Do the Epic Online Services require one to have an Epic Store account to use?

While cross-store cross-play is nominally good for games and gamers, I don't feel particularly inclined to sign up for a store that only supports Windows. :/

In my ideal dream world we'd have an open source and distributed system for connecting, matchmaking, etc. with federated servers, such that even open source games could integrate the library for online play. I'm pretty sure it's all solved problems technically (STUN/TURN, DHT, etc.), it just needs someone/s to roll together the functionality into an easy and openly licensed API. I just don't have the energy or drive to even start experimenting with that right now. :(

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On top of the previous comments, it seems a silly name for a product targeting Gen X customers, when Gen Z are known as "Zoomers"! 🤦

And that "Projects" page is something else!

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Quoting: benstor214I’m always interested in the paradox games, but as soon as I see the prices for the ‘complete’ game my interest just vanishes into thin air.

The "full" versions may seem expensive, but perhaps that's because we Linux gamers are often insulated from the mainstream consoles or AAA games. The latest Pokemon games on Switch are $60 (so $120 if you want all the Pokemon AIUI). The latest Call of Duty® regular priced base game is $70, with a $100 "Vault" edition also available.

Then you can look at the hours invested for the money, and the kind of people who like Paradox games are typically in it for the LONG haul. By no means do I have all the EU4 DLC (I stopped playing some years ago), but I have over 1301 hours in the game. Thanks to sales I spent only around $50 in total, but even if I spent $130 (over the course of years, mind you), that'd still be a lot of entertainment for my money.

And then there's the question of "do I really need to buy all the DLC"? There's a Pokemon-like urge we have to "catch 'em all", but the games with a lot of DLC generally have very little that are "must haves", especially when you're yet to get into the game, or don't give a hoot about cosmetics.

As an aside, this last one is the main reason I got off EU4. The core gameplay became so tied to and changed by owning certain DLCs, that they became "necessary" to really play as intended. One example I remember can be summed up as: "remember last patch, when they introduced a 10 year cooldown on declaring war against the same nation? Now you can buy a DLC to bypass that." Though I understand they learned from this, and have more independent stand-alone DLCs for their later titles, such as Stellaris.

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It briefly showed a new EA App screen, then showed Origin and then went into the game.

Yo gamer, we heard you didn't like launchers, so we put a launcher in our launcher, so you can launch a launcher while you launch a launcher from your launcher!

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For those asking "why wasn't it already on Steam?", one of the actual devs has posted on the Steam forum, asking the "publisher" to get in touch, and explaining why it hasn't been on Steam yet legitimately: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2158440/discussions/0/5277681174359234528/ [External Link]

Making it available here as implications on the moderation and the server load of the lobby and its limited resources that should not be taken lightly. It also has some implications for the future of the game concerning reviews which could doom its opportunities. The project is not done yet and it will continue to evolve.

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Quoting: eldakingApparently "retro physical media + monsters" is an entire sub-genre of pokelikes, with Cassette Beasts, Floppy Knights, and Disc Creatures.

Anyone up for making Gramophone Titans?

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It should be noted that there is no single "Creative Commons license". Creative Commons is a suite of licences with various clauses to choose between: From Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which is about as close to Public Domain as one can legally get; to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA), which has a bunch of conditions attached.

FTR, it seems Valve has chosen the latter [External Link]: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0.

ShareAlike gives it a GPL-like quality (no proprietary modifications), but the more important clause is probably the NonCommercial...

dbrand replied with "So... no C&D then?" (C&D being Cease and Desist) since they announced their Project Killswitch case.

So yeah, about that commercial operation you've got going there dbrand...

Though really, since dbrand have already been working on a case, they've probably already reverse-engineered a physical device so don't need these CAD files, and should probably avoid them from a legal standpoint.

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I notice that the game is still being "recommended" by the GamingOnLinux curator in Steam. Maybe it's time to revisit that?

Quoting: HoriIf they consider it's not profitable, or that they could do something else with that time/effort that's more profitable than it, then it is what it is, that's capitalism, we can't demand charity.

It's not charity if it's a product that's already been sold. We're in the realm of legal obligations and customer expectations now.

I think there's two positions one could take on this:

1. "You paid for the game at the time, you got the game at the time"
2. "You paid for the game like everyone else, you should expect to receive the same product/experience as everyone else"

While I personally lean more toward the sentiment of #2, for a single-player game I think #1 can be a reasonable position to hold. So long as the game doesn't lose functionality for those who bought it on Linux, they essentially still have what they paid for. :/

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Hellpoint. AFAICT the first real 3D souls-like we've had with explicit Linux support, and as such it's my first such souls-like. I'm really loving it, so am super glad this got a native release. 46 hours in I'm still exploring the world, and haven't finished my first run yet!

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Looks like a neat twist on Sokoban. Reminds me a bit of Recursed [External Link] from a few years ago, which is yet another puzzle game to which I admitted defeat.

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