Quoting: Mal

Quoting: MunkI will never buy your game on EGS, Origin, and likely not on GoG.

Careful, that exactly the message that Epic is trying to pass. Which is blatant lie.

The day Steam competitors offers the same/equally worth/better features, people will naturally buy games from there too. It's a matter of value proposition. There is people who doesn't like Steam and value more GoG for instance. Other people would likely be happy to buy from present day EGS if they were discounted the value of missing features from the front price. That is way nobody has tried before (ofc they don't, in the end it's all about raping customers, not about fair deals).

In case of Paradox for instance if they put together a service with friends, multiplayer, mods, save cloud, guides/forums, automatic updates and patch management and such I'd say they would already have a compelling case for them going by themselves (though I would still miss streaming in my case and controller profiles for niche games like Magicka2, I absolutely love how they used Steam Controller api in that game it's fantastic). Ofc all that stuff costs and so 12% (which already do not contain transaction fees in Epic implementation, so they do sell at higher prices) becomes a chimera.

I understand that you're talking about people in general, however, I was speaking specifically about myself.

With regard to Epic and EA, feature parity isn't the issue, it's that I believe these companies to be unethical in their practices and refuse to do business with them, ever. With GoG, they're trying to solve the most major problem I have, which is library parity (via GoG connect). I can respect GoG's attempt, but until a much more significant portion of my library is available through this feature as well as have a Linux client for GoG Galaxy, I'm simply not interested in the platform. I don't believe they'll ever do enough to win me away from Steam, especially as a Linux gamer. I just want all of my achievements, screenshots, saves, friends, comments, reviews, etc, all to be in the same place. I don't want a fragmented library, and it's going to take a lot to get me to switch.

Epic and EA have no chance at my money. GoG might, but they've got very long way to go.

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Those hardware specs don't seem to make any sense to me. It looks like it's going to thermal throttle immediately, especially the high end model. There's no point to buy high end hardware that's going to be thermally limited to performance of low end hardware.

That's entirely speculative, however. I've obviously not tested it. It just looks like there's not going to be sufficient cooling.

Edit: Just read that it's based off something that has been tested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35OyZzCvG0g [External Link]
I stand corrected.

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What's 100% of $0?

I buy games on Steam because I want them in my Steam library, specifically. I would rather have a game through Steam than GoG or direct from the publisher, because I know the servers are fast, reliable, updates are automatic, proton is integrated, community content is facilitated for, etc.

If you're not selling your game on Steam, there's a very good chance I'm not going to buy it. I'm just being honest.

Paradox can complain all they want, but the harsh reality is, I'm not alone in my significant Steam preference. It's a wrongheaded assumption to make to think that sales on one platform are the same as sales on another. I may buy your game on Steam. I will never buy your game on EGS, Origin, and likely not on GoG.

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I'm happy to see Valve build their modern development chops on opportunistic titles like Artifact and Autochess. I'd much rather have them shake off the cobwebs with smaller-scale games than have one of their major IP's flop because they were stuck in the old ways of game development.

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Quoting: massatt212DXVK & D9VK are so nice buuuuuut the shader stutters :'(

The shaders need to be compiled when they first run, which can stutter the game. Once they've been compiled and cached, everything should be smooth (until a new shader needs to compile). Obviously this is a less than optimal experience, so Valve's already rolled out a solution to this with Proton - steam downloads the shader cache with the game, so everything's ready to go.

If you're playing without Steam and Proton, I don't think there's much you can do about this other than have the shaders run and compile, knowing that the next time they run they won't stutter.

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Before everyone takes offense, hear him (Henri Verbeet) out. I'm not taking sides, but here's the "elaborate explanation" he's referring to in the post linked to the article: https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-January/138023.html [External Link]

Personally, I don't think he was as tactful as he possibly could have been in his recent comments, but far more than he could have been. I don't really mind the odd off-color comment from developers. Even Linus himself is known to express frustration with less than cordial responses. It seems that he's frustrated and might have let that affect his tone ever so slightly. I don't see a need to jump down his throat.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Munk

Quoting: ageresTheir Dota card game failed, so they are making a Dota chess game... What's next, a Dota board game?

Autochess is already a successful mod of DOTA with a playerbase. They tried to work out a deal with the creator of that mod, but they couldn't come to terms. During E3, it came out that the creator of the Dota mod is creating an Epic Game Store exclusive version of Autochess. League of Legends also announced they were coming out with a version of Autochess.

This is a very different situation to Artifact, and they're actually seeming to do things right this time by releasing an open beta. This is probably from the pressure of the announcement of the clones, but the closed beta nature of Artifact is largely responsible for its failure.

All autochess players already rely on Dota. If Valve can rush the game out, even in an imperfect state, they have a very good opportunity to keep many of those players on their platform.

Presumably an Epic game store exclusive version of this thing would have to not use the DoTA lore and characters because otherwise why would Valve not whack them for massive copyright violations?
Alternatively, if it remains basically a mod for DoTA which only works by attaching to DoTA and in itself only contains the mod author's IP, does Valve have a responsibility to let a paid game released on someone else's store piggyback on their game? You'd think they could patch DoTA not to allow it to work.

One way or another, I see significant advantages to a version, whether produced by Valve themselves or not, that remains part of the Steam and DoTA ecosystem.

Autochess is an invention of a new type of game, called a Multiplayer Auto Battle Arena (MABA). It doesn't inherently rely on Valve's IP, it's just what was used to bring it to creation, like how DOTA was initially a mod of another game. I don't see what Valve would have to gain from blocking it, considering neither the EGS exclusive or the LoL version being developed use Valve's IP. "Autochess" (the EGS exclusive made by the Autochess DOTA mod creator) is being built in Unreal Engine, so it's not relying on anything of Valve's.

The advantage Valve has is that the MABA genre started with the DOTA mod, so all the MABA players are already on Valve's platform, necessarily. The fact that they're keeping the DOTA skin/lore isn't very significant. It's just keeping what it started with, being a DOTA mod in the first place, and giving it a first-class treatment. DoTA is a convenient choice because of the scope of the existing lore, but they could theme it to whichever one of their IP's they wanted without losing much, or even just create a whole new IP.

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Quoting: Mountain ManWhatever happened to the good ol' days when Valve used to make classic games like Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike... it seems they have pretty much abandoned some of the strongest franchises in the gaming industry in favor of more Dota spinoffs that nobody asked for.

VR happened. Seriously, that's what it is. When you really dig into what Valve's been doing, they've been quietly working on the hardware and software needed for the next generation since at least 2012. There's a fantastic video going over the history here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ1jyNF0cR0 [External Link]

Valve is mostly a technology company now. That isn't to say they're not a game developer anymore, but their IP's aren't really in much urgent need of a refresh. Their games hold up, more or less, and are still updated. When Valve releases a game, they tend to be paradigm shifting. My guess is we won't see the trilogies of their IP's start to release until they can be sufficiently revolutionary.

It's not all just VR either, nobody really knows what Valve's got up their sleeves with regard to software. There's leaks from time to time, and those leaks suggest that there's a lot of effort going into Source 2. It would make sense to me, given how Valve likes their games to be revolutionary, for them to take their time and build out the tools they'll need to really take things to the next level.

I think a lot of the work they do with open source projects and closed source developers has a lot to do with Valve trying to get the state of technology ready for their next batch of games. It seems like we're getting close to that, with the Index being released and leaked games like Citadel and HLVR.

They're doing work. Personally, I'm happy to wait. I'm excited to see what they've really been up to.

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Quoting: ageresTheir Dota card game failed, so they are making a Dota chess game... What's next, a Dota board game?

Autochess is already a successful mod of DOTA with a playerbase. They tried to work out a deal with the creator of that mod, but they couldn't come to terms. During E3, it came out that the creator of the Dota mod is creating an Epic Game Store exclusive version of Autochess. League of Legends also announced they were coming out with a version of Autochess.

This is a very different situation to Artifact, and they're actually seeming to do things right this time by releasing an open beta. This is probably from the pressure of the announcement of the clones, but the closed beta nature of Artifact is largely responsible for its failure.

All autochess players already rely on Dota. If Valve can rush the game out, even in an imperfect state, they have a very good opportunity to keep many of those players on their platform.

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I see this as a negative that stimulates positive - a catalyst. Exclusives are not a good thing, so hopefully the response to this action will be impactful and blame appropriately assigned.

Valve's response to this is great. The Statement on the page seems to very much just state the facts from their perspective in a very straightforward way. This seems very transparent and allows the customers to see what's going on and speculate as to why. This might be enough.

Crazy ideas could be integrating something like steamgifts.com - a charity lottery system for games and marketable items. Some things are given away on steam, but I think a user-driven charity economy would fit Valve as a company much better. This could directly combat Epic's giveaways.

As for a more direct response to Epic's lean into restriction, Valve could enable developers to go completely drm-less. Perhaps this is already possible and I'm just ignorant, but a lean away from restriction would seem appropriate.

The common consensus seems to be that exclusives are bad, which is good.

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