Quoting: GuestValve need competition against Steam. The reality is that it's the main place to get most games, and it's the primary point of purchase for just about anything. I've seen a good many comments on this very site that if a game isn't on Steam, they won't buy it. If a developer wants a game to be successful, they've practically no choice but to put in on Steam (exceptions exist of course, but for the vast majority this is quite true).

Valve have far too much influence as a distribution platform. It's not healthy for the gaming ecosystem. They can pretty much do what they want with impunity, and that's really not good.

At about this point I'm sure several people will be foaming at the mouth and already typing out something furiously, but at no point above did I say Valve were bad or evil. They've reached this position by being good at the business. My point is that the situation is bad, and the situation is harmful to gaming, particularly on GNU/Linux.

Let's put this in context: Does Valve have competition in the Linux gaming world? What are the features that other stores offer that would make me switch?

For me it's simple: Valve offers the best Linux support out of the box for even the most novice Linux users and it also offers regional prices (at least for my country). And if that wasn't enough, they also allow me to go to my preferred dev web and directly buy a game code, guaranteeing me that the dev will get 100% of that money. Seriously, Valve needs competition but all the other contenders stores are just "yet another place were you can buy your games". Out of itch.io or GOG, the others stores doesn't offer any ground breaking feature that I can appreciate as Linux user.

Quoting: GuestOn a parallel note, the flood of crap on Steam is really harmful to developers, and customers too. Part of the reason I continue to support GOL is for discovering nice games. Something like Vaporum I'd never have seen were it not covered on this site. Valve's so-called "algorithm" is basically just a way for them not to have a hand in any sort of store curation. While there are arguments for and against that, if Valve don't have a hand in it, they shouldn't take money for it. That 30% cut of theirs is, I believe, too much.

How do you know that "it's too much"? The 30% cut is just propaganda at this point as Steam is not the only store that ask for 30% cut (which is not a constant BTW), but it's always the argument that makes it the bad guy. Not to mention that Steam has curators, so you can get GOL recommendations from their platform as well. I'm starting to think that the people that complain about Steam mostly don't use it.

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Quoting: scaineI follow a lot of indies on Twitter who genuinely despise Steam. Not just for taking a 30% cut, but for taking that cut and giving almost nothing back. They argue that the lure of the biggest audience for gaming is useless when Steam's algorithms are geared to only highlight AAA or "popular" content.

Valve implemented the discovery queue and curators recommendation. And during the sales, you have to explore the discovery queue in order to get a trading card. At least in my case, I was able to discover many nice games with the DQ.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI hope the lawsuit succeeds, although chances are naturally slim.
Their cut is and always has been too high.

Yes, they offer a ton of services, but practically no developer utilizes even half of them.
The solution is simple: Lower the minimal cut to something reasonable (closer to the Epic cut), then allow developers to opt-in to features they actually need, which would then increase the cut.

But Epic cut is dumping: https://www.techpowerup.com/280877/epic-games-lost-usd-453-million-running-the-epic-games-store-in-2019-2020 [External Link]

They got $265 Million from third parties, which means that they got a profit of 26.5 million. Remove the millions they spend with exclusives and free games plus Fortnite benefits and you will be far from making any profit with that 12% cut.

BTW, seems that GOG takes a similar cut from devs and had financial problems not long ago. Anyway, what a greedy bastards!

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Just as a general reminder:

You don't have to opt-out of Mesa drivers at system level in order to test this as you can simply install AMDGPU-PRO vulkan as a client driver along side RADV (you will have to use VK_ICD_FILENAMES in order to select the driver though)

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Quoting: ripper81358AMD GPU owners should avoid this game for now. It seems to have massive problems with the MESA drivers.

The only way to get it working without trouble is to use AMDVLK right now. The performance is not good with this driver though.

I didn't notice a big difference between AMDVLK and Radv, maybe a few less frames here and there (I'm using vsync though).

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Quoting: gojulMissing files for me :-(

Can confirm. Dang it!

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Just bought a copy, don't waste a key on me :P

Quoting: gojulMissing files for me :-(

I'm downloading right now. I'll let you know if I have the same problem in around 10 min :S

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Quoting: slaapliedjeFunny thing I always find is that most games on non-dos platforms usually ran at 50/60 frames per second (depending on PAL/NTSC).

TBF, when running on NTSC or PAL you have to process a half of the resolution for each frame.

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Quoting: aokami

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: aokamiI worked on the main menu for this. :grin:

Awesome, so if it's terrible we know who to blame! I mean far be it for people to praise it when it's awesome though! Kidding man, that's great. Maybe you can let us know how it was working on getting some cross-platform menus created :)

I've chosen to sail a different ship for personal reasons a few months back, besides any dev currently at Feral has a strict "don't talk to press" agreement (like most studios I guess).
Also the game is not yet released so not sure what is still under NDA (they tried yo avoid a second "Grid" crisis, keeping this one under the hood for years).
Not to mention I was actually surprised to see a live-action trailer rather than gameplay so I definitely won't spoil anything.

What I think I can say at this point would be, it's using the same 20 years old engine as a base but there's a whole new front end renderer (dx8 was getting old-ish kinda) which allows for Feral cross platform magic to take place. Though it does not look the same at all (and doesn't play the same either).
UI is still done via the original engine menu abstraction but most component classes were rewritten to add features and lift limitations (and bug crushing, like, a lot.)

Anyway, I definitely didn't work on the most exciting parts and I won't say more until it is released but give some love to the colleagues and friends who put tears and blood (and extra hours) into this.
Covid was a challenge in itself, like everyone else, made things more complicated and obviously delayed projects.
But if you're based in southwest London or plan to, don't hate macos too much and you're fresh out of Uni with CS background give it a try, they're always looking for new people.

EDIT: oh I know they'll be stressfully reading these lines on monday morning, hi G., I. and D.
I hope I'm not getting into trouble. :whistle:

A PM will probably spit some espresso over their laptop after reading this on Monday XD

Ok, enough cháchara. Time to get my credit card and buy this game.

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The best total war!

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