Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: GuestPersonally i think 30% is perfectly fine for AAA devs. I however think that Steam [and other Stores] could lower that Cut for Indie devs.

Funny enough, it is actually the other way around. AAA devs regularly negotiate a lower cut with Valve. Which in itself actually proves the cut Valve usually takes is higher than it needs to be.
Indies don't have that kind of power to negotiate with, unfortunately.

There's also this, which strongly favors AAA to begin with:
https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-new-revenue-sharing-favours-big-budget-games-and-indie-devs-arent-happy/ [External Link]

Hah interesting, didnt know that. Well that sucks of course. Should definitly be the other way around.

It should be, but this is all about money. Steam don't really want to encourage more indies - they want to stop AAA's going elsewhere. Indies definitely get a rough deal with Steam and I don't blame any indie that takes an Epic deal. But I'll happily blacklist any AAA dev/pub that does so.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: psy-q

Quoting: kuhpunktRelease it on several stores then. It's not like it's complicated.

Last I heard it's very complicated. Each store has its own toolset for uploads, its own publishing requirements, its own system for how updates and patches are handled. An indie dev once compared the experience between GOG, itch.io (the easiest) and Steam (the most complicated), but that was before EGS existed and I can't find the article now. But the conclusion was "think carefully before adding another store", so it seems it isn't something you just do on a whim.

That's ridiculous. It's fucking SEGA. Even if the toolsets are a bit complicated... that's no reason to go to just one store. They got a ton of cash. That's it.

Except its not this was Creative Assembly call as it was there call to port the other total war games and alien isolation to linux its why there are no sonic games etc on linux sega have not authorised any linux ports. I do not have the tweet about it anymore but this was a CA lead decision.

SEGA, CA, whatever... fucking tiny indies are able to set up Steam and sell their shit. Saying it's too complicated makes no sense.

oh you don't understand it not difficult its cash and you cant say in the same position you would do the the same exmaple i will give you two million upfront for a year of exclusivity on your game plus i will compensate you for lost sales plus i am going to take less of a cut of your profits. Still going to be noble and say no ?

Indies should always... ALWAYS... take the cash deal. The smaller the indie, the more they should take it. I mean, I'll stop patronising them (the few that I do) and I won't buy their game until it hits Itch, GOG, or Steam, but they should ALWAYS take the money.

But bigger studios? TOTAL WAR?? C'mon. They can absolutely do one in my opinion. Money talks, but won't see any of this consumer's money. Ever. Maybe not ever again - I'm not that bitter and twisted, but I won't support exclusivity deals in the same way I won't support Denuvo. Once those barriers are out of the way, I'll reconsider. But I'll usually remember that exclusivity deal and think "hmmmm... maybe not".

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Just checked my Steam profile to see when I played the last one - June 2015!!! Five... FIVE years ago??? It was a load of fun, but I did get bored on the 20 hour mark and stopped playing. Couldn't tell you why, but I think it was because of the grind to get minor upgrades to components? I prefer games where there's a HUGE number of components thrown at you and it's up to you to build them in novel ways.

Might be mis-remembering this one though. I'll keep an eye on it. I love 2D space sims.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: MohandevirPersonally, I was able to steer my son away from Fortnite. He is now an Overwatch convert. At least, he's not giving any more money to Epic that is used to fight Linux gaming...

Because, for my part, encouraging Epic in anyway is detrimental to Linux gaming. It's probably the single worst threat, atm. It's a total no-go.

I "liked" your comment because I agree with the concerns around Epic's exclusivity... but omg, Blizzard are hardly a shining beacon of light when it comes to a) being good guys, nor b) supporting Linux! :D

Five minutes watching Jim Sterling's videos on Blizzard would open anyone's eyes on what a shit-show they are!

(Overwatch is great though!)

Never pretended they were perfect... It's a matter of choosing the least worst. It was Overwatch or Fortnite... I had to find a compromise. :)

This said, there are no exclusivity deals, at Blizzard, that will directly hurt Linux. On top of that, the launcher and the games are running well in Lutris and you shouldn't get banned by using Linux (official Blizzard stance).

So... I can tolerate that.

Yep - Overwatch genuinely feels native for me on Lutris. Perfect sync of mouse on/off screen, no minimising of the app when I click out of it, superb performance, all features fully supported. It's excellent!

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Quoting: MohandevirPersonally, I was able to steer my son away from Fortnite. He is now an Overwatch convert. At least, he's not giving any more money to Epic that is used to fight Linux gaming...

Because, for my part, encouraging Epic in anyway is detrimental to Linux gaming. It's probably the single worst threat, atm. It's a total no-go.

I "liked" your comment because I agree with the concerns around Epic's exclusivity... but omg, Blizzard are hardly a shining beacon of light when it comes to a) being good guys, nor b) supporting Linux! :D

Five minutes watching Jim Sterling's videos on Blizzard would open anyone's eyes on what a shit-show they are!

(Overwatch is great though!)

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(p.s. I love that this article, despite all the comments, has precisely zero likes at the time of writing this comment!)

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPEpic just has the better deals for developers.

My hope is that Valve will wake up from its slumber and starts giving developers better deals as well. A cut lower than the absurd 30% would be a very good start.

Concerning the game at hand, it does suck for Feral I imagine, but I was never interested in the "Saga" series to begin with. Too limited in scope.

I wish more devs would dual launch on Itch and Steam. I just bought Space Grunts 2 by OrangePixel that way. They wanted $10 on Itch, I ended up throwing them $15 through the tip system (which matched was slightly more money than the pound-sterling price on Steam, but only by a bit), but which is a 50% mark up from their perspective. And I get a Steam key anyway, so win-win.

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Quoting: psy-q

Quoting: kuhpunktRelease it on several stores then. It's not like it's complicated.

Last I heard it's very complicated. Each store has its own toolset for uploads, its own publishing requirements, its own system for how updates and patches are handled. An indie dev once compared the experience between GOG, itch.io (the easiest) and Steam (the most complicated), but that was before EGS existed and I can't find the article now. But the conclusion was "think carefully before adding another store", so it seems it isn't something you just do on a whim.

But this isn't an indie - and regardless, once you've done it once (as they have), it's really not complicated. Besides, the comment wasn't about technical complications, it was about the argument itself - "we don't want to be tied to one store", all the while tying themselves, via exclusivity, to one store. It beggars belief.

I'm sure they'll also launch on MS Store though, then use that as a bogus claim of non-exclusivity, as if anyone cares, or indeed buys from the MS Store...

This is purely about vilifying Steam. What Epic don't seem to realise though is that every time they steal a publisher for an exclusive, they glorify Steam as the good guy and vilify themselves.

God I hate Epic.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: elmapul"sidestepping the actual Windows API. "
how is that even possible?

So, again, just as I understand it from reading bug reports about a game I'm vaguely interested in rather than from any in-depth knowledge, most programs will use some kind of library when they need to make some system calls to make something happen - libc or ntdll.dll, say - but it's also possible to just make system calls directly: libc and ntdll.dll need to be able to make their own system calls, too, of course. Windows and Linux both use the same mechanism for this (I think it's a processor instruction and registers?) but they use different numbers in the registers: that is, they'll both have a system call number 12, but there's no reason for it to necessarily do the same thing. In fact, which thing gets done by each number changes between versions of Windows, so the developers doing this need to check the version of Windows and use a look-up table to generate their numbers.

Exactly this! on i386 you put the syscall number in the eax register and some other data in other registers depending on the syscall and then you raise the $80 interrupt. On x86_64 they implemented a pure syscall instruction on the CPU.

Here is an old "Hello World" example that calls the sys_write syscall (syscall 4) to write the "hello world" string to stdout and then it calls exit (syscall 1) to let the kernel terminate the "application" with a proper exit code.
 
.data
    s:
        .ascii "hello world\n"
        len = . - s
.text
    .global _start
    _start:

        movl $4, %eax   /* write system call number */
        movl $1, %ebx   /* stdout */
        movl $s, %ecx   /* the data to print */
        movl $len, %edx /* length of the buffer */
        int $0x80

        movl $1, %eax   /* exit system call number */
        movl $0, %ebx   /* exit status */
        int $0x80

Jesus, I'm getting wild, unwelcome flashbacks to the mid-80's and trying to learn 68020 assembler to get a simple text message scrolling smoothly across the screen! I got there, but I paid for that in blood and almost literal tears. Never again!

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Super helpful, CatKiller. Now you mention the benchmarks, it's obvious that they've rolled their own prior to submitting a patch for wider adoption. Thanks for clearing that up.

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