This from the man who thinks he’s “competing” with Valve?
Valve is figuring out how to run games they didn’t even develop on Linux, while Epic complains it’s too hard to do for even their own games…
That’s rich.
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No it isn’t, I didn’t claim it was, and Valve is doing a good bit more than mere pre-configuration.
Valve is contributing efforts to improve Wine, DXVK, VK3D, shader-cache management, and making their use simple and easy.
If I figure out how to use Bottles, then in a literary sense it is completely correct to say: I figured out how to run windows software on Linux.
The sentence doesn’t suddenly become false if I didn’t write every line of code, from kernel to compatibility layer, that my PC is executing to do it.
Sometimes you need a few developers getting paid full time to truly get a project like DXVK off the ground. Some of the biggest open source projects wouldn’t even exist without the time and money from companies that actively support it.
This is why I don’t give Epic and any exclusives on it’s store any money. I know 0% of it is going back into making linux gaming better.
I will happily take advantage of their free giveaways, though.
Nope. Fuck them, don’t give them any market share.
I don’t give a rats ass about their market share, epics never going to pass steam, but they still have to pay devs to give away those games, and with a lot of the games being indie titles, I’m perfectly happy for some free money to go into a devs pocket
To add on to this: steam was dog shit before epic came along. A lot of people are either unaware or have forgotten how bad steam actually was until it got some real competition
I’ll happily buy my games on Steam just for the convenience of Steam Cloud (wrt one-click Linux gaming: there’s an effort to standardise custom Proton version loading iirc which Heroic Launcher is part of), but yeah - let’s not forget that Steam had its dark days. You reminded me of NerdCubed’s rant in 2015 about Greenlight and such that led to him dropping his Curator page at the time, and I remembered quite a bit of cheering in reaction to the Epic Games Store announcement around 2018/19 (before all the exclusivity shit afterwards).
Man, I hadn’t heard that rant in years.
And yeah, I remember a lot of people both cheering and hating on EGS when it was first announced. A lot of people were saying it would be as bad as uplay and whatever ea calls their launcher now (it wasn’t), or that devs would get screwed by the platform (they didn’t).
I also remember a lot of people saying it would be a “steam killer”. It wasn’t, but even without direct evidence I feel comfortable saying it was a major factor in steam finally making their launcher halfway decent. It still has a ways to go and I still think EGS does some things better (why TF would I ever want to launch directly to the store, valve? Just show me my fucking games)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
And if you only care about playing your games then Epic’s launcher has the shortcut right in your face when it starts while Steam has it in a separate page with a popup in the way.
People can praise Steam all they want, for new it’s just bloated as fuck.
He can go fuck himself with a 6" railroad spike.
At least Gaben is pushing the Linux gaming community forward!
BUT 30%!!!
Yeah, that 30% means I can ditch Windows. At least it’s being used for good and not just* yachts.
Anyone who actually complains about steam’s cut is either misinformed or lying.
Just because there’s an outdated industry standard doesn’t mean it should be perpetuated, let alone supported, for eternity. Valve’s server hosting costs on a per-installation basis have fallen substantially since they first launched Steam, so there’s no reason why the 30% cut is still necessary; even 20% would leave them a sizable profit margin. I’m not a fan of the Epic Game Store for bribing companies to not release their games on Steam for a set amount of time, and choose not to use it as a result, but it’s time that the 30% industry standard be dropped. In purchasing a game I want to support continued development of that franchise, and $15 of a $50 purchase going to the storefront is not only excessive and inflationary, but harms developers as well.
I guess you wouldm’t be complaining if they never improved efficiencies then, since decreasing costs should apparently be passed on to distributers. Shame on them for improving their business sonthey could use those profits to create the steam deck and other benefits for gamers instead of propping up the profits of game companies!
Should game companies lower their proces based on volume of sales when they make ‘enough’ profit?
Valve could still operate as it currently does, including having sufficient profits to account for R&D and long-term costs, at a lower cut of platform sales (as another commenter mentioned, Gabe Newell’s billion dollar yacht collection is demonstrative of the platform’s profitability, especially when one considers how much it costs to maintain ships). Products such as the Steam Deck make money for Valve too, as Steam Deck users (myself included) statistically buy more games on Steam as a result. I don’t support profiteering efforts by game publishers either, such as the Factorio price increase attributed to inflation, $70 game releases attributed to inflation when digital releases have reduced their costs, and micro transactions in general. In any case, however, given that cost increases are always the consumer’s responsibility, cost decreases should not simply be a means for companies to bolster their profit margins.
I am fine with someone who set up and runs a successful business that is in no way predatory and is a benefit to employees, consumers, and the companies that use their product to have an excess amount of money. They are doing capitalism the right way and actually earned the benefits.
Games going up to $70 are not becsuse of the 30% cut. They wouldn’t go down if that percentage dropped either. I play multiple games that were always sold at $40 or less as full games and they have been massively profitable.
So it’s not predatory to let games become more expensive while also reducing running costs? Because if you run the numbers it means they’re just increasing their profits by charging the same % and forcing devs and publishers to increase the cost of games to compensate for development costs increasing. The only winner here is Valve, maybe you should start defending your own interests instead of defending the interests of a billionaire.
You’re the one that ends up paying for it though, games could be cheaper, instead Valve just increases its profits.
I am getting my money’s worth.
Ok, that’s just idiotic…
There’s the weakest defense of a capitalistic business practice you could come up with…
“It’s the industry’s standard!”
Ok, if the standard was 50% and someone came along and said “Know what? We can do the same thing for 20%” would you be defending those charging 50%? What if it was 75%?
The reality is, they’re taking 30% because their position allows them to do so and people don’t care enough about those actually doing the work to create games to push Valve to change their ways. Valve is as greedy as any other company.
Remember folks, Gaben is a billionaire that owns multiple yachts, he’s not your friend, he’s making a fuck load of money instead of making sure you get the most from your money, Valve could lower their cut by a whole lot while still being extremely profitable.
Pretty sure Gaben has a yacht too.
A bunch of them, he’s just another billionaire but people can’t help defending him.
This would be news if it were current. At 2 years old it’s just clickbait
Some would say not having Fortnite on Linux is a feature…
No. I don’t care for them game, but I want people to be able to play it on Linux still.
Over 15k verifiable playable games work on Linux
Look, it’s just that the engine they use doesn’t have Linux support… Wait no that’s not true
I just used lutris lol.
Linux users are not your audience. Owners of the Steam Deck are. I’d wager the vast majority of Deck users do not have a computer that runs Linux. You don’t really need to know how to do anything in Linux even in desktop mode. The environment is so similar to mac and windows for most tasks.
He’s just pissy about the idea of designing anything that would benefit Steam; the heavyweight he has tried and failed to emulate.
Sweeney generally has a hate boner for Linux. It’s nothing really new.
And it represents so few people that the investment isn’t worth it, especially as most of them have a hate boner for Epic.
Why tf would you post this without at least putting a date on it lol
I noticed too late, I forgot the steam deck is old now.
This is a 2 and a half (almost) year old article. I figured Tim’s thoughts on this were common knowledge at this point?
Okay, now give me another free game Epic. I’ve got over 100 probably on you wacko store and have not paid for a single one.
You say that like you’re getting one over on them. But they’ve successfully got you to download their shitty software. You think they aren’t aware of what they’re doing?
Step 1: Redeem games through my web browser.
That’s it, there is no step 2.
So you don’t actually play the games? You just redeem them?
Correct. Fuck Epic. They’re awful.
Full transparency though, I’ve played precisely one game on epic games store, Alan Wake 2 because I like Remedy as a developer and want to support them. Alan Wake 2 will never come out on any other platform and I’m not buying a console to play one game.
Okay but redeeming the games doesn’t actually do anything. Epic doesn’t care. You’re not messing with them by just having an account if you don’t use it
Epic is subsidizing the sale of the games. It costs them money and muddies their metrics.
Oh no, not the metrics!
I’m sure they’re fully aware that some percentage of people will redeem the games with no intent of actually playing them.
The whole point is to generate word of mouth for their store. You’re out here doing their job for them, talking about how many free games you’ve gotten from them.
Not the other guy but I download them through heroic, install a crack, repack, store on my NAS. That is, if the game is one I’d like to keep for the future.
So yeah some of us are absolutely taking those free games AS free games without downloading their software. A couple of mine have been “loaned” to friends and family, even.
They know what they’re trying to do, which is to bait people into spending money on their platform so they can have revenue numbers to show developers to get them to release on their platform to get people to want to spend money with them without bait.
Taking the bait but not getting caught in the trap isn’t quite pulling one over on them, but it’s also not what they were hoping for, so it’s not not taking advantage.
This is where the Heroic Games Launcher comes in, it only downloads the game itself, no Epic Games Launcher to be seen
I’ve got like 400.
Think I only paid for Outer Wilds plus the DLC, and Untitled Goose Game out of all those, because everybody should play Outer Wilds.
Linux is ‘a terrifically hard audience to serve’
said owner of a company that last tried to oficially support Linux in late '90s.
This is old news but I do often think about the flaw in Tim Sweeney’s strategy to try and bully apple and Microsoft into making their platforms work his way.
Honestly Epic should have got in the Linux bandwagon years ago so they could provide their own hardware.
Good old Tim never misses an opportunity to tell Linux users about his nonsense dated opinions
It’s not that hard to make a game run on Linux thoses days, they’re just lazy ass
