Quoting: Mal

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: MalOk. But if it's illegal for Valve why is it legal for Netflix, Disney and all the other national media in Europe?

Netflix doesn't do what Valve was accused of doing, if you buy Netflix in Croatia you can still logon in Norway with the same account, that is why VPN services works for Netflix to get access to different catalogues of media.

It's not a matter of correctness of regulation. Ofc EU Regulation allow it to Netflix. But that because EU Regulation is hypocritical.

There is stuff you can watch in Norway and not in Croatia and viceversa. That is geo-locking, they offer different content in different regions, that you can only consume in those regions. Not to mention that prices are also different. EU can call it whatever they want but it's geo-locking. People in the single market pay differently and obtain different services depending where they live.

Then yes with VPN you can also login in UK and play steam eastern version of the game. The only difference here is that Valve is generally smarter because they serve a smarter audience and it makes it more difficult since you also need other credentials like a valid cc card where Netflix is dumber.

Or are we saying that the whole point in EU is that geo locking is fine only as long as you can easily circumvent it with a plain nord vpn for few bucks at months?

No it is not hypocritical, it is two completely different things. Valve and the listed publishing houses had different prices for the same product inside the EU single market with a geo-lock that meant that it hindered the free movement of services and goods that exists inside the EU single market.

Netflix does no such thing, if you bought your account in Norway you can still access the service in Croatia, or Austria. There is no geo-lock on your account. Yes there is differences in available media depending on where you login to Netflix but that is not Netflix being asshats, that is different IP holders having different rights to media and thus different agreements with Netflix. Aka distribution company X might have the rights to show Y in Norway while company Z have those rights in Croatia and if only one of them have decided to make an agreement with Netflix then ofc Netflix is forbidden from showing that content in one of those areas or Netflix would be found guilty of copyright infringement. And there is draconian law allowing EU to force a single company to have the rights to the entirety of the EU, such things are handled by each local country.

Had Ubisoft had the rights to Mass Effect in Germany and Warner the rights to it in Austria then both could have sold the same game in Steam with different prices and with geo-locking and it would have been legal, but that is not what happened.

Quoting: Craggles086What is wrong with setting a price at a level that is affordable to people in a lower economic block / region.

Something that is available to everyone in the UK or France and Germany is only available to the wealthy in the Baltic states?

I thought the EU was a democracy?

Or am I reading this wrong..

Yep, think I read it wrong. :)

No your thinking is wrong here, not your reading. There exists zero laws in EU against you having different prices in different regions of the EU. If you live here you already know that since there is no EU mandated price for tomatoes across every single member state and every single store. Valve and the game publishers are completely free to sell games cheaper in say the Baltics, what they are not allowed to do is block a person from Germany that bought the game in the Baltics to install his game in Germany.

It's hypocritical man. You're just fixated with explaining to me the law which I already do (and I know is not Netflix fault, at least for the catalog, the different pricing is their fault). And you're ignoring the practical effect, the so called "ideal principle" that is held for a certain economical category but not for another.

It's just a law that prohibits geolocking to Video games IP holders but allows it for music, video and press rights holder benefits.

It defends consumer rights in one case, private interests in another. It's as simple as that.

No I didn't explain the law to you, I explained that movies and tv-shows have their rights divided onto different companies in different regions and that this is different from how e.g games are licensed. So this is not hypocritical at all, just a difference in how they are licensed.

And your examples are not geo-locked, purchase X in country Y and you can still unlock it in country Z which is something that you couldn't do with the video games. What you are after is the EU turning into some massive federal institution forcing every single store to sell every single item that exists on the planet, so I don't think that you have thought this through.

This is completely apples to oranges.

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Quoting: Mal

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: MalOk. But if it's illegal for Valve why is it legal for Netflix, Disney and all the other national media in Europe?

Netflix doesn't do what Valve was accused of doing, if you buy Netflix in Croatia you can still logon in Norway with the same account, that is why VPN services works for Netflix to get access to different catalogues of media.

It's not a matter of correctness of regulation. Ofc EU Regulation allow it to Netflix. But that because EU Regulation is hypocritical.

There is stuff you can watch in Norway and not in Croatia and viceversa. That is geo-locking, they offer different content in different regions, that you can only consume in those regions. Not to mention that prices are also different. EU can call it whatever they want but it's geo-locking. People in the single market pay differently and obtain different services depending where they live.

Then yes with VPN you can also login in UK and play steam eastern version of the game. The only difference here is that Valve is generally smarter because they serve a smarter audience and it makes it more difficult since you also need other credentials like a valid cc card where Netflix is dumber.

Or are we saying that the whole point in EU is that geo locking is fine only as long as you can easily circumvent it with a plain nord vpn for few bucks at months?

No it is not hypocritical, it is two completely different things. Valve and the listed publishing houses had different prices for the same product inside the EU single market with a geo-lock that meant that it hindered the free movement of services and goods that exists inside the EU single market.

Netflix does no such thing, if you bought your account in Norway you can still access the service in Croatia, or Austria. There is no geo-lock on your account. Yes there is differences in available media depending on where you login to Netflix but that is not Netflix being asshats, that is different IP holders having different rights to media and thus different agreements with Netflix. Aka distribution company X might have the rights to show Y in Norway while company Z have those rights in Croatia and if only one of them have decided to make an agreement with Netflix then ofc Netflix is forbidden from showing that content in one of those areas or Netflix would be found guilty of copyright infringement. And there is draconian law allowing EU to force a single company to have the rights to the entirety of the EU, such things are handled by each local country.

Had Ubisoft had the rights to Mass Effect in Germany and Warner the rights to it in Austria then both could have sold the same game in Steam with different prices and with geo-locking and it would have been legal, but that is not what happened.

Quoting: Craggles086What is wrong with setting a price at a level that is affordable to people in a lower economic block / region.

Something that is available to everyone in the UK or France and Germany is only available to the wealthy in the Baltic states?

I thought the EU was a democracy?

Or am I reading this wrong..

Yep, think I read it wrong. :)

No your thinking is wrong here, not your reading. There exists zero laws in EU against you having different prices in different regions of the EU. If you live here you already know that since there is no EU mandated price for tomatoes across every single member state and every single store. Valve and the game publishers are completely free to sell games cheaper in say the Baltics, what they are not allowed to do is block a person from Germany that bought the game in the Baltics to install his game in Germany.

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Quoting: ShabbyX> pay the full €1.6m fine

Peanuts for Valve I'm sure. I wonder if the cost of lawyers trying to fight it was even worth it, lol

Most likely is that they want to fight this so that they can enable it again, not to avoid the €1.6M fine.

Quoting: MalOk. But if it's illegal for Valve why is it legal for Netflix, Disney and all the other national media in Europe?

Netflix doesn't do what Valve was accused of doing, if you buy Netflix in Croatia you can still logon in Norway with the same account, that is why VPN services works for Netflix to get access to different catalogues of media.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualNow, if only governments would outlaw region locking with DVDs and Blu-Rays. Region-locking shows on streaming services is bad enough, but region locking physical media is incredibly greedy. Or how about creating firmware for DVD players that will refuse to play discs not authorized to play in this region? How was anti-consumer behavior like this ever allowed? Was anyone allowed to publish a hardcover book which would combust if a customer attempted to open it in Australia?

Fuck region locks. For any reason.

Now you probably talked in more general terms, but just for people who don't know both DVD:s and BR:s are a single region inside the EU so they are both already not region locked as per EU regulation.

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Quoting: PublicNuisanceAs mentioned before Valve is a private company and that will mean that Gabe would have to say yes not shareholders. This is the exact reason why anyone who takes their company public is insane because once you do it is no longer your company.

Depends on how many shares you sell out to the public and what kind. E.g Alphabet (aka Google) have shares with zero votes and those are the ones that are traded, the ones that carry the actual votes the founders kept for themselves so no one can buy Alphabet by purchasing up all the public shares.

Also Gabe is not the single share holder, exactly how many shares he has is unknown but it is rumoured to be 50% and that Lisa Mennet got some in their divorce.

Quoting: QYMEThe older i get, the more woried i get at what will happen after Gaben step down/dies and this sort of news are kind of terrifying when i look at my 827 game library with only 54 of those game completed. And this include game i bought dozens of years ago on console that got a pc port i actually haven't touched yet.

As I wrote above most people forget that Gabe is not the sole share holder of Valve, Mike Harrington as being the co-founder surely have his share of shares and there is rumours that Gabens ex-wife have quite a lot of shares as well.

If/When Gabe dies his shares will most likely go to his two sons and keeping those shares would ensure their financial future until the day they die including their own children so they would be completely idiots to sell it off for a one time fee to MS. In any case that is most likely years and years away, yes Gabe is not the most healthy looking individual, but he does have access to the most expensive care available on the planet so he could very well live for another 20 or 40 years.

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Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: F.UltraYeah but it will never happen, neither Nintendo nor Valve will ever sell

Seems unlikely today, but if Gabe gets hit by a truck or the Switch2 is a total flop, things could change.

First of the gov of Japan is extremely weary about selling out to foreign companies, secondly Nintendo has been around since 1889 and have huge coffers, both switch2 and switch3 can be complete failures and Nintendo will still survive.

When it comes to Valve I think most people forget that Gabe is not the sole owner (the other owners are not exactly Microsoft lovers either), plus the fact that Valve is a money printing machine so whoever takes over Gabes shares when he dies would be a complete idiot to sell it.

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Quoting: PhlebiacDefinitely not great for those 26 people, but is there any indication of what percentage of their headcount that is? And don't a lot of studios shed a fair number of people after finishing a project, if they don't have other immediate projects lined up?

~80 according to Embracers last Year End Report. So roughly 33%.

Quoting: Luke_NukemYou know what else?

https://kotaku.com/microsoft-buy-nintendo-net-worth-valve-steam-email-1850852461 [External Link]

Fuck Microsoft.

Yeah but it will never happen, neither Nintendo nor Valve will ever sell

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KimyrielleThe number of game devs I talked to who founded studios with the primary goal to eventually get bought out by a bigger fish is fairly mind-numbing. They want to publish one good game, get noticed, get bought, and walk away with a fat wad of cash. So, yeah, they really want to do this.

It's no wonder that this is how the story often ends.

Shame. Beamdog was a great studio. At least before they got bought by these people. MythForce is quite a misfit in their portfolio. Like Anthem was for Bioware. Maybe studios should stick to what they're good at.

Not just a game studio thing; it seems to be endemic throughout tech. And for that matter, I know a guy who has a business making eco-friendly bamboo toilet paper who has been hoping for years that a big boy will buy it up.
To some extent, at least in tech, I think it's making a virtue of necessity--the big monopolists will not let you grow a company to become a serious competitor, so might as well try to get the buyout quickly so you end up with a decent return on your time investment . . .

This really spiralled out of control during the early 2000:s when both Google and Microsoft where wearing their big spending pants so a lot of startups had the single goal of being acquired by either for billions.

I was in 2007 searching for investors to massively increase the capacity of a new computer cloud that I and a friend (I as the developer and he as the initial investor) had started (basically a competitor to AWS EC2 but with more features and performance at the time), basically every single such meeting ended with them trying to convince us to instead shift focus to something that Google and Microsoft would be interested in buying up in a short while (this was before Google and Microsoft where interested in cloud computing, so so much for those investors potential to see the future...).

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraWhat I did find however was on the Wiki on Metal that Apple announced in 2017 that 148k apps used Metal which is only 9% of the number of apps they have in their app store, so it wasn't like people where rushing out to implement it.

I'm not sure this is a useful percentage. Most apps don't need any 3D API in the first place, right?

Which kinda is on point no?

One of us has a big misunderstanding here. :D Let's find out who.

You said "only 9% of the number of apps they have in their app store" have been using Metal. My point is that this might(!) be 100% of the apps needing a low-level 3D API in the first place. So we can't conclude "it wasn't like people where rushing out to implement it".

That "most apps don't need any 3D API in the first place" is exactly my point. It means that they went through all this trouble fragmenting the graphics API scene only to cater to 9% of apps (and most likely only a subset of those apps really benefits meaning that the real number is lower).

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Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: F.UltraNo, no one is saying that Metal isn't better than OpenGL or OpenGL ES. The point is that Metal wasn't that much better than OpenGL or OpenGL ES […]

Says who? The difference between Metal & OpenGL are the same as Vulkan & OpenGL (potentially immense). Metal is just easier to use than Vulkan (according to developers comparing both).

And Vulkan isn't that much better than OpenGL ES on a mobile either unless we talk really graphically intensive games and then mobile and iOS isn't the platform for that anyway nor is macOS, and even then Vulkan/Metal is not always better than OpenGL (you have to be very thread dependent for Vulkan/Metal to be much better).

Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: F.UltraYes and that makes it the 9% I wrote earlier. The point being that even 3 full years after the introduction 91% of app-makers still though that OpenGL ES was good enough which means that iOS didn't gain any major benefits over Android by implementing Metal. So that closes the door on "Apple was forced to implement Metal or iOS would be obsolete" that some people throw around (note that I don't accuse you of doing that, the same discussion is happening on Phoronix at the moment).

I don't get what you're calculating.

Most applications don't use any graphics library, usage is abstracted by the system. That's true for all systems, therefore already 1,7 million apps were using Metal (probably almost all).

The 9% (of all apps) must be compared to the apps that are directly using a graphics library, e.g. games. Since we don't have any numbers on that, we can only guess.

9% where the ones using Metal directly and is Apples own numbers. And that most applications don't use any graphics library is kinda the point in showing that the "desperate need" for Metal wasn't and isn't really there.

Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: F.UltraSo Apple didn't _need_ Metal, they could have waited for Vulkan just like Google did. And hadn't they been so hell bent on NIH and vendor lock-in they could have spear-headed the collaborative project to replace OpenGL with a new better API, and that by all means could have been Metal.

Obviously they want to & actually control everything on their systems (from hardware to software). But waiting makes a huge difference. They release each year a new generation of hardware which is restricted by size, power & heat. In the best case scenario, Metal was like a new GPU generation, just by software.

To answer this question: The first Metal based game was released in 2014 (https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/news/131021-asphalt-8-airborne-is-first-metal-ready-game-for-ios-8-and-boy-does-it-look-lovely/ [External Link])

But think whatever you want. I know you're wrong & I've done enough to try convince you.

No you haven't, you have not provided a single argument for why Apple was in such a desperate need of Metal vs just using OpenGL ES until Vulkan came or launching a collab for a open replacement of OpenGL outside of NIH and vendor lock-in.

Every single mobile manufacturer releases each year a new generation of hardware and they are all restricted in size, power & heat, none of this is Apple specific problems, so that is not an argument either.

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Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: F.UltraNo I have no data regarding iOS usage, Android works quite well with OpenGL ES though so I see no reason why the iPad could not have done that aswell. To me Metal is just too much NIH and an attempt to perform vendor lock-in on primarily iOS.

That's like saying Vulkan is redundant. OpenGL ES is just subset of OpenGL, it retains the flaws of the API.

No, no one is saying that Metal isn't better than OpenGL or OpenGL ES. The point is that Metal wasn't that much better than OpenGL or OpenGL ES that Apple had to go full on NIH and further fragment the graphics API market, _unless_ they ofc wanted to ride the wave of vendor lock-in.

Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: F.UltraWhat I did find however was on the Wiki on Metal that Apple announced in 2017 that 148k apps used Metal which is only 9% of the number of apps they have in their app store, so it wasn't like people where rushing out to implement it.

I haven't found concrete numbers, but there are estimates of the available games in the app store: 200,000-800,000. Even taking 800,000 as an estimate (which is unlikely when, 2022 were only 1,783,232 apps in the store, this number comes from Apple) 148,000 would be quite good.

According to Apple, more than 148,000 applications use Metal directly, and 1.7 million use it through high-level frameworks, as of June 2017

It's not limited to games but internally used everywhere.

Yes and that makes it the 9% I wrote earlier. The point being that even 3 full years after the introduction 91% of app-makers still though that OpenGL ES was good enough which means that iOS didn't gain any major benefits over Android by implementing Metal. So that closes the door on "Apple was forced to implement Metal or iOS would be obsolete" that some people throw around (note that I don't accuse you of doing that, the same discussion is happening on Phoronix at the moment).

So Apple didn't _need_ Metal, they could have waited for Vulkan just like Google did. And hadn't they been so hell bent on NIH and vendor lock-in they could have spear-headed the collaborative project to replace OpenGL with a new better API, and that by all means could have been Metal.

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