Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen.
I don’t want Steam to go away, it’s an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don’t want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.
Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.
EGS, GOG,… all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn’t even available on Linux, despite the fact that it’s built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.
Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.
They also chose not to have their own layer of controller translation or their own game recording backend.
Linux is 2% of the market even on Steam with official support. DRM-free means DRM-free for everybody.
I would like more official Linux support, but I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime. There’s no workaround for monopolistic positions or mandatory DRM-free policies.
I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime.
And that unofficial support is brought to you by Valve’s contributions to Wine, DXVK, RADV, LibSDL,…
There’s no workaround for monpolistic positions
Considering that the only monopolist in PC gaming is Microsoft, the workaround for that Windows monopoly is to spend money on products that make non-Windows PC gaming better and currently that’s almost exclusively Valve.
I don’t need Valve to be a moustache-twirling cartoon villain to not like them having a monopolistic position. They make a great platform, I generally like their hardware and, much as it is a byproduct of them trying to cut Microsoft out of the loop, I think it’s great that they are basing their efforts on Linux.
They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming, though, and that means they should lose some market share.
You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.
They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming and that means they should lose some market share, though.
So CD Project could take a tiny fraction of their massive Cyberpunk earnings and make GOG Galaxy with Proton integration available on Linux.
You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.
No, it has nothing to do with sports. Picking the vendor that invests into making an open source alternative to Windows viable is pure egoism. Their contributions will have a positive effect long into the future of PC gaming.
I mean, they don’t need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn’t solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it.
And I hear this “DRM on Steam is optional” a lot, but it’s… kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it’s that you have to. You buy a game, it’s yours to keep.
That’s a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists specifically to avoid that.
Yeah, well, I’ve had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well.
I guess that’s the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say.
As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn’t matter to you… well, I can’t help you, but you’re wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.
Dude, I absolutely have. I was on Manjaro and had some mishaps with the runtime vs native versions of Steam accidentally being installed at once and with trying to use NTFS as a shared drive (since it was a dual boot) that did permanent damage. To this day Proton Experimental shows up on my Windows install of Steam and won’t uninstall, and I had to wipe all variants of Steam manually twice and start over to get it to sort of work. It was a mess.
Heroic was supposed to struggle with Gamescope, but on my KDE Plasma/Wayland install it picked everything up first time.
I by no means say that’s the norm, but “it works on my computer” is never a valid answer, particularly with Linux. Steam has a LOT of remaining quirks despite official support.
And no, you can’t do the same with DRM-free Steam games. You can copy the installation folder, you don’t get a per-policy DRM-free install package you can preserve and install stand-alone for every game.
I want them to have some competition…
Yeah. I mean, same thing.
The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen.
I don’t want Steam to go away, it’s an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don’t want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.
Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.
EGS, GOG,… all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn’t even available on Linux, despite the fact that it’s built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.
Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.
Sure.
They also chose not to have their own layer of controller translation or their own game recording backend.
Linux is 2% of the market even on Steam with official support. DRM-free means DRM-free for everybody.
I would like more official Linux support, but I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime. There’s no workaround for monopolistic positions or mandatory DRM-free policies.
And that unofficial support is brought to you by Valve’s contributions to Wine, DXVK, RADV, LibSDL,…
Considering that the only monopolist in PC gaming is Microsoft, the workaround for that Windows monopoly is to spend money on products that make non-Windows PC gaming better and currently that’s almost exclusively Valve.
I mean, cool.
I don’t need Valve to be a moustache-twirling cartoon villain to not like them having a monopolistic position. They make a great platform, I generally like their hardware and, much as it is a byproduct of them trying to cut Microsoft out of the loop, I think it’s great that they are basing their efforts on Linux.
They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming, though, and that means they should lose some market share.
You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.
So CD Project could take a tiny fraction of their massive Cyberpunk earnings and make GOG Galaxy with Proton integration available on Linux.
No, it has nothing to do with sports. Picking the vendor that invests into making an open source alternative to Windows viable is pure egoism. Their contributions will have a positive effect long into the future of PC gaming.
I like GoG but they don’t support Linux, they don’t take a smaller cut, and developers are free to submit their games to Steam without DRM.
I mean, they don’t need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn’t solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it.
And I hear this “DRM on Steam is optional” a lot, but it’s… kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it’s that you have to. You buy a game, it’s yours to keep.
That’s a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists specifically to avoid that.
It actually doesn’t. Half the games I install through Heroic don’t work. Meanwhile Steam games work 100% of the time. That’s the problem.
Don’t really see the practical difference except that it has like 1% of Steam’s library for that reason.
Yeah, well, I’ve had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well.
I guess that’s the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say.
As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn’t matter to you… well, I can’t help you, but you’re wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.
I don’t believe you.
You can do the same with DRM-free Steam games. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you but you’re wrong.
Dude, I absolutely have. I was on Manjaro and had some mishaps with the runtime vs native versions of Steam accidentally being installed at once and with trying to use NTFS as a shared drive (since it was a dual boot) that did permanent damage. To this day Proton Experimental shows up on my Windows install of Steam and won’t uninstall, and I had to wipe all variants of Steam manually twice and start over to get it to sort of work. It was a mess.
Heroic was supposed to struggle with Gamescope, but on my KDE Plasma/Wayland install it picked everything up first time.
I by no means say that’s the norm, but “it works on my computer” is never a valid answer, particularly with Linux. Steam has a LOT of remaining quirks despite official support.
And no, you can’t do the same with DRM-free Steam games. You can copy the installation folder, you don’t get a per-policy DRM-free install package you can preserve and install stand-alone for every game.