Yamamoto: As a publisher, we would like to deliver it to PC users as well, but per our agreement with Vanillaware, we are only releasing on console. In other words, there are no plans to port it to PC currently....
Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
As a publisher, we would like to deliver it to PC users as well, but per our agreement with Vanillaware, we are only releasing on console. In other words, there are no plans to port it to PC currently.
That’s from the game’s producer at Atlus. If the publisher wanted to get a PC port, they would have found the money to do it (or found a third-party to manage the port if Vanillaware wasn’t willing/able). Per the quote, Vanillaware themselves do not want it on PC - nothing about not being able to afford to port it or anything like that. This tracks with how they’ve never released a single game on Windows aside from an MMO they made for Square Enix almost 20 years ago, before they were even known as Vanillaware.
Vanillaware just doesn’t have any interest in PC, and while that’s quite frustrating, it’s their prerogative.
UPDATE: Despite saying they were using SteamOS on the homepage, they’ve since clarified that it’s actually “an optimized version based on HoloISO”. HoloISO seems to be a community compiled version of SteamOS. It’s very similar but it’s not officially SteamOS....
Judging from their history of rapid releases, I’d say this is more a matter of just throwing it out there to see if it sticks because “why not?”
Worst case, it fails, they’re out a little bit of capital, but can just as easily swap it over to Windows and keep selling it that way. Best case, they’ve opened the market up that little bit more for themselves.
I don’t remember but I heard it’s like an aggregator of some sort too, right?
GOG the store is just that - a store. They only sell games that have no DRM at all, which means a couple of things. One, they almost never get AAA games at release (the exception being games developed/published by CD Projekt, as CDP owns GOG), and two, there’s a high likelihood that GOG will offer game versions that are out of sync with or missing features from the same game sold on other platforms (for example, if a game uses Steamworks for its multiplayer, many devs will just strip out multiplayer altogether for the GOG version rather than patching something new and store-agnostic in).
What you’re thinking of with the aggregator is GOG Galaxy, which is their (completely un-required) launcher software. Unlike Steam and EGS, GOG’s DRM-free nature means you can just buy games on their site, download the installers directly, and go on about your business. Downloading games, starting games, etc., is all just done manually. If you want a dedicated launcher software similar to the Steam and EGS clients, that’s what GOG Galaxy is for. And as a value-add, they implemented aggregator features where you can have it pull in your library from Steam, EGS, EA/Origin, Ubisoft, etc., and just view and launch everything from the one spot. I’ve generally found Playnite to be a little better at being a one-stop launcher, though everyone’s mileage will vary of course.
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time.
Please stop with this horseshit. Valve and GOG had both done third-party exclusives before EGS was even a thing. Epic absolutely in no way "brought [them] to PC gaming for the first time.
Yes, they did make them a pillar in their strategy to try to enter a marketplace that was dominated by an 800-pound gorilla - which is a perfectly legitimate approach to take - which neither of the other two did, but they 100% categorically did NOT bring the practice to PC first.
they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store.
Wow, you’re just full of misinformation on this post. They have constantly been updating their store since day one. No, it’s not on parity with Steam (and it likely never will be), but to just flat out say that they haven’t spent anything on improving it when there has been a steady stream of improvements over the years is ignorant at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
This article almost makes it as if they’re removing stuff from your library
But it doesn’t remotely imply that? Here are the words/phrases it uses to describe what will happen:
Steam will halt support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14
existing Steam Client installations on those operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind, including security updates
some games will effectively stop functioning on macOS
The Steam store will stop considering games that offer only 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible at the end of 2023.
At no point does it say or imply that anything will be removed from your library. In fact, it explicitly says how you can ensure that those games you own will remain playable:
In order to ensure continued operation of Steam and new 64-bit games purchased through Steam, users on these older versions should update to a more recent version of macOS.
Why would they include that if they’re trying to tell people the games will be removed from their library?
He was mere feet away from total strangers who may or may not have been masked when he opened the door (taking the video at face value, and assuming he didn’t send the production team up there to tell the residents to mask up first). Much more dangerous than a courtoom of people with N95s on, none of whom he would need to get as close to as he did for those Deck deliveries.
Wolfire Games created the original Humble Indie Bundle, but they’ve been divested from it for a few years now. From Wikipedia:
The Humble Bundle concept was initially run by Wolfire Games in 2010, but by its second bundle, the Humble Bundle company was spun out to manage the promotion, payments, and distribution of the bundles. In October 2017, the company was acquired by Ziff Davis through its IGN Entertainment subsidiary.
The comment above that Humble’s the ones suing Valve here is inaccurate.
I think there was some cross-pollination for a couple years beyond that. Sounds like they sold Humble off to be its own thing, but the Wolfire guys were still running it until 2019 (see Wikipedia quote below). Either way, they’ve got out of Humble well before they filed this suit.
Rosen and Graham, the founders of Humble Bundle [and the CEO and COO, respectively, of Wolfire Games], announced in March 2019 that they have stepped down as CEO and COO of the company, respectively, with Alan Patmore taking over the company operations.
Yes, comical that Valve secured exlusivity of an already-on-sale third-party game to try to drive support of their nascent digital store more than a decade before Epic did it and you fanboys are all just okay with it because you weren’t there.
You all try to pretend that Epic invented this sort of exclusivity on PC, but it’s been a thing for years and years before they even opened their store. But go on and bury your head in the sand even further about it, I’m sure GabeN will be your bff if you do it hard enough!
I read about this game months ago, when it was released I was very glad to see that it was on PS Plus from Day 1. Since I am already subscribed to PS Plus, I have downloaded it and playing it right now. I really like the game up until now....
Not sure about Perfect Dark (never played it), but Goldeneye had the control mode where you hold the left and center grips which was quite similar to dual analog. Of course, that was moving with the d-pad instead of moving with an analog stick, so not quite as smooth on the movement front, but it was definitely a step up from the default control scheme while not being quite as unwieldy as using two separate controllers.
This week, it’s Alan Wake 2, which has released and scored an 89 on Metacritic, a tick below a 90, but a 92 if you’re looking on PC where its visuals can be maxed to their fullest.
BotW was great, but not if you were wanting a traditional Zelda.
TotK is hot garbage. They just took BotW and leaned way too hard into the whole “build silly contraptions!!1” thing that some fans were doing with BotW’s physics interactions.
This went into Forspoken back at the end of September.
I tried it out on a 3080Ti and I can confirm it’s absolute garbage. Totally hitchy stuttery mess, completely unplayable every time I turned it on. Plus, you have to use FSR2 for your image reconstruction to make it work, so you don’t get the image quality benefits of DLSS while you’re staring at the frozen frames during the stutters.
Released in 2014, so while good, doesn’t quite fit the “from the last 5 years” criteria (unless you’re specifically talking about the PC port, which just squeaks in by a month, but I’m not sure that’s quite in the spirit of the discussion).
Microsoft at least owns the trademark on it. Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if that’s at all decoupled from “the IP” or not, but I suspect they’d be tied fairly close together.
It would also be weird if Mistwalker signed a contract giving MS ownership of Blue Dragon (which is on the list, but has multiple games from different publishers) but not Lost Odyssey. I guess maybe the solution would be to remove Blue Dragon from the list rather than adding Lost Odyssey. 🤷♂️
I got Dredge on Xbox for $12, lowest its been on PC is $25.
What are you even talking about? $25 is the base price on PC; are you claiming that it’s literally never been on sale on the platform? Because that’s obviously, hilariously, wrong.
The dude you’re arguing with is an absolute toolbag with his blind PCMR bullshit, but you aren’t helping the case against him by spewing blatant bullshit of your own.
Imagine thinking anyone knows or cares what currency you’re talking about when you don’t bother to specify.
The website you linked doesn’t account for Gamepass discounts.
You’re making your case even worse. I like consoles, but arguing that paying a monthly fee to get a 20% discount is better than the regular deep discounts that PC games get is laughable.
if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them
To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come.
They did both things.
Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody’s going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).
But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone’s libraries (something they’re obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.
But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of “you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.” They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don’t play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on “ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11”. Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn’t up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they’re doing.
The bulk of gamers simply don’t want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I’ve literally seen people say “I want every game on every store and then I’ll buy it from Steam.”
If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful.
That’s not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender’s Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but “REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1”, nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck… buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
Even if every aspect of your service is better than Steam’s in every possible way, you’re still up against the massive inertia of everybody already having huge libraries full of games on Steam. Their credit cards are registered on Steam, their friends all play on Steam, and most importantly, all the developers, and therefore all the games, are on Steam.
A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits
Nobody is talking about public companies here. Both Valve and Epic are private companies.
If you want to complain about profit motives, that’s a capitalism problem overall, not an issue with public vs. private corporations.
They can’t “push and pull” anything. With Sweeney owning 50%+1, Tencent and anyone else he sold shares to can literally do nothing - he will always have the final say. And since the company is private, there’s almost certainly an agreement/contract in place on those share purchases that if someone wants to dump them they have to offer them back to him/the company first. Since it’s not a public company they can’t just go sell their shares on an open market. The threat of a large shareholder is gone in a case like this - they can’t stage a hostile takeover and they can’t dump and run.
There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.
There was one game that happened to. Metro. And anyone who had already pre-purchased on Steam had it fulfilled through Steam at launch.
The rest of the games people claim this happened to were Kickstarter projects in which the backer reward promised a “digital key”. Now, at the time of those Kickstarter campaigns, the only stores that existed were Steam and GOG, so there was an assumption made that the keys would be to one of those two. But by the time the games were getting ready to launch, another option came into existence and devs who clearly needed money (or they wouldn’t have been going to Kickstarter to begin with) made a deal.
Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer.
That’s the point. No, nobody’s forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve’s chosen policy.
Don’t think Valve doesn’t understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.
Not only the same, but better. Epic will automatically just refund you the difference if a game you bought goes on sale within a certain period of time after your purchase (allegedly even beyond the two week refund window, although I haven’t been able to find any definitive statement of how long they watch it for). Just flat out, you get an email one day telling you they’ve credited back X amount of your purchase.
Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.
There are. For more than four years now. The problem is that, just like with Steam, they can only put the option out there - it’s up to devs to actually implement it. And there are a lot of devs who haven’t done so, which lots of people interpret as EGS not having cloud saves at all.
It’s almost as if Epic actually does have developers’ and the industry’s best interests at heart despite the shit takes from the terminally-online Gamer™ crowd…
EGS is really the only thing remotely close to what Steam does, though.
GOG will always be an afterthought as long as they have their DRM-free policy in place. They’re super cool, but they’re a niche and will never grow beyond that without losing what makes them cool.
Origin (or whatever EA’s calling their store now) gave up pursuing third-party sales years ago. They still do it, but they clearly have no interest in actually making a go of becoming an actual competitor to Steam.
The Windows Store is terrible for a number of different reasons, even if it’s better than Microsoft’s previous attempts at getting into this space (coughGWFLcough). EGS is more likely to overtake Steam than Windows Store is to even rival EGS.
Uplay (or, again, whatever Ubisoft is calling their store these days) is like Origin - I don’t even know for sure if Ubi is doing third-party sales, but if so, it’s very much an afterthought for them.
And then everyone else just sells Steam keys. They’re not in the same market as the others, so don’t really fit into this conversation. If you’re 100% reliant on the store you’re “competing” with, you’re not competing with them.
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own....
Unicorn Overlord Devs Denied PC Port (www.destructoid.com) angielski
Yamamoto: As a publisher, we would like to deliver it to PC users as well, but per our agreement with Vanillaware, we are only releasing on console. In other words, there are no plans to port it to PC currently....
Introducing: Skull and Bones Ship's Wheel Controller (www.youtube.com) angielski
This… is something. I mean Farming Simulator did it, so it only “makes sense” piracy farming simulator does it, too! 😅
AYANEO NEXT LITE handheld announced with SteamOS Linux | UPDATE: Not SteamOS Apparently (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
UPDATE: Despite saying they were using SteamOS on the homepage, they’ve since clarified that it’s actually “an optimized version based on HoloISO”. HoloISO seems to be a community compiled version of SteamOS. It’s very similar but it’s not officially SteamOS....
What's up with Epic Games? angielski
I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…...
Fallout 3: GOTY Edition is free to keep for the next 24 hours on the Epic Games Store (store.epicgames.com) angielski
Fallout TV Show - Teaser Trailer (m.youtube.com) angielski
Two games free on Epic Games - Jitsu Squad and Mighty Fight Federation angielski
Jitsu Squad...
Steam dropping support for macOS Mojave and by extension 32-bit games (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Google discussed teaming up with Tencent to buy Epic Games (www.tweaktown.com) angielski
Have you tried Sea of Stars? (seaofstarsgame.co) angielski
I read about this game months ago, when it was released I was very glad to see that it was on PS Plus from Day 1. Since I am already subscribed to PS Plus, I have downloaded it and playing it right now. I really like the game up until now....
An unofficial PC port of Nintendo 64's Perfect Dark is available for download, featuring mouselook, widescreen, FOV & 60fps support (www.dsogaming.com) angielski
You need an original ROM file, and this here, according to the article.
‘Alan Wake 2’ Complicates An Already Wild GOTY Competition (www.forbes.com) angielski
This week, it’s Alan Wake 2, which has released and scored an 89 on Metacritic, a tick below a 90, but a 92 if you’re looking on PC where its visuals can be maxed to their fullest.
AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 Now Available (www.youtube.com) angielski
It’s only available in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum which is… Unfortunate....
Every Franchise Xbox Now Owns After Buying Activision (kotaku.com) angielski
The Good, the Bad and the Incredible – Two Weeks of Witchfire [dev blog] (www.theastronauts.com) angielski
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Sales Breakdown - with PC making up a whopping 68% of units sold (lemmy.prograhamming.com) angielski
Source: twitter.com/…/1709934221840814198
Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, 16 Percent Of Its Workforce, also selling Bandcamp (kotaku.com) angielski
What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved? angielski
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
If I’m honest, I don’t disagree....
Godot is Getting EPIC // 10 Games & Projects Made in Godot (youtu.be) angielski
VFX Series. Shaders: Lesson 1...
Unity apologizes and updates their infamous Runtime Fee (blog.unity.com) angielski
Microsoft - keep your filthy hands off Valve, leak shows MSFT would buy Valve (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
The Xbox Series S Is More Popular Than The Xbox Series X (insider-gaming.com) angielski
According to documents from Microsoft's recent case against the FTC, the Xbox Series S is more popular than the Xbox Series X
This should be illegal (lemmy.world) angielski
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own....
Starfield, is it getting review bombed? (youtu.be) angielski
Seems kind of like the game is just suffering from reactionaries, but I definitely don’t put that much stock in critic reviews these days either.