On the other hand we Dutch run ads in the THE TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL, begging the Doom spawn coming for some nice debauchery, not to visit Amsterdam. True story.
As much as I agree the 30% cut can be a bit steep, I do appreciate that part of it is going into ongoing R&D like Steam Deck and Proton benefiting the whole gaming industry. I’d like to think of it like Valve are investing into PC innovation similarly to the way Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo do for their new consoles.
But unlike valve the console R&D is limited to the consoles themselves. Valve is working to improve gaming for Linux in general and foster a more open and consumer friendly console system.
If you have to choose an evil monopoly hell bent on world domination and bloodshed you might as well choose steam at least they are owned by a private individual instead of a hive mind distilled from the pure greed of capitalism.
I’ve had this conversation so many times and some people just can’t imagine that they might be paying more than they need to just so Gabe can collect yachts… People feel they’re getting their money’s worth because everything they’ve ever bought is priced based on the fact that there’s multimillionaires and billionaires higher up the chain…
AFAIK it falls to a lower percentage if you sell more copies. As to why I dont mind the fee as a consumer; valve invests its earnings into linux gaming and does cool shit like that. I can’t remember the last time i aplauded ea or ubisoft or epic for doing something like that. Oh yeah… it was never. Id sooner applaud Microsoft for investing into a non lucrative venture like accessible gaming accessories. But they aren’t on the same playing field… so from them, I’d expect it.
If i were a developer, I’d let valve eat the 30%. The amount of customers they bring to the table, deal with chargebacks, host the files. That shit isn’t free. Epic has to take such a low amount because they don’t have as many users and can’t produce such sales numbers and don’t have to deal with as many chargebcks and don’t have to waste as much bandwidth hosting the files.
Again, they can afford their R&D while paying their employees more than the industry average and while making the owner a multibillionaire, they 100% could afford to lower their cut without any negative impact on everyone but Gabe Newell.
The lower % starts if a game sells enough copies to make 10m$, Valve has made 3m$ at that point.
Stop defending the people that make you poorer, they’re not your friends, all billionaires exist at the expense of our wealth. All. Of. Them. Are. Evil.
Well I guess I’ll just stop buying things then because all Im doing is contributing to some billionaire’s cocaine fund. This is capitalism. I learned to live with it. When the time comes to sieze the means of production and give power back to the proletariat, I’ll be there to help. Until then, I’d rather give Gabe my money so he can shove more ships up his ass than give it to Sweeney because at least Gabe will throw a penny back into linux gaming. Ill take the crumbs if I can get them because Im not a 21 year old student with a burning desire to change the system anymore.
And those “reasons” were plentiful. Most importantly is their market share. From a purely business perspective, if a distributor has 200% more users and charges 100% more while offering the same features, they will be the better choice - purely from en economical perspective. 30% is ok because you will reach a larger audience and if so many publishers disagreed with Steam’s cut, they wouldnt all come crawlin’ back would they? In other words, the market dictates the price and the market has decided that price is 30%. It doesnt matter who does or doesnt defend it. Thats what it is.
As to why I dont mind the fee as a consumer; valve invests its earnings into linux gaming and does cool shit like that.
You’re also talking like they wouldn’t have as many customers if they reduced their cut which is completely ridiculous. More profit would go to the people actually doing the work or prices would go down.
Stop defending the billionaire, you’re making a fool of yourself.
Tango closed cause it was the one of the only studios under Zenimax that wasn’t currently making a game with “executive producer: Todd Howard” squirted all over it
I should be surprised that a bunch of nerds are fixing game-breaking updates in their spare time that were created by a multi-billion dollar corporation, but I’m not, at all.
Plus, this is Bethesda, and in particular their open world games. They have always been shit the fans had to fix if they wanted to play it, as the foundation was solid but the company didn’t do any actual development.
When Bethesda began re-releasing Skyrim without ever fixing any of the many, many, MANY bugs, was when I realized they really don’t give a shit about quality. Unofficial Skyrim Patch has over a thousand bugs that haven’t been fixed by Bethesda, some as old as the original release.
This has been the gaming industry since the internet.
Back when gaming was still considered a niche pastime or just toys for kids, and the developers weren’t multi-billion corporations, the dynamic was one of a mutual love of the product.
Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”
Fuck you, Nintendo. You made $1.6bil in profits last year. I bet the number of pirated copies of Zelda: TotK barely amount to a fraction of a percent of that.
Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”
Ngl I kinda want them to use this logic and see what happens when they try to apply it to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console, which are emulators playing ROMs basically.
Hell, the games you can play in Animal Crossing are literal emulators with ROMs since they found iNES data in the headers.
Emulation has already been litigated to hell and back. It's very clearly legal, including relying on users pulling a blob or two from their hardware for the whole thing to function.
Yeah that would make sense except you missed a key point:
Connectix’s development strategy was based upon reverse engineering the PlayStation’s BIOS firmware, first by using the unchanged BIOS to develop emulation for the hardware, and then by developing a BIOS of their own using the original firmware as an aid for debugging.
The whole point here is that Connectix used Sony’s BIOS to develop their own BIOS. Yuzu is not doing that. They don’t have their own BIOS they are providing to their users. They are telling people to use Nintendo’s bios, but that they aren’t providing it.
This. This seems to be the argument that Nintendo is hinging on. In order for Yuzu to play the games properly you need a prod.keys file. I guess Nintendo is claiming that the keys in this file are owned by them and it’s illegal to have that number much in the same way the number used to represent the C code for decoding DVD copy protection is illegal: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Illegal_pr…
I am no lawyer but seems tenuous when you can run a program to get the prod.keys from your own console. Especially when that code is legal and exists on GitHub: github.com/Decscots/Lockpick_RCM
Who the fuck genuinely cares about a digital plot of land? The only reason stuff like this attracts people is the hope to make money, and therefore only people who only care about the monetary aspect play games like Legacy.
I highly suggest the YouTube channel “Jauwn”! The dude plays nft games “frome the perspective of a gamer”, so he tries to give those games a fair shot (although he is clearly biased against nfts in general). To no one’s surprise each and every nft game is just a grift to mine money in the pockets of idiots who think they are smarter than the rest.
Videogames are the cheapest and most durable form of entertainment, ideal qualities when you don’t have a job and resources to keep you busy. This fucker wants people to never escape being in misery.
The goal is to get those “young men” out there in the job market struggling to make ends meet day after day so their boss can buy his second vacation home and new yacht. In the meantime Republicans will point to some group or minority as the cause of their woes. It’s a win, win for them.
"It doesn't work like in Dragon Ball, where Goku fuses with other characters," continued Kamiya, "Two people with completely different personalities and ideas would clash. There's no way you'd get a decent game of that."
It’s an interesting idea. I think sometimes two different creative people collaborate on something you can get something greater than the sum of its parts. But it all depends on the specific people and whether they have a shared vision for the art they’re creating together.
But for the Fusion Dance to work in Dragon Ball both users have to be perfectly in sync or you get a bad fusion, he should have specified it doesn’t work like the Potara fusion. smh get your lore right
What a ridiculous society we live in that someone can be so rich that they get to threaten people with a gun and don't get arrested. What an unhinged asshole he is.
The obsession with the fact that GN didn’t reach out for lmg’s response to the story is extremely rich given that ltt didn’t give billet labs that exact same courtesy
I mean Billet sent them a unit for review. That implies they’re expecting to be reported upon. Now, LTT half-assed the reporting and then accidentally put the prototype into their auction system, but I’d say “damning reporting” is an expected possible outcome of sending something to a reviewing org to be reviewed that doesn’t require special notice.
However they sent a 3090 GPU and a prototype cooler for that specific board, which they mounted on a 4090 board which has a potentially different layout and was not tested.
Imagine they were a small company , whose first product was the LTT screwdriver, and they had sent an early prototype to a YouTuber who complained that none of the bits he had laying around worked on that screwdriver, so no one should buy the LTT screwdriver because it just doesn’t work. When people complain that they weren’t doing the product justice by testing it with the wrong things they replied “I’m not spending money retesting a screwdriver that no one should buy because it’s useless”. Then turned around and sold the prototype at an auction. Then when people complained they said “we didn’t sell it, we auctioned it for charity, and have already sent money to replace it” having sent the email agreeing to pay seconds before saying that stupid excuse.
They did a LOT of wrong things there, a bad review is the least of the problems. For all I know the product is in fact shit, but because of their methodology, plus all that they did afterwards, I can’t trust that they would ever produce an honest review of the product. And this is a house of cards, as soon as one review can’t be trusted, no review can be trusted. Can you assure that they used proper protocol when testing other things if they can’t even use the GPU that was sent together with the cooler? And that when people point this instead of retesting they just dig themselves deeper into “we’re right”… Plus you should watch the GN video, they point a LOT of inconsistencies and errors in other videos, showing that the cooler is NOT an isolated thing.
For all I know the product is in fact shit, but because of their methodology, plus all that they did afterwards, I can’t trust that they would ever produce an honest review of the product.
I mean yeah I’m not arguing that point. Maybe calling that “half-assed” is an understatement when they were clearly showing their whole asses on that effort, but still:
Billet sent a unit to get reviewed, and the reviewers made a review. A grossly incompetent review, but a review. I don’t see why that would be worthy of special notification. Losing/selling the prototype was just a further demonstration of that incompetence.
Whereas if you’re going to do a long-form report on a group’s involvement in an event, it’s considered good form to reach out for comment.
Either way, imho the Billet story has kind of been eclipsed by the Xeets by their ex-employee about the toxic workplace.
Basically, Linus’ company is a complete trainwreck and he has no credibility on fixing it since it seems like the disastrous culture is his own fault. Sitting and saying “this is fine, I’m taking care of it” to every disaster while pushing for more and more content to the point that quality slips to legally actionable levels is piss-poor leadership.
I understand that point but my counter is that if someone sends you a product/video in private to review you have more reson to contact them about what you will say before you do than if the product/video is publicly available.
Do you think LTT should contact the companies that they do secret shopping before releasing the video? Any comments that they might have won’t change what happened on their experience, and any promises of improvement won’t prevent them from publishing the video so it’s kind of pointless.
Even if GN had contacted and they had explained what they already explained, the GN video would be the exact same with an added part for LTT’s response, which LTT is perfectly capable of doing themselves, and would do regardless of GN’s video.
I’m glad GN didn’t reach out. Linus emailed Billet Labs 2 hours after the GN video with an offer to reimburse them for the prototype, so that he could claim that GN got their facts wrong. But we have the receipts!
That was the nail in the coffin, for me. Making mistakes is fine, even big ones. I understand that Youtube is the devil, and it’s easy to fall into a trap of shoveling nonsense out onto the platform. I’m honestly sympathetic to that. If Linus said “You’re right, quality has suffered cuz we’ve been going too fast. We need to take another look at this.” I’d be completely happy.
But to lie – not just by words, but by actions – in order to cast doubt on the people who are trying to give you a reality check and get your work back on track… That’s really bad.
I did watch the response video before commenting. Did you read the forum post? He said it’s all settled, it’s just gotta go through the bean counters now. But the fact that he emailed them immediately before posting proves that he knew it was not all settled.
What if they replied “Actually, you can’t just reimburse us for that. The manufacturing process that produced it is being overhauled and we won’t be able to replace it for at least 6 months and we’ve got conferences to demo at between then and now. We need you to get it back.”
everything is fucking videos now. You get stuch at a very particular place? Prepare to sift through literally hours of video instead of, for example, just searching for the name of the place you’re in ingame
Nah, there’s a lot of text guides too. But the problem is that they’re often just copied from one source that somehow manages to get basic shit wrong every damn time. And videos definitely have their place, so many times I’ve first searched for a text guide and only got more confused. As long as the videos are short and to the point I always appreciate them. Found some great channels that way that have helped me through several games.
If you buy through Heroic, Heroic gets a cut. So it creates a data point that they can use to see how big that market is, so they know what they have to do to get 100% of my sale in their own pocket.
A proton is a positively charged subatomic particle doing in the nucleus of an atom. But in this context, Proton is a translation layer that allows games that were built for Windows to run on Linux.
Lutris + GE-Proton + umu works. If you use GE-Proton as the runner, Lutris automatically uses umu to launch the game which launches within the Steam Pressure Vessel container.
You can manage GE-Proton downloads using Protonplus. The latest version, last I checked, is GE-Proton9-15.
I’ve been playing more GoG games with Lutris + Wine in Linux than Steam games with Proton and I even have one situation of a game were the copy I bought in Steam doesn’t work with Proton, but the pirated copy I downloaded to see if that would work runs absolutely fine with Lutris + Wine.
For me at least it’s actually easier to sort problems out with games when using Lutris + Wine than it is with Proton and I can even make sure all games I run from Lutris are wrapped in a “firejail” sandbox, which amongst other things blocks all network access, something I can’t do with Proton.
It’s a vendor-tied solution meant to keep you in the Steam ecosystem, so for all the great work they did in past getting it to have broad compatibility, the future is not Proton, it’s Wine.
Proton in Steam is absolutely easier. Lutris just automates work that some other user did, and if you’re doing it in something like Heroic launcher instead, you have to figure that out yourself. It often involves things like installing other Microsoft components that are bundled with the application on Steam, and in one case, even though the game was verified on Steam, there was no Lutris script, and I just couldn’t get it working on the GOG version.
Proton too just automates the work that somebody did in the form of install instructions, same as Lutris.
The difference is that those making the install scripts for Proton are paid for and you don’t get the option to fix them or make your own, which means that there are in fact fewer games with Steam install instructions (i.e. Steam Support) than games with Lutris install scripts.
Further, there are fewer things you can tweak in Proton and they’re all either changing the proton version or some badly documented text parameters that get fed to its command line, whilst Lutris actually has most such options in menus: the learning curve for just starting a game is lower in Steam that in Lutris when it works but the learning curve for fixing it when it does not work is lower in Lutris and sometimes you simply don’t have access to change what’s needed to fix it in Steam but you do in Lutris.
If you use Lutris with its GoG integration the experience is generally the same kind of Click & Play as Proton of Steam and whilst the rate of problems seems to still be a bit bigger in Lutris, surprisingly (at least for me) it’s not by much.
For me in Lutris having to go and install Microsoft components using Winetricks is generally only needed for some standalone installer executables, not when using GoG integration.
Steam is great when it works and a massive headache and pretty limited on what you can do when it doesn’t, whilst at least with GoG integration Lutris is great when it works and still a headache when it doesn’t but not as much as Steam and it gives you a lot more options to try and get it to work, plus the coverage of pre-made installer scripts in Lutris (which is what makes games “just work” in it) seems to be broader than in Steam, including covering older and more obscure titles, plus that coverage is probably growing faster because the scripts are user contributed rather than the work that can be done adding support being limited by how many people Valve (who are notorious for having very few employees for a company that size) hired to work on it.
Paying someone else to do it and verify that it works is exactly part of why I parted with my money in the first place. At least GOG has a very generous refund policy, but it’s a lot more work on my end.
The point I’m making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don’t expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren’t successful AAA titles).
It’s the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of “giving users enough rope to hang themselves with” (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn’t work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that’s not so for the corporate one.
It’s what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe’s suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren’t for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).
That’s why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.
But really what I’m asking for, as a customer, is for GOG to do this work for me before I buy. Because it’s all open source, there’s nothing stopping them. Valve pumped a bunch of money into the projects to improve things for everyone, but they’re still doing more work on their end.
Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve’s Linux strategy is really a “have our own console on the cheap” strategy.
But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they’re doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that’s it.
So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.
PS: Mind you, I’m not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I’m trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.
If there’s one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that’s no guarantee that at a later date they won’t leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).
Lutris has GoG integration and it’s exactly that same 2 step process if you use it (I believe it passes you through 3 screens of options were you invariably do nothing but click “Continue”, so strictly it’s 5 steps were 3 of the are just “Press Continue”)
The difference is that when it does NOT just work, it’s easier to figure out and there are more options to fix it with Lutris + Wine.
I even have some weird weird cases on Steam - like Borderlands 2 were Steam would often and randomly, before actually starting the game spend almost 1h doing shader conversions that if you stopped it the game would fail to start (the solution was to force an older Proton version and now you just get random downloads from the Internet that last a few minutes before the game starts).
IMHO, here too what one sees is the general design philosophy difference between open source software and corporate solutions - the former gives you tons of options and lots of ways to tune it so it looks more complicated to use and has a steeper learning curve but that also means when things go wrong you have a lot more ways to try to fix it, whilst the latter is click & play until things go wrong and then you have very little info and just a few things you can change to try and fix it.
Mind you, Lutris itself seems to be an attempt to also be click & play (hence why you generally get a steam-like experience if you use its GoG integration) but all the “buttons and knobs” are still there (those 3 screens of options that’s usually fine to just press “Continue” on that I mentioned above) just in case you want to muck about with them, making it look daunting to use.
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