Quoting: GuestThey will push the exclusives approach. With more and more competing stores, they will each need something to set themselves apart from the competition. Enter exclusives. It happened with streaming services, it will happen here too. It's been happening in console gaming for years

From what I've heard, exclusives are dying out in consoles space. It makes zero sense for developers to limit their reach. I.e. as a developer you want to sell in all stores to reach more users. At least for independent developers, who aren't controlled by the store itself.

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Quoting: x_wingEach company now has a store, and you're almost forced to have it installed in order to play the game. The problem is that you can't have anymore a standalone installation and that will piss off a lot of people, believe me.

I personally don't "install stores" :) I buy only DRM-free games, so yes that mean standalone installation.

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Quoting: x_wingPeople will really piss off for having such a huge number of stores in order to have their games. All this stupidity will just benefit console gaming in the end...

Number of stores is not a problem (or do you prefer oligopoly?), as long as they won't start pushing the sick exclusives approach.

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I'm surprised they didn't mention Linux explicitly. With Tim Sweeney constantly complaining about MS lock-in, you would have expected him to put Linux front and center in the store announcement. I don't care about launchers, but let's hope the store will have DRM-free options.

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Quoting: HoriCorrect me if I'm wrong but WINE games cannot use Physx, right?

PhysX can run on the CPU.

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Quoting: GuestI think they (Khronos) are planning to converge the roadmaps so that eventually they will be basically equal. Citation needed.

I've seen it here: https://hexus.net/tech/news/software/105895-vulkan-opencl-will-merge-single-api/ [External Link]

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Sounds good! THQ Nordic are one of the Linux supporting publishers.

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It doesn't look too useful. Still tied to CUDA for hardware acceleration.

Also, what stops anyone from using Vulkan compute shaders instead of OpenCL?

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ShmerlValve should have put Linux version release as a requirement for such discounts. It would incentivize big developers (who have money) to make Linux versions. Win win for everyone.

If they had the leverage to do that they wouldn't be dropping the price in the first place.

They can give it as an extra bonus. I.e. decrease even more for those who make Linux releases. Not sure how much it will cut into their profit, but it's some incentive still.

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Yeah, USB optical drive sounds like a good enough solution if you never need one.

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