I used Egypt just as an example, the countries actually involved are Latvia and other EU countries. This is a really old case, it used to be the case that the steam store wouldn’t even open if your were not from the US. There’s a complex web of financial trade agreements and red tape behind making a global digital store with regional pricing available. There’s also a lot of shenanigans that go on to avoid abuse of regional pricing. Steam limits changing your store region to once every 6 months, for example. Which makes it impossible to exploit the regional pricing model. This case is precisely because Steam and the 5 stooges (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) didn’t want to let EU citizens from one country buy a cheaper version of the same game in another EU country. I think the most egregious thing is that Valve claimed not guilty, not by saying they didn’t do it, but that they did it and they were in their right to do so. The EU said, it’s not abusing the store, EU citizens are in their right to use whatever store from any other EU country under the single digital market law.
Unlike the EU, the rest of the world is still geoblocked, and discriminated by Steam. For instance, I can’t buy Elden Ring, I can’t even see their store webpage at all. Regional pricing is a good thing to make games affordable for different markets with different purchase and income levels (fuck Epic store), but it should be based on currency and payment method, not geographical location. This along with Nintendo’s regional blocking and the bullshit that Hollywood does wolrdwide are just anti-consumer manipulation.
Suppose you are an European citizen and you live in Egypt. Valve used to block you from purchasing a game available in Europe. Despite the fact that you are European and your store settings were set to Europe. That’s geogblocking. Now valve is not allowed to do that according to EU law. They still deny access and discriminate based on geography with plenty of excuses. But they can’t use the IP geolocation anymore. Mind you, they still claimed not guilty despite the fact they were caught red handed and dragged the whole thing up to appeals. Despite the fact they still pretty much still do it for certain games from time to time.
The only comment is a marketing text that claims “experimental support” for Linux. There’s no mention of Linux at all in any of the tutorials. And on the manual it looks very finicky, they only support an old LTS version of Ubuntu and reading the GitHub issues, it looks not only experimental but very rough. As barely working, lot of workarounds, rough. On Godot at least, Linux is a first class citizen, not an afterthought to qualify for grants.
Looks interesting. Shame the editor doesn’t run on Linux and the engine doesn’t target Linux at all. Valve is pushing Linux gaming hard and people are hating Windows 11 every day more and more. Anything exclusively C# will always have a Microsoft shackles issue.
It’s really hard for humans to imagine things at that scale, but Microsoft is so many orders of magnitude larger than Nintendo that whatever Microsoft (and other mega tech companies like Apple and Google) does the entire global international finance system feels it.
I have a PC where I could (and regularly) play almost every single game ever made, from Pong to Elden Rings. If I bought a PS5 today, I could only play games exclusively made for PS5 (not many, mind you), this also means a lot of PS1, through PS4, games that have never been ported are unplayable on a PS5. On my PC however, I can comfortably play almost every single game from every single generation of PlayStation up to PS4. I can also play every single AAA game ever released in history. Something that the PS5 cannot do, it only plays PS5 games.
You see, making games is so expensive nowadays. So, now the starting price will be $80 and there will be a convenience fee for every install. No, it doesn’t matter that the game doesn’t use Unity, we will charge it anyways, just in case.
Steam is just a storefront, not a publisher. And traditionally Valve only publishes their own games. While Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are more broad game publishers. Imagine Casio trying to charge the watch store for every time you look at the time in the watch you bought there. Complete bonkers.
It shines in 2D where Unity falters, yes. But it’s perfectly capable of doing 3D competently. It’s shaders and lightning pipelines that are a bit rough on the edges, but that can be overcome with time with more brainpower coming in to contribute. The scripting is also far more robust than the hodgepodge that Unity tries to pass off as C#. The great advantage is that Godot is a non-profit foundation with a transparent governance model. Not a predatory venture capitalist behemoth like Unity.