Technology wise I hope they go Vulkan only for Dying Light 2 to reduce bugs.

Did you change the Launch Options in Steam to "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%"? This is needed for it to start on Mesa since it tries to open v4.5 of the compat profile instead of the proper core profile.

Yes, I did. But it doesn't help, there is just a black loading screen. And in some days in mesa-git this workaround will be obsolete :-)

Strange, I had that exactly that black loading screen until I changed the launch options... Don't remember if I did anything else, since you are on mesa-get I believe that you are on 18.x since they also did some workaround in 17.x to get Dying Light to work.

It's a really buggy game though, currently I'm stuck near the end of The Following since the game crashes as soon as I reach a certain point (the granary) which apparently also happens for people on Windows and PS4 so not even with a better port it would be completely stable.

edit: btw do you have this section in /etc/drirc:
        <application name="Dying Light" executable="DyingLightGame">
            <option name="allow_glsl_builtin_variable_redeclaration" value="true" />
        </application>

edit2: seams like others on Arch also have problems with this game: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/2766/post_id=15355

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Quoting: mylka

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: mylkamaybe they get more money with each sale, but now they have higher costes. own servers and linux programmer for the launcher
maybe gog follows

I think that it's simply that they have now grown big enough to where those costs are less than having to give away 30% of each sale to companies such as Valve.

Now I don't have longer data than back to 2013 in the database (they listed their share in 2016) but they seam to have made some nice increase in both sales and profit (ptp in the table below is the pre-tax-profit) and while not close to a behemoth like EA they are probably as I wrote before closing in on the kind of sales numbers where 30% suddenly are quite a lot of actual money (aprox 35M EUR in 2017 if we assume that all sales are from places like Steam).

does steam really take 30%. assassins creed costs the same on steam and uplay. actually its now cheaper in the steam sale, than the uplay sale
why wouldnt ubisoft make their games like 10-20% cheaper in their own store? the customers would pay less, so they would get more costumers and they would make more money with each sale

why is EA selling their games only on origin, but ubisoft isnt, if they would save so much money?

Yes they take 30% (Paradox writes so in their Annual Report which I have in Swedish only but they might have it in English on their IR site) however there exists no details if large publishers like EA and Ubisoft are tied to the generic deal or if they are large enough to get a discount here.

That Ubisoft does not lower their own prices by the Steam tax is quite simple, that would #1 make them loose 30% there as well and #2 it would lower the value of their games. Say the price is 100 USD om Steam and 70 USD on Ubisoft Store then Steam users will complain en masse that the price on Steam is lowered to 70 USD as well which now means that Ubisoft gets 49 USD from each Steam sale instead of 70 USD.

And to move a substantial amount of your customers from Steam to your own store you probably have to do way more than just decrease the price of your wares by 30%. I wouldn't categorise Steam as vendor-lock-in but their store is convenient enough so that it's close to customer-lock-in.

Also for large AAA games it's not certain that a lower price yields more sales (or enough more sales to cover for the lower price).

I don't believe the conspiracy theories that Valve prohibits the sale of games outside of Steam since #1 no one in the industry have ever claimed that this is happening, #2 lots of both large and small publishers (e.g EA and Feral) have their own stores, and #3 that they simply do not need to force a specific price due to the mechanics that I explained earlier (i.e that if they lower the price in their own store then they ultimately lower the prices on Steam as well).

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Quoting: GuestI bought Dying Light one year ago. Actual play time 0 minutes, it never worked on my machine, neither with Mesa or Mesa-git. So if they release it for Linux, they hopefully make it work as well. Otherwise I can't see what's the difference to a Windows only release. I paid the full price for this game, but so far I got 0 fun and 0 service. Technology wise I hope they go Vulkan only for Dying Light 2 to reduce bugs.

Did you change the Launch Options in Steam to "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%"? This is needed for it to start on Mesa since it tries to open v4.5 of the compat profile instead of the proper core profile.

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Quoting: mylkamaybe they get more money with each sale, but now they have higher costes. own servers and linux programmer for the launcher
maybe gog follows

I think that it's simply that they have now grown big enough to where those costs are less than having to give away 30% of each sale to companies such as Valve.

Now I don't have longer data than back to 2013 in the database (they listed their share in 2016) but they seam to have made some nice increase in both sales and profit (ptp in the table below is the pre-tax-profit) and while not close to a behemoth like EA they are probably as I wrote before closing in on the kind of sales numbers where 30% suddenly are quite a lot of actual money (aprox 35M EUR in 2017 if we assume that all sales are from places like Steam).

+-------------+-------------+--------+
| sales (EUR) | ptp (EUR)   | period |
+-------------+-------------+--------+
| 82802623.75 | 34552570.25 | 2017   |
| 68283456.35 | 32235567.90 | 2016   |
| 65690763.75 | 26313802.50 | 2015   |
| 18811775.00 |  4644400.00 | 2014   |
| 22308151.25 |  3817602.25 | 2013   |
+-------------+-------------+--------+

edit: ok this is strange, the table is perfectly aligned in both the edit and the Preview but skewed when actually posted...

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Well this is what happens when a company needs to spin everything in order to keep the campaign going and thus squash each and every thing that questions the project.

I mean when he wrote "We clearly said that we were bringing engineering design models to GDC and lots of people clearly don't understand what that means" he clearly knew that the point of the article was that there does not exist a single working system yet and that their execs cannot answer a single question on it. Instead they try to weasel word their way out of it by implying that El Reg has an agenda.

The very fact that they brought "engineering design models" instead of a prototype is kind of the essence of the El Reg article...

And lets us not forget that this is not the real Atari either, it's just Infogrames with a different name.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraI can say that it's quite possible that Feral is obligated to release only on their own store+Steam with DRM

Why would 2K want Steam exclusivity with DRM for one version (Linux / macOS) and not for another (Windows)?

For total control. Feral wants to sell on GOG as well well then they have to pony up more money or a higher percentage. Now this is of course complete guesswork here and I do not want to put 2K into the EA corner here but publishers often have strange ideas on how to control their assets.

Now I work in a completely different market (finance) but I have seen and been involved with lots of strange decisions by asset holders. E.g one company decided that the data they sat on was so valuable that they could not set a distribution price for it and they went bankrupt due to not having any revenue...

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.Ultrait's also possible that their license covers the version released and this new non-DRM release on GOG is a new version that Feral does not have license to.

This is most likely the case, contracts are usually narrowly worded. But it's not a blocker, Feral can just make an additional contract or update the current one if the original publisher (2K) is OK with the idea to begin with.

Of course they can, but the macOS/Linux marketshare is a small one and perhaps they think (which very well could be the wrong decision) that they will get a better return if they invest in new ports instead of re-releasing old ports on other stores when the original publisher does what 2K did with X-COM. Doing the needed changes and supporting a new store is not free (also if there is some anti-GOG feelings among the top decision makers at Feral then they will not open themselves to the domino effect here where if they release one game on GOG the demand increases tenfold for them to release other games as well) so it has to be weighted against the possible revenue from such a move.

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Looks almost like a 16-bit isometric version of Resident Evil 1 :)

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: GuestTry as you might, there's nothing to indicate Feral's DRM stance one way or another. I put it to you that lack of xcom on GOG is about various business deals, distribution, quality control. Nothing at all to do with DRM.

:) You know, it is kind of silly to try to hide an elephant behind a straw:

• The DRM-free version of the game is already available on GOG, but Feral® explicitly said it is not interested in GOG release;


• Feral uses Steamworks (as none of their games are on The Big List of DRM-Free Games on Steam [External Link]).

Their (awkward) reasoning is of no importance to me. The hard truth is: Feral Interactive releases all their games as Steamworks-exclusives and it is entirely Feral's descision to do so.
You can condemn or approve this descision, but stop pretending it is not their own stance.
Sorry, but no "Feral is tied up with contractual obligations" rubbish from now on, OK?

Quoting: TheRiddickSteam does not stop developers releasing products on other platforms, so the decision is up to the original developer.

Got any proof? Some Licence Agreement scans? Or, are you one of Valve employees and has explicit right to speak on behalf of Valve? And in this case the original developer had already desided do release the game DRM-free, but Feral is of different opinion on the matter.

Quoting: LinasWhy do you assume that they are even allowed to release the games as DRM-free? The majority of the games they port are not even available as DRM-free on Windows. It's not like when they make a Linux version it becomes Ferals(sic) property and they can do whatever they want with the game?

Eeehmm… Hello again! It seems you did not fully understand the whole meaning of the news. Well, just in case you missed (sorry for being Captain Obvious here), "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" is already available at GOG [External Link]. DRM-free!

Well to be completely honest we have no idea what the deal between 2K and Feral looks like. Having experience with license deals (not on games though) I can say that it's quite possible that Feral is obligated to release only on their own store+Steam with DRM, it's also possible that their license covers the version released and this new non-DRM release on GOG is a new version that Feral does not have license to.

It's also possible that Feral (with their much smaller market share) decided that the effort to implement the changes needed for this new release is simply not worth it.

And it could be that Feral is pro-DRM, I know nothing about their company structure since they are a private enterprise but perhaps they have investors that require DRM (basically 100% of investors require shit like that).

Personally I dislike DRM just as much as you guys but at the same time I understand that it might be a necessary evil for small companies such as Feral to survive. Call me a sheep but when having to choose between no Lara Croft and Lara Croft with DRM then I choose the latter any day of the week. This however does not mean that people should not criticize Feral to let them know that there exists a market for non-DRM games, the end game is of course to go 100% DRM free.

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: F.UltraThe idea is to let his patreons pay for the porting, so what he is saying that he will port your game for free if you let him (and you are a game publisher/developer).

I'm one of his patreons and I somehow missed that in his fairly regular updates! Nice. I'd love if more devs actually offered him the chance to work on games. It seems weird to have what is literally a legendary porter putting his services free gratis, and he's not getting any offers!

IMHO the main problem is that the (large) publishers wants to be in 100% control of the process as well as holding on to the possibility that either they can license out the Linux-version for lots of money or that Linux someday will be the New Hot Thing that they ride the gravy train by releasing ports at that specific point in time.

For an example we can look at "No One Lives Forever" The Sad Story Behind A Dead PC Game That Can't Come Back [External Link]. It's a good read to get into the strange thinking on the large publishers.

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