Not that I give a crap about Fortnite, but what an asshole.
Yeah, Timmy's had a hate-boner for anything related to Valve and Linux for years. He's been lying through his teeth non-stop whenever either topic comes up.
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.
A terrifically hard audience to serve given the variety of incompatible configurations.
If your game doesn't work with my fully functional operating system (while others do), isn't it literally your game that's "incompatible?"
Plus it isn't like there aren't tons of compatibility issues with all the versions of hardware on PC.
My kids, unfortunately, love the game, so I’ve kept up with performance a little bit. It seems they’re trying their best to make it run like trash. They can’t even support the few operating systems it does run on. I haven’t noticed any mind blowing graphics updates, but fps is around a third of what it used go be. Such a garbage company.
The cartoonish artstyle might hide it a bit, but Fortnite is basically Epic's showcase of all the newest Unreal Engine tech. The move to UE5 a couple years ago brought with it all those new features and a huge leap in graphics. Fortnite has been around for a long time now, so the minimum performance targets are probably changing as tech and average system hardware improve. I don't actually play it, but it's pretty much a different game now compared to when BR mode was first released.
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.
Why is a 2 year old article being posted now?
Good call out. So rage bait here has hit lemmy
Maybe there should be a feature that warns us if the article is more then 6 months old. Our maybe a bot could do it.
Lemmy just added the ability to add on server plugins. That would be a prime case for a server plugin
Good catch I was just wondering he doubling down all of a sudden.
"We don't have enough developers to support Linux!"
- Tim Sweeney promptly fires 700 developers
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.
...what? Yeah, 30% is the standard when there are higher costs and higher risks. Why would it not follow that Steam using the same percentage - with lower costs and none of the physical-based risk - is simply greed?
If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.
A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can't still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.
There's an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people's things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.
When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn't just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.
Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they're offering becomes a lot easier to see.
I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.
I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of "The Club" that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don't know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.
Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.
I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn't worth it.
I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.
Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve's cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.
Why would it not follow that Steam using the same percentage - with lower costs and none of the physical-based risk - is simply greed?
Most of the retailers mentioned in that article were also digital only and had the exact same or less risk. Steam certainly does a lot to try and get people's money, but they aren't just greedily fucking over Devs for that 30%, that is in fact industry standard.
I also have no doubt that Epic will enshitify itself and raise its rate closer to 30% after growing.
Its not one to one, but providing digital services is not exactly cheap. Data centers and servers take a lot of costs, both the electricity and salary for a team of ops engineers to keep it running smoothly. The building, conditioning, maintenance, insurance, storage, equipment. To ensure low lag and high download speeds you need several data centers with data caches in different regions of the world. If anything it is actually more risky. If a store closes the stock was already paid for by the the owner to the publisher. Zero risk for the publisher. If Steam goes down, it brings windows of opportunity for sales with it and not a dime is secured. They pay for the uptime and quality of service, not just processing a payment once and a download link with a shitty 72 h expiry time. People expect access to their digital goods 24/7 virtually forever. Steam provides it all with a myriad more of business and client facing services that a physical store would simply be incapable of providing.
Uh, not to take away from your point about Steam making it possible to ditch Windows, but that money is absolutely being put towards buying yachts. Gabe Newel owns $1 billion worth of yachts, 6 of them in total. Like, good on Valve for making Linux accessible, but the money is still quite literally going towards Gabe's yacht collection.
This would be news if it were current. At 2 years old it's just clickbait
Just an FYI: This article is 2 years old. Not saying anything has changed or not.
Look, it's just that the engine they use doesn't have Linux support... Wait no that's not true
I know this is an older article, but EAC has had compatibility with Linux for years at this point. Linux is also really easy to compile and develop for compared to MacOS. They just don't want to because there aren't enough players to justify the cost, most likely. Also might have some incentive to keep their game off the hardware of their biggest competitor.
Actually, I think they don't want linux gamers, with their higher technical savvy. Some game dev companies love how 90% of their bug reports come from 10% of their users (and even brag about it). Other companies would rather just not get those 90% of bug reports.
Well yeah…. They’re clearly developmentally challenged at Epic. In every sense of the word. I’m not exactly surprised that a platform still lacking basic functionality that should’ve been there on day one, has trouble figuring out Linux.
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.
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?
The wording in the tweet in the article is a little less bombastic. He's concerned about maintaining anti-cheat for custom kernels and other Linux-exclusive issues at the scale that Fortnite runs at. Given how large the audience for that game is and the age range (which has a lot more time to dedicate) I can see how that would be a costly endeavor and look at TF2 right now as an example of what happens if you fail to do so. Combine that with the much smaller footprint of the Linux base (which is changing!) and thus, less incentive to tackle any of that in the first place.
Maybe I'm just trying to not read ill intent, but I see "Linux gamers are a hard audience to serve" as "You guys use an OS focused on freedom and customization, which means it's literally harder to serve you all effectively" and not as "Linux gamers are mean".
Or ya know, the steam deck is on a platform they are trying to take over by throwing money at their store. Of course they aren't going to make it easy for kids to play on deck.
Yeah but they haven't bothered making their store run natively on linux.
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.
This is incredibly short-sighted. Having your business model hitched to a single vendor is just asking to screwed by whatever walled garden that vendor puts up. There's a reason Valve is pushing Linux.
Tim Sweeney is a terrifically hard person to get to fuck off.
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