Quoting: g000hEven if their source control server went down, it is usual for developer workstations to retain much of the working code. (True of git, perforce, subversion anyway.)

Exactly this. Where I work all the developers have each a complete copy of all our source code (myself I do a "svn up *" every morning) on our work computers, many of us have it on our home computers as well. Then the subversion server is backed up to a remote server in a different country. And we are a small 8-person company.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

Just because being a hypocrite is solidly in your best interests does not make it stop being hypocrisy.

So what does his hypocrisy consist of? AFAIK he is not imposing a 30% cut of other companies to use the Paradox store?!

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

It's the very definition of being a hypocrite. He's basically saying "do as I say, not as I do".

Not really, their per DLC price is not correlated to how much Paradox feels that a distribution channel is worth when it comes to a cut of the sales.

If not then anyone here is probably a hypocrite as well. Who here does not want to be paid more in salary while wanting to pay less for things like media, games, food and rent?

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Quoting: Tuxee

QuoteWhat are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: gradyvuckovicCounter argument for you Paradox:

• For their cut of the sale, Valve hosts your games indefinitely and provides countless services for free, such as free DDOS protection by running game network traffic through Valve's network, free cloud saves hosting, game streaming (Twitch style), free remote game streaming (Stadia style) which runs off Valve's network as well, plus provides features like Proton that gives Windows only games extra sales on Linux. How do you expect Valve to pay for all those things?


• 30% is the starting rate, it drops to 25% after $10m USD in sales, then 20% after $50m USD of sales. $10m USD in sales is easy to hit for a popular mainstream AAA game, for a game like Sekiro for example, that's only 166,666 copies sold, and $50m USD is only 833,333 copies. It's safe to say Sekiro has blown past both of those numbers. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, across all platforms (don't have Steam only figures handy) sold 2 million units in the first 10 days of release, at release it had 125,000 concurrent players on Steam, so it likely hit that 25% threshold in the first 24 hours and quickly hit the 20% threshold in the first week. It is highly likely several of Paradox's games have hit the 20% threshold, such as Cities: Skylines, which according to SteamSpy has sold between 5m and 10m copies.


• Paradox sell their games outside of Steam as well and have their own store, and because Steam allows for free key generation and offer an API for account linking and game activation, Paradox accounts can link with Steam accounts, so it doesn't matter where you buy your game (Steam or Paradox) your game will be activated on both accounts. Games sold from Paradox directly, pay no royalty to Valve/Steam at all, Valve effectively hosts those sold units of the game for free. For a game already at the 20% threshold, every sale outside of Steam just lowers the rate even further.
  
  (Personally I've bought my Paradox games directly from Paradox in the past to support them since they strongly supported Linux. Then I've activated those games on Steam, to enjoy Steam's service and keep all my games in one place. I'm sure others have too, otherwise Paradox would not have bothered setting up their store.)


• If we want to talk about 'outrageous fees', lets talk about how much Paradox charges for some of their games. The total cost of buying Cities: Skylines for example, is $30USD for the base game, plus $180USD for all the DLC, for a total price of $210USD for the whole game.

But looking at it not from an indie developer's perspective, and a single player game, much of what Valve offer simply isn't used, isn't relevent. And some of the services Valve provide are more to try lock developers into Steam than anything else.
Then "Proton" isn't expensive for Valve. Wine is free. DXVK was not started by Valve, but they do invest in it by paying a developer. Except that's not going justify 30% cut of every game. "Proton" and other investments are only Valve trying to make sure they're not beholden to Microsoft and Windows - they're not a service provided to publishers.
As for network infrastructure, forums, etc, well...I don't think it's worth 30% of every game either. Yes, they have to charge something. But 30%? That's probably a bit much for an infrastructure that is in place, has been paid for, and is mostly just maintenance. Moderation, curating, etc, are even pawned off to the community so Valve doesn't even do anything there.
Plus the more expensive and larger games are going to use more of their infrastructure than some small indie. Yet by earning a bit more, Valve will take less of a cut. Hmm.

I'm not saying Valve are evil. I might have given that impression, so allow me to say that they are investing in areas that are useful to GNU/Linux users. That doesn't mean they don't need a bit of competition though. That 30% cut is from lack of competition more than anything else, and I think developers are starting to suffer slightly from it. If only the epic store could adjust to being _healthy_ competition, then it might be alright.

Keeping such a network infrastructure that is needed for this is way more than just maintenance, as the number of users and published games keep increasing you have to constantly increase the bandwidth, number of storage units and so on. And that shit costs a lot of money, now I'm not saying that it costs 30% of all sales on Valve to do this (let's be honest here, Valve is making lots of money here) but it's a major cost item on Valves book keepings.

And this is the major point where Epic currently have the upper hand because they already need that enormous network to feed Fortnite so currently they give away that for free for their game publishers. Once Fortnite decreases in popularity they will have to stop subsidizing that network and then it will be interesting to see what happens to the cut that Epic takes.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: GuestThats not how economics works. Why would any business create a product for a market that does not exist or is irrelevant in terms of the size of that market? Businesses always look at the size of the market and how much they could possibly get in sales vs the cost of servicing that market. The truth is for many game devs, the outgoings vs projected revenue isn't worth it. We have to show them that the market exists. The only metrics that really matter are sales metrics

Imagine you and a small group of people want chairs. All that's produced is tables. Then half of the group starts going to the retailer, buying tables, but tell everybody "I will use it as a chair! A chair, understand!"
What would be my reaction as a table manufacturer?
I'd say think: "Fine, have fun."
It's no incentive at all for me to produce chairs when I know people will still buy my stuff if I wont - quite the opposite.
What they are showing is not a market for chairs - it's a market for "whatever four-legged you make".

I understand that you're saying that less than a percent is not incentive enough to get chairs many Linux games - it seems you're right. You're hoping for an increasing Linux percentage - I don't see it. But either way, if your long term goal is native Linux games, people must demand native Linux games sooner or later.

Still that first group have something to sit on while the other have to stand.

Look, I'm with you and I think that everyone here is as well and you are damn correct in that we sooner or later must demand native Linux games but as you conclude yourself, 1% is not the enough to make that demand mean anything. There simply is no way around the fact that we have to increase that number (where exactly the limit is I do not know but it clearly is above 1%) and until then all proton does is allow us to still use Linux while getting access to the latest games.

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Quoting: hakzsam

Quoting: F.UltraBut then perhaps the problem lies in Mesa?! For with 19.1.0 also Wolfenstein II stopped working altogether due to some Vulkan init error and here DXVK isn't even being used so I can hardly blame it here).

This is now fixed in Mesa master [1]. Sorry for the breakage but it was actually a game bug. The fix will be in the next 19.1.x releases. Next time if you want to report bugs directly, feel free to open a ticket [2] under the Vulkan/Radeon component. Thanks!

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/ef1787dbc95e138b782fef1fcc93279ccf0e4910
[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org

Thanks, yes I added bugs there before in the past for e.g Dying Light but hadn't really gotten down to getting a clear error from Wolfenstein II in order to make a useful bug report yet. I will do better in the future!

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Quoting: DuncWell, if it's any consolation to indie devs reading GoL, my wishlist is a mess. :)

I'm even worse, I've never ever used the whishlist. When I'm in the mood for buying a game I simply go this site and see if GoL have covered anything recently that looks interesting.

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It's also quite clear from this announcement that what they where planning to do before Ubuntu backed was just to remove the text that said that Ubuntu was a recommended system. Going by some earlier comments on the Internet during this few hectic days one could almost get the impression that Valve was going to make sure that Steam could not be installed on Ubuntu at all :-)

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My only gripe right now is that Vampyr for some reason have had it's performance seriously downgraded the last versions of DXVK.

First it was reported that this happened because the new DXVK required some new Vulkan extension that wasn't in Mesa 19.0 and the fallback was slower, but then Mesa 19.1 with the extension came and the performance dropped even more :( so it went from a very playable game to completely unplayable.

But then perhaps the problem lies in Mesa?! For with 19.1.0 also Wolfenstein II stopped working altogether due to some Vulkan init error and here DXVK isn't even being used so I can hardly blame it here).

This on a RX480 btw.

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