Quoting: fenglengshunIn that case, why not take the guarantee, and then use some of that money to do marketing campaign when it's closer to Steam release?

It would be interesting to know then what the typical price of such games is when it finally makes it to Steam. Games drop price so quickly these days. I'd wager that whatever marketing they could do with the Epic cash wouldn't be enough to offset the loss.

Even if hypothetically (because the publisher was crazy) a game did come out on Steam 6 months late, and was still full price, and I still really wanted it (a lot of ifs) there's no way in hell I wouldn't be waiting for a sale if I'd already been forced to wait that long.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: fenglengshunBecause it's going sell anyways once you get to Steam.

I don't think that's true. A lot of people in the forums state that they will not purchase a title that went the Epic exclusive route. Additionally, games are always *much* cheaper by that point.

For instance:
* Dead Island 2 has already dropped from AU$99 to AU$15 in some places for the physical Xbox day one edition, and it's not even on Steam yet.
* The Saints Row remake is currently AU$14.83 (and it was even given away on the Epic Games Store late last year).
* Goat Simulator 3 made it to Steam just last month and already dropped to $28.57 during a sale and has a Steam player count of 98 people as I write this.

Quoting: fenglengshunLet's not forget that Hades was an Epic exclusive, after all.

Hades doesn't disprove my point. It was not a AAA title. There might have been the hope that it would sell well, but I doubt its success was expected. I think that most sales (and the focus) for the game was on Switch. The game did not launch with PlayStation or Xbox support either, so they might have also been lacking in manpower.

Quoting: fenglengshunThe only issue is that Epic is a marketing blackhole, as they say, so if your game isn't good then it's just going to get forgotten.

Even if it is good it might well be forgotten there. When it comes to consoles, I buy games physically. Alan Wake 2 wasn't on store shelves. When it comes to PC, I buy games on Steam. It wasn't there either. I genuinely forgot that the game was even out for a few months until it was mentioned at the Game Awards — and we can tell it's coming to GamePass anyway because that's the pattern with such games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I beat Saints Row 1 & 2 on the 360 back in 2017. I liked the first game the most. The second was fine, but I didn't like the personality of the characters so much.

Next I then started playing SR3 on PC, but I was feeling kind of burnt out on these types of games at that point and stopped playing after sinking a few hours into it.

It didn't help matters that SR3 seemed to be the point where everything went a bit too goofy. It was like a different game series in many respects. For example, I vaguely recall that you would get points in SR3 for running over pedestrians, which wasn't a thing in the prior games. Perhaps it was taking inspiration from Postal or something.

Then a while back I purchased a 6900 XT and got the Saints Row remake included as a freebie pre-order. Very disappointing that it only came out on Epic Store at first, when I already had all of the other games on Steam by that point through various bundles and sales.

Mechanically, the driving and all of the jank in the remake felt just like the first two SR games, just with a much higher resolution and frame rate (which is not great given the huge time span between them). Unlike a lot of people, I could kind of look past that (particularly since I didn't drop any extra money to get it), but it really highlighted the importance of having good characters and story writing in modern titles. Once again, I stopped playing the remake and left it unfinished. Perhaps I'll get back to it one day since I'm probably 75% of the way through it, but it's not a game that I feel excited for.

Side-rant: I have a theory that every 3rd party game with a relatively big budget that is released on the Epic Store as a timed exclusive, is going to be a game that the developers don't think will sell. Alan Wake 2, Dead Island 2, Skull and Bones, Goat Simulator 3, a bunch of games I've never heard of (presumably not AAA), and Saints Row remastered... why bother putting a game on Steam and giving it the most eyes and promotion if it's not going to sell anyway?

I'm not saying that these games are all bad, just that the developers or publishers seem to have no faith in them. In the case of the Saints Row remake, the reasons are especially obvious.

I especially find it disrespectful to fans that purchased other games in the franchise on Steam — or in the case of games like Dead Island and Dead Island Riptide, physical boxes that included codes for Steam activation. I also think that being EGS exclusive angers enough people that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that game sales won't be great.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeI had to use Proton Experimental for Dungeon Keeper 2 to not run at like 4 frames per second.

Works perfectly for me out of the box (defaulting to Proton 8.0-5). I just played a few levels.

Edit: I missed the "2" there. Yes that was one I had switched to 9.0 (Beta).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BelaptirFor Tiberian Sun, after you've done that, edit SUN.INI (in the game directory) and DDrawcompat.ini and add the desired resolution so the game recognises it.

For Red Alert same, but instead of SUN.INI edit RA2.INI and RA2MD.INI

Thanks. I kept at it for Red Alert 2 and got it working nicely, but it turns out that this was going down the wrong path.

In RA2.INI I have this for the Video section:

[Video]
ScreenWidth=1024
ScreenHeight=768
StretchMovies=no

In DDrawCompat.ini the related lines I have are:

SupportedDepthFormats = 16
SupportedResolutions = 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768

In game I have the resolution set to "1024 x 760 x 16". This allows me to play at the game's originally supported maximum resolution, fullscreen with the correct aspect ratio which is just what I want.

The problem I was experiencing was delated to the settings I selected in cnc-ddraw config.exe. In the end I hit Restore default settings and tried again, only making the following changes:

Compatibility Settings -> Limit game speed: 60 ticks per second

I made sure not to touch anything else.

Let the driver (or the ddraw.dll replacement) perform the upscaling instead of the game. The sphere behind the Westwood intro video should be a circle instead of an oval if the aspect ratio is correctly maintained, which it is.

It's not working 100% the same as it did back in the day because the "Would you like to quit Red Alert 2?" question box is still cut off, so I have to click around to find the quit button. That's why I originally had the cnc-ddraw config.exe "Compatibility Settings" -> "Fix invisible videos / UI elements" option selected, but that was what was introducing all of the other resolution issues I was experiencing.

I tried a RA2 skirmish match without changing the "Limit game speed" setting, and before I could even get to the menu to slow the game down, I got a game over screen (the computer destroyed me in 6 seconds!). 60 ticks per second feels about right, but you could also probably go a tiny bit faster.

Sadly, I'm still not having any luck with Tiberian Sun. I can get the video and menus full-screen at the correct aspect ratio using AllowHiResModes=yes in SUN.INI and my native monitor resolution, but then starting a match causes an instant crash. Or, I can get everything looking correct at 800x600 upscaled, but then the menus revert back to their behaviour of not showing up. It's extremely frustrating.

Edit: I finally got Tiberian Sun working 100% as well, by setting the Proton version to 3.7-8. Of all the included Steam Play compatibility tool options available, this is the only one that works 100%. Proton 3.16-9 kind works but has flickering, and all newer versions cause the menus to be cut off. It seems a regression was introduced somewhere.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I purchased all of the games, and just finished performing limited testing via Proton. They all seem to work perfectly out of the box, with just these exceptions:

* Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun and Firestorm - some in-game options menus are rendered black or missing
* Command & Conquer Renegade - the mouse cursor doesn't move, although the menus can mostly be navigated with the keyboard
* Commnad & Conquer Red Alert 2 - the screen goes entirely black after the intro video finishes playing

It's quite impressive how far Proton has came. According to one reporter on protondb, https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw [External Link] can be used to fix Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. I've tried it and it does indeed make the game playable... but it's not a great experience. It includes a "cnc-ddraw config.exe" utility and a custom ddraw.dll file that you can use by setting the game launch options in Steam to this:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw.dll=n,b" %command%

With these changes, the missing menus will now appear, but they'll be rendered at the top-left hand side of the screen in their native 800x600 resolution (which is quite tiny on my 4k panel). No amount of tinkering I've done so far has been able to solve this.

Furthermore, the actual gameplay is stretched to fullscreen (when it's clearly meant for a 4:3 monitor) and I was unable to find a work-around. The game speed also had to be turned down somewhat or it was completely unplayable. I'm on a 7950X3D, it's possible that YMMV.

Tested on Arch with a RX 7900 XTX with the free software driver stack, and graphics details maxed out for all games (and a resolution of 1600x1200 for games meant for 4:3).

We got a remaster for the original C&C, so hopefully we can get one for Tiberian Sun and Firestorm next.

Edit: To clarify, all the non-C&C EA classics seem to work fine as well without any tinkering — aside from telling some games to use Proton 9.0 (Beta) although I can't remember if that was ever necessary. Populous: The Beginning looks like it doesn't remember the selected resolution when set from the main menu, but it looks like actual gameplay does use higher resolutions so I think that it's just a quirk of the game and is actually running as intended.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

"users probably just pirate a yuzu folder with everything"

To that I say, users probably also pirate games by hacking their Switch.

There, I've said it! Does that mean that Nintendo will now stop selling the Switch, since we know people use it for piracy? :huh:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It reminds me of my time at RMIT in the early 2000s. I couldn't afford a laptop so I had Gentoo with all of my applications and work files loaded on a USB HDD, which I just plugged into one of the computers in the lab to do my work.

One day, a staff member noticed me working this way via a security camera and marched into the room to tell me that it was not allowed and demand that I immediately shut it down and boot the machine back into Windows. The person in question and some other more senior staff members called me into a meeting a few days later, and explained that it was against their ToS (which I believe they had only just made specifically for me as it wasn't even on the website yet) and said that I had compromised their computer.

I explained that all of the computers were set to boot from USB already, and I did no such thing, and that I was only doing my university work, but they didn't care.

I even protested this with a blog post explaining how absurd this was on my student account's blog (a service provided to all students simply by dropping files into ~/public_html), which the university deleted a few days later without explanation. Gosh studying there sucked! I always think about it when I think about bootable USB drives.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I've just got an S22 Ultra — I just get whatever hand-me-down phone my spouse gives me since I'm not really into phones except for educational apps like Duolingo and Anki — but this phone can do split screen, and you can break an app out into a window. I'm sure you can get the size to be the way you want, with a bit of messing around.

There are also all kinds of custom keyboards you can get. I used to always use the Hackers Keyboard, which supports various sizes and keyboard layouts and is great for things like SSH (but eventually had to switch away for Japanese input support).

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to make it work, although I personally just can't imagine the experience being great for anything more than turn-based strategy games and the like. You can't feel for the keys/buttons, and don't want to be looking at a virtual keyboard when trying to focus on reaction times in an action game.

I miss the days of my N900. I hate that Microsoft screwed that up... but it was Nokia's choice to go along with it. :sad:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShabbyXSo why go through the trouble? Because it's *users* microsoft is buying.

A agree, at least to a point. It's not the only reason, since Activition gave them a very strong incentive.

Activision was threatening to pull CoD from Xbox unless they were cut a better deal. MS would have been getting a worse deal than Sony for the same rights because they have a worse bargaining position, being 3rd place in the console war. By buying Activision, they no longer need to worry about competing on uneven ground, and turn a great disadvantage into an advantage going forward.

Anyway, that's just another aspect to it, although a smaller point in the grand scheme of things (as I'll point out in a moment).

Quoting: ShabbyXAnd with users microsoft can keep its other businesses alive. More users on microsoft platforms == fewer users on other platforms == worse software support for other platforms.

This is incorrect.

In the end, the primary reason Microsoft purchased Activision was not because of CoD. It wasn't even about cloud gaming.

It was primarily about King.

Microsoft is desperate to compete in the mobile space, which dwarfs all of console gaming in potential revenue. These mobile games will not be on fewer platforms. Definitely not. If anything, they'll be on more platforms than ever.

As for CoD, it's is still going to be on PlayStation. It's going to end up being basically everywhere. Sure, this and the other games in the Blizzard/Activision catalogue will help GamePass (and many of the smaller console/PC games will likely remain exclusive to MS and Steam, no argument there), but it hardly means that there will be fewer users on other platforms.

Why is this? Did you watch the Kinda Funny interview? Phil Spencer himself said that Microsoft could release the best games possible on Xbox today, and it still won't stop people buying a PlayStation. At best, people might play games from both ecosystems. PlayStation is too far ahead when it comes to the average gamer's digital library, and unless Sony make some really anti-consumer moves that drive people away (similar to what MS tried to do in the previous console generation), it's going to take a long time before we see that change.

View this comment - View article - View full comments