I feel like so many people, including the Paradox CEO and Epic Games CEO, just completely ignore the fact that it's not strictly a 30% cut on purpose and just feel the need to constantly say '30%' as a form of misinformation.

It's a 20%-30% cut, depending on sales. For almost all games that sell over 200,000 copies, it's actually a 25% cut which is below industry standard. And it only applies to sales on Steam, not to sales outside of Steam.

For high selling games that are also sold outside of Steam via key resellers, etc, the true cut could be as low as 15%-18%.

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Counter argument for you Paradox:

• For their cut of the sale, Valve hosts your games indefinitely and provides countless services for free, such as free DDOS protection by running game network traffic through Valve's network, free cloud saves hosting, game streaming (Twitch style), free remote game streaming (Stadia style) which runs off Valve's network as well, plus provides features like Proton that gives Windows only games extra sales on Linux. How do you expect Valve to pay for all those things?


• 30% is the starting rate, it drops to 25% after $10m USD in sales, then 20% after $50m USD of sales. $10m USD in sales is easy to hit for a popular mainstream AAA game, for a game like Sekiro for example, that's only 166,666 copies sold, and $50m USD is only 833,333 copies. It's safe to say Sekiro has blown past both of those numbers. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, across all platforms (don't have Steam only figures handy) sold 2 million units in the first 10 days of release, at release it had 125,000 concurrent players on Steam, so it likely hit that 25% threshold in the first 24 hours and quickly hit the 20% threshold in the first week. It is highly likely several of Paradox's games have hit the 20% threshold, such as Cities: Skylines, which according to SteamSpy has sold between 5m and 10m copies.


• Paradox sell their games outside of Steam as well and have their own store, and because Steam allows for free key generation and offer an API for account linking and game activation, Paradox accounts can link with Steam accounts, so it doesn't matter where you buy your game (Steam or Paradox) your game will be activated on both accounts. Games sold from Paradox directly, pay no royalty to Valve/Steam at all, Valve effectively hosts those sold units of the game for free. For a game already at the 20% threshold, every sale outside of Steam just lowers the rate even further.
  
  (Personally I've bought my Paradox games directly from Paradox in the past to support them since they strongly supported Linux. Then I've activated those games on Steam, to enjoy Steam's service and keep all my games in one place. I'm sure others have too, otherwise Paradox would not have bothered setting up their store.)


• If we want to talk about 'outrageous fees', lets talk about how much Paradox charges for some of their games. The total cost of buying Cities: Skylines for example, is $30USD for the base game, plus $180USD for all the DLC, for a total price of $210USD for the whole game.

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Another problem Linux gaming faces is the ROI (Return on Investment) of shipping a native Linux game. Even when shipping a native Linux game IS profitable, we often miss out on those games because the ROI is so slow. There are fixed costs for shipping native games that don't scale with the number of customers, and that can reduce the overall ROI % of shipping a native Linux game.

From the perspective of a greedy big AAA publisher with thousands of angry investors screaming at them to throw more lootboxes and mtx into their games, spending $10 to make $12 profit vs spending $10 to make $100 profit, is a no brainer, you're always going to go with the best ROI. They get a better ROI for Windows only games.

In that circumstance, it doesn't matter how high our numbers get, unless we reached something like 20 or 30% marketshare, we wouldn't those AAA games from those publishers. It doesn't matter how much we scream at them "no tux no bucks" they're quite happy to answer back: "no problem" then ignore us.

But lacking those games also keeps gamers from switching to Linux. Hence why we need Proton in the short term.

But it's too early to judge the situation, Proton has only been out for 10 months. In 10 months we have seen some positive signs, a trend of growth emerging on Steam stats, fewer people on GoL's stats indicating they're dual booting, positive youtube coverage of Linux, and Valve has shown unwavering commitment. This is all great but it's still too early to draw any conclusions.

For a start, Proton while amazing is still lacking some crucial things needed for success, like EAC/BattlEye compatibility. Multiplayer PvP games are THE big games of our present, we NEED those games on Linux and right now they're the most likely type of game to not work. Fortnite, PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, these are huge popular games and completely unplayable on Linux right now.

We also shouldn't assume Proton would be so effective that it would draw over huge masses of gamers overnight. Never underestimate how difficult it is to ask someone to change something as crucial as OS.

People hate change, just look at how difficult it has been for Microsoft to get people off Windows 7. Windows 8 officially became available to the general public in 2012. That's 7 years ago! 7 years of bombardment of advertising, 7 years of desktop notification reminders on Windows 7 telling people to upgrade, then several years of offering Windows 10 as a free download, and even sneaky tactics like shipping Windows 10 as a free automatic update to Windows 7. For years Windows 7 hasn't been available in retail stores on laptops/desktops for years, and installing Windows 7 on a modern PC is a nightmare as drivers for modern hardware have to be sideloaded into the installer, among other countless problems. Windows 7's EOL is coming in less than 12 months.

Yet look at the Steam Stats for 2019. 1/4 of Steam users still use Windows 7. That's how much people hate change. Switching to Linux represents a HUGE change. And also a step backwards in many ways, since it means switching to an OS with less hardware support (forget customising your gaming keyboard/mouse's RGB lights and don't forget NVIDIA's crappy drivers), access to far fewer games and often worse performance.

The fact that, under all of these conditions, Linux is not only staying relevant but also seeing even a tiny silver of positive growth, is simply incredible and something to be grateful for.

We have reasons to be optimistic, but at the same time, we need to also be realistic.

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Quoting: KimyrielleI would be super scared about the state of Linux gaming without Steam Play. Let's be honest, our platform isn't gaining any momentum whatsoever. We're still stuck at the same 1% market share we had before Linux gaming became a thing. And not only has no further major publisher entered the Linux market in years, we're reading more and more developer comments about Linux not being worth it and them questioning further releases for it. I get the idea that it's not a perfect solution and native ports would be preferable, but at least this way we can play these AAA games that nobody seems to port to Linux. Call me happy!

My thoughts on some possible reasons why:

• The UX of many distros is still very poor. If a brand new convert from Windows picks something like Arch for their first Linux distro, they're going to have a bad time and ask "why the hell would anyone even bother with this?". And by UX, I don't mean just the UIs, although a bad UI is of course included in a bad UX. But also the websites of many distros are poor, there's often poor documentation, and not a lot of beginner friendly content, like videos on how to perform common tasks. New users are often left to just 'figure stuff out' for themselves, and while some Linux users may like that, it would definitely be turning off new users.


• App distribution on Linux is still a bit of a mess. Just look at the length of the 'download' page for Lutris. [External Link] For Windows that page would just be a single button, 'Download', and hence it wouldn't even be a separate page, just a button on the homepage. We can't seem to nail down what method to make the primary focus of app distribution and often devolve back to just terminal command instructions for each distro. I'd like to see a survey targeting a wide number of people that asks the question, "What is your preferred means of application distribution?", and see if we can pick one, then focus entirely on making all applications available via that means, and integrating it well into every distro. If that's flatpak then focus on flatpak, if it's appimage, then focus on appimage. We just need to pick something and make it happen, and whatever we pick needs to be something other than entering terminal commands like a programmer adding dependencies to a project.


• Even if Proton became perfect tomorrow, it would still take years for us to reach even 5%, because people are hesitant to change something when it works and often completely unaware of Linux's existence or anything happening on Linux. People often take a 'if it aint broke don't fix it' approach to PCs, so the only time to grab a potential Windows user and bring them over to the dark side is when something breaks on their PC, or when they hate the next version of Windows. I don't know how we advertise Linux without becoming 'annoying' but that's something worth tackling.


• Even if Proton became 'perfect' tomorrow, and could run every Windows game flawlessly, there's still one more issue Linux faces: All that achieves is making Linux on par with Windows in terms of number of available games, that still doesn't make Linux superior to Windows for gaming. To the typical user who doesn't care about Linux, what reason do they have to switch to Linux? Linux will need to become 'superior' to Windows for a large number of users first before we get huge numbers of converts.


• There's also still a lot of hardware support issues when it comes to gaming. We got the basics now of course, when it comes to supporting GPUs and such, but stuff like gaming mice/keyboards, customising RGBs, etc, we still don't have many nice solutions for that stuff.

That said, we have gained a little bit of traction recently, and there are always going to be a number of people who will be keen to switch away from Windows even despite everything I've said up there. I think there's lots of reasons to be positive, but we still face a lot of challenges.

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So many people here keep saying that Proton supports the Windows ecosystem, but I don't think anyone here seems to have seen that actually Proton is more like EEE: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. But it's not Microsoft using EEE this time, it's US!

Proton Embraces DirectX/.Net/Win32, then Extends those APIs to Linux, by creating an abstraction layer that converts them to Vulkan/Linux/POSIX/etc.

But how does it Extinguish those APIs?

When a gamer is convinced by Proton to switch to Linux because '90% of the games I'm playing work on Linux', you shouldn't underestimate the mental size of the barrier to switching back to Windows. Sure it's something that could be done in a day, but most users are not like technical Linux users and enjoy switching OS all the time. Most like to set things up once, get them working, and then leave things the way they are. And the longer you spend on Linux, the larger that barrier will become as you start to get more cozy and familiar with Linux.

So after switching from Windows to Linux, as long as the user never gets up the mental energy to switch back to Windows, they should remain on Linux. So, unless something terrible happens and they never lose access to an important piece of software, chances are that gamer is going to make decisions on what to buy based on how well each game will run on Linux.

So that gamer won't likely buy exclusively Linux native games, but they will be unlikely to buy games that won't at least run through Proton, and chances are, most importantly: They are less likely to go back to Windows.

But! Think about what that is going to do to the Windows ecosystem as more and more people switch to Linux because of Proton.

Proton starts to alter developer behaviour. Those developers will notice that their Proton compatible games make more sales than their Proton incompatible games. And for absolutely minimal work! Work so easy, they've often done it by accident! Suddenly developers aren't developing for "Windows", they developing for "Windows + Proton". By following a few simple rules for what Windows APIs to use and which ones not to use, the developers can gain some extra sales with minimal work and almost zero investment.

Suddenly, Proton is dictating which Windows APIs are used, as targeting Proton/Windows means targeting the lowest common denominator of both.

When that starts to happen(we shouldn't expect to see that yet, games take years to develop, it's only been 10 months), it will mean more games will work via Proton on purpose instead of by accident, which will mean more gamers will be able to make the switch to Linux and have even more games available to them to buy than before. The number of 'truly Windows only' games will get smaller and smaller as a result.

Thus it creates a cycle, of creating customers who will prefer Linux native, but will buy Linux compatible games. Which in turn will encourage more developers to make their games Linux compatible, until the number of customers becomes large enough to justify Linux native games as well.

Ultimately I see Proton as EEE, it Embraces, Extends, then Extinguishes the vendor-lockin of Windows APIs. Unpicking the Windows monopoly one API at a time. Using Microsoft's requirements for backwards compatibility with their huge software library against them.

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1. PRAISE LORD GABEN AND LORD PHILIP!

2.

Quoting: BeamboomI'm slowly gliding over to the conclusion that Steam Play probably is the solution for gaming on Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I will always be eager to support native binaries, but let's face it: The companies/individuals who work on porting to Linux are way too few and the interest at the game developers too low.

Absolutely. The way I see it, the battle strategy is thus:
Gamers can't game on Linux because there's no games?
Game devs won't port to Linux because there's no gamers?
Fix: Bring the games to Linux, so the gamers can come, then the game devs will follow.

"How do we know this won't kill native games?"

Here's my logic: Why doesn't Linux get more games?

Is it hard to port a game to Linux? No, not now, not with engines like UE4, Unity, Godot, or even the in house engines the likes Ubisoft and EA use, as their software is designed to be flexible so they can easily port to new game consoles and new platforms. We've seen that with Stadia.

Bringing a game to Linux doesn't mean porting it, it means supporting it, and there in lies the issue.

Support is more or less a fixed cost, despite how many customers you have. Support includes testing, checking compatibility, running tests on multiple hardware configurations, providing help staff, etc. That's not happening right now because "not enough Linux gamers to justify that cost".

Proton doesn't just offer porting, it also offers support, kinda. Valve takes the heat of support and supplies the commitment to porting (updating Proton), the game developer just gets sales.

The way I see it, the more people who use Linux for gaming, the more Linux gamers there are, the larger the potential marketplace gets. The more sales those game developers are going to get.

Sure, at first, for some game devs they will weigh up that market and say "Still not worth it to do a native port". But that revenue from Linux sales won't go unnoticed, and eventually it WILL make management of some game developers ask the question, "What are we doing to ensure we're compatible with Proton for those extra sales?".

Then we'll go through a period of time, where game devs are willing to 'half commit' to Linux, putting minimal effort into making their games run via Proton as long as that doesn't represent a large commitment, to enjoy some additional sales. That will result in many games working via Proton that currently don't, which will only increase the number of people who game on Linux.

So at what point does Proton cease to become relevant and suddenly get replaced with native games?

Hypothetically if Linux had 90% of the marketshare right now, would game developers continue letting gamers play their games via Proton? No.

Eventually, Proton ceases to become useful as a compatibility solution with minimal cost, and instead becomes a dependency burden. Just look at the number of times an update to Proton has caused a regression, if you become dependent on Proton, then you're subject to those regressions out of your control.

Supporting a game means testing, ensuring compatibility, performance, etc. Not because you want to, but because you want sales from your customers, and you want the game to run on their systems reliably, because you want those customers to tell their friends to buy the game.

Proton is an extra dependency, extra layer of complexity, an extra drag on performance, etc. When the costs of ensuring high quality Proton compatibility become larger than the cost of just doing a native port, then in my opinion it becomes cheaper and simpler to just do a native port and ensure a high quality result, with no Proton dependency to worry about.

Basically what I'm saying is, I think if Linux gaming gets to say, 10% of the marketshare, Proton will begin to naturally fade out and become replaced with natives anyway. And it will have a heroes funeral.

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Perfectly worded response, Valve's position is in my opinion completely justified. What Canonical pulled was crazy and unreasonable, as was said countless times, if there was a solution then Valve couldn't have been expected to work it out in 3 months. You HAVE to give more warning than that when doing something like dropping all 32bit libraries.

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Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: gradyvuckovic

Quoting: keanI would even pay for it if everything works well.

I'd happily sign up to that, $10/month for a Valve developed Linux OS which provides the best possible gaming experience for Linux? Hell yes, give me that.

Kinda off-topic but I'm somewhat terrified that the idea of a 'subscription model' OS comes so naturally to people nowadays.

Why not? It's no different to using Linux Mint and donating per month to the Linux Mint team via the development fund, or patreon. Developing an OS costs resources, usually money, and those costs occur every month, not just the month you buy the OS. If you sell an OS as a product with a one off fee, then the company who makes it is just required to keep putting out new versions and selling those too, otherwise they have no revenue.

I'm not talking about $10/month as some kind of massive money making scheme for Valve. I would be very surprised if they would make even a profit off that, but the $10/month should be viewed just as a contribution to their efforts and to ensure they have at least some incentive to always keep going with the OS.

Part of the problem with Ubuntu, is that Canonical makes basically $0 from any of us. We don't buy anything from them, we don't pay them for their services, we don't donate, nothing. They have zero reason to care if they break support for games because they don't make any money from gaming. Just paying $10/month to a company for them to develop an OS, could at least help us establish a relationship with that company, where we can expect regular fast updates, proper support, polished UX, etc.

I'm happy to pay for high quality software, foss or not. A high quality Linux OS with great support would be worth paying for.

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Quoting: keanI would even pay for it if everything works well.

I'd happily sign up to that, $10/month for a Valve developed Linux OS which provides the best possible gaming experience for Linux? Hell yes, give me that.

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Valve didn't really have much of a choice. If there's a solution to this, Valve couldn't be expected to commit to figuring it out and fixing it just 3 months. Canonical pulled this out of no where with no warning and just expected everyone to deal with it. Well, no, that's now how running a major OS works. Maybe if you're Microsoft you could get away with that, but not when you're just Canonical. Valve, the Wine devs, everyone will just take the road they've been more or less forced to take, which is dropping support for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is going to suffer, on top of the suffering it's already having and the gradual decline in marketshare that we've already seen over the years. The likely outcome of this is Arch based distros taking off and Ubuntu based distros disappearing rapidly. Hopefully the Linux Mint team's "LMDE" backup plan (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is ready for prime time or not far off it, because it looks like that will likely become the main version of Linux Mint, unless they want to take over doing the 32bit work that Canonical doesn't want to do, but I imagine that would be too much work for the LM team.

Really Canonical, what the fuck?

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