The numbers aren’t much better for Resident Evil 4 (remake), Resident Evil 8, or Death Stranding. Customers are offered the opportunity to get a worse version of the game for the same price, often without cross-buy like you’d get when buying a game on Steam Deck.
Pain tolerance levels? The biggest pain points I have with Steam are that it’s not universally DRM-free (which is why I shop GOG first) and that their multiplayer servers go down for 15 minutes during maintenance windows once or twice per week. Native Linux ports were not going to become more common prior to Proton; they were on the fast track to becoming less common, especially given how many more games are now released every year, and Proton has the added benefit of adding Linux support to games where it was just never going to feasibly happen otherwise.
While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
It’s both. That fear of losing their market position is exactly how a functioning market is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to come in and outdo Valve. EA looked like they were interested for a little while back when they launched Origin, but they changed their minds. Epic says they’re interested now, but they only want sellers and not customers. It’s not a monopoly, legally, when they attained their market position by just being better than everyone else.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them.
And I wonder how many more there are out there. Because if that number is low enough, it may just not be worth it to bother. I’d imagine it’s a nightmare to have to support Apple through all of their standards that they dictate at their business partners. Valve went through the trouble of making a Vulkan->Metal translation layer, since Apple refused to support open standards, and then Apple retired x64 on their machines shortly afterward.
At this point, their cut is just about mathematically fair, given how little value customers get from buying games most other places and how much value they get from Steam. Then that money got funneled back into decoupling PC gaming from Microsoft and making probably the only mass produced handheld gaming system that’s open enough to let you opt out of their ecosystem. I’d be really curious as to how many games on Steam even have ARM builds, because I’ll bet it’s a very low number, and that would likely make the juice not worth the squeeze.
I’d say both that you’re making a lot of assumptions off of not a lot of information, and that it can be inspired by RimWorld without being exactly like RimWorld, perhaps even with different strengths, but it certainly looks like they were inspired by RimWorld.
The RimWorld comparisons don’t strike me as bullshit in the least bit. If you asked me to name one game that came to mind from this trailer, it would be RimWorld. For Civ, I guess it’s those screens that look like diplomacy and trade? That one’s harder to pin down, but I don’t doubt that they were inspired by it in some way, even if it doesn’t manifest very visibly in the trailer.
Split-screen and LAN in addition to online. You love to see it. Split-screen in racing games is so rare anymore, as are racing games where you’re not driving some semi-realistic approximations of real world cars. It’s nice to see devs stepping up to fill in that gap.
I don’t have numbers on this, but I’ll bet the percentages on mobile studios struggling financially are even worse.
Plus, there may be too many games, but I’ll put an asterisk on there that there are too many long games. When so much of it is designed to keep you coming back to this one particular game over and over again, there’s less room in your life for other games that you otherwise would have been willing to buy. I’ve got a list of 14 games that came out this year or have release dates this year that I’m interested in getting around to still, on top of the 8 games that I’ve already started or finished, plus another 8 that are expected to come out this year but don’t have release dates yet…and I’m still going to spend a few hundred hours across three different fighting games that I’ve been playing for years.