I really dislike the argument of "would you be willing to pay more for a port". Rather, if I am going to buy the game without any official support it should be a lot cheaper, as an inferior product and since I'm not costing them any money in support going forward. Would they also want to charge extra for older Windows versions or any hardware configurations different from the standard? Maybe want to charge for bugfixes individually?

Heck, they accuse Linux users of "wanting things for free", but expect people to buy their game to use with Steamplay... without investing anything on Linux support. :S:

I'm actually pretty ok with small developers relying on Steamplay, so long as it works. In some cases it just makes sense for them, and for us very little changes - they would not feel confident enough to release for Linux anyway, or they would release the Linux build but wouldn't be able to offer a lot of support, or they are going to helpfully fix issues that arise when playing with Wine or Proton. But it is important to keep in mind that it is not the same. Whether the game is officially supported matters. Whether a developer chooses to support Linux or not matters, even for whitelisted games. Sometimes there will be issues with Proton a native version would not have (even if it is just a workaround needed). For some people those things will be a dealbreaker, and for others it will still carry some weight. So when a developer wants to pretend it is the same, they are either being disingenuous or intentionally overselling.

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Quoting: Doc AngeloI've not played Stellaris for very long, about 40 hours. (Which is not that long for 4x games...)

To me, those 5 bullet points sound like additional anomalies/special projects, which consist of a few short text screens, a small image and a 3d model. Is that about right?

Nope. They are creating a new system for archeological investigations (I guess some anomalies and special projects will now use this system). You find archeological sites (through surveys or in other ways), assign a scientist to work over time, he can progress in the chain or trigger random events. It has a new interface and everything, which you can see (along with more details, if you want) in this dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-145-archaeology.1170190/ [External Link] . Besides that, there is a new resource called "minor artifacts" that you earn and use on various actions, gaining tech boosts or benefits to your planets.

There are also Relics, special "items" you can collect and that give you both passive and active bonuses. Some are from previous DLC, like the throne of the Great Khan (a space conqueror introduced in Apocalypse); I think there are 3 of those (available even without the new DLC), plus 20 from Ancient Relics. You can see the new screen and the pictures for some relics in this dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-148-relics-relic-worlds.1177865/ [External Link] .

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This looks pretty cool. I'm particularly fond of Stellaris story packs, as I feel like the game benefits more than most from additional content (event chains, anomalies, interesting worlds, small factions/enemies to interact with, etc). But the addition of an archeology system also fits particularly well with many of the anomalies and missions we already have - including the existing precursor event chains.

I got back to playing Stellaris recently, and man is this game amazing now. Vanilla 2.2 is so great, and with all the DLC (well, almost all, didn't get Megacorp yet) it is so replayable and full of possibilities.

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When I read about the "community integration", I really thought they were hinting at Proton/Wine (among other things, of course). In a "we won't whitelist games like Steam but if people want to use the client to run things with a compatibility layer they can".

It was a long shot, but still a possibility until I saw the tweet saying the client won't even run on Linux. :/

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I think this is less serious than what they have done previously - I think if you put your own game on your own store only, that's more or less fair compared to paying others to not compete with you. And much less than paying someone to break their promises after crowdfunding and pre-order (Phoenix Point).

But after recent events, this isn't just a matter of them buying a successful studio and selling it on the most profitable store, it is yet another way they found of using their money in a way that takes games away from the Steam store.

Competition is so good, Epic could invest so much money into making a better platform or making games for their store but it is so much easier to spend it to make Steam worse. If you make all stores suck, your sucky store can compete much more easily!

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I'm not going to dive into VR for many years yet, if ever - I play strategy games on an old laptop - but I find Valve's commitment to open standards and intercompatibility really encouraging.

I don't see VR becoming mainstream any time soon; even the cheap alternatives are expensive, and have been so for years now. But does this hardware look cool.

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Hmm, the bugged release is surely a bummer. From what I remember, Stellaris (their last new release) was good on this front at least.

But yeah, Paradox at least has great post-launch support. And same-day native release is quite good.

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The issue is complicated. Regional pricing is an absolute necessity in many places; not having it can be effectively "not available in this region". The technical measures used to implement it, however, are basically DRM, and thus have serious implications.

In this case in particular, I kind of agree the point the EU is making. Within the EU, there shouldn't be limitations on "exporting" games, even if this affects the ability to offer a "more fair price". Also, many countries already use the same currency, which is one less concern (exchange rates rarely reflect purchasing power, but besides that it can fluctuate a lot which is a big problem). But I hope that Valve can figure out a better solution so that people in those countries aren't screwed by a corner case of international trade deals... since it apparently only affects key reselling, perhaps by limiting their policy in issuing keys they could keep the fair prices for purchases in the actual store?

Of course, ideally we could have a single price worldwide and no trade restrictions. But first we would need to figure out how to solve all the inequality in the world. The idea that you could just price a product in dollars and sell it worldwide is naive at best.

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I really like the idea of itch.io, though I never bought any games from there for a very simple reason - no regional pricing, or "games are ridiculously overpriced for me". I downloaded some free games to try, but I'd like to actually be able to purchase games from there. Still, it is one store I'd like to see rising to the forefront. Epic goes on about how they take a smaller cut from developers, well, itch.io takes an even smaller cut and they offer better features.

As for why it is mostly unknown... well, they lack the big money to invest in publicity, they don't sideline the indies to make space for the big games, and they could still improve usability and user friendliness. Make it easier to find games you like somehow, make downloads more transparent for users, improve the looks and base themes.

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I was a bit disappointed at first. I don't want the library to show friends, I want it to show my collection and relevant information about the game. I'd like more information from the store page to be shown for the games in the library, and I'd like for important things like the workshop and the DLC to be more prominent. Initially I assumed the "updates" given so much attention would be the "news" currently shown (every article on a website that mentions the game), which would be horrible, but if it is actual updates that is actually very nice. But I do like the new visual style, and the filtering is very nice indeed, so the change is for the better in general. The flexibility of the search coupled with the saving searches option will be so much more convenient than creating categories and then classifying every game.

I also love the "events" page, and the idea that you can set up reminders for it is great. Many games I play have somewhat frequent updates that add more stuff (Kingdom Rush Origins comes to mind as it was featured here just today, but also Northgard), or some very old games that get a completely unexpected updates (Sins of a Solar Empire), and it would be nice to see those things. Particularly for games that I might not have played in a while (Paradox games have so many additions, but I follow dev diaries so I know about them months in advance...), or are not so big (no chance of missing a Civilization DLC). And then, there are actual mini-events like Amplitude often does (the Endless Day each year, the time when Sega made a competition between their strategy franchises).

In general, I'm excited.

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