Well what do you expect them to provide at a measly 12%?
That 12% does not matter a wit to me when the game still costs the same amount.
Dauntless launches next week on the Epic store. Looking forward to trying this one out assuming my lousy computer can run it.
Just curious, any reason you haven’t played it up until now?
I guess I didn’t realize I could. I saw the article mentioned a beta though.
Well that does make a lot of sense! :) I picked it up around May of last year, I think that’s when it became widely available but I didn’t follow the game too closely.
Well they are adding cloud saves this month and I feel like an offline mode was added fairly recently. June they are redesigning the front page and adding more search functions (tag/genre).
Steam was secretly paying one guy for months to do a DX10/11 → Vulkan wine plugin. It wasn’t much of a shock he wasn’t doing highly specialized work for free, but Valve wanted to keep it under wraps while it did the store backend + frontend.
As to Valve allowing it to be used outside Steam, Wine’s license forces added code to be free, though they might have done it on their own anyway.
So, basically, you can play Epic Games with this on a Linux machine?
No. Sorry, you do not get to spin this as Epic supporting Linux. Their client does not run on Linux, so you can’t even install games let alone run them. And this is still effectively emulation, unlike the thousands of games on Steam with native Linux support. It’s like talking about the great Windows support that Nintendo provides since you could theroretically buy a game, get a ROM dump, and run it on a third-party emulator.
Wait, so you can’t use this program to install Epic in the first place? I read that although it’s designed for gaming, there is not reason it can’t be used for other applications.
And, no this isn’t a win for Epic, but this does seem to mitigate some of the issues that Linux players might have.
The reality we live in is that few game developers actually support Linux, and I doubt the majority of games that come to Epic would have had Linux support, even on Steam, at least directly.
But I am not a Linux users, at least on Desktop, so I don’t know.
Largely semantics, but Wine Is Not an Emulator. That’s what WINE stands for. They actually interpret all the windows kernel calls and translate them into native ones. Pretty cool.
Yes, you can use WINE for other applications. Not sure about the Proton variant.
All that said, WINE (and Proton) will become irrelevant as time passes; modern computers will soon all have 8 or more real CPU cores, and technology like Looking Glass will allow you to pass a PCIe GPU through to a Windows virtual machine and then just transparently play games in Linux with perfect compatibility.
AMD also has introduced GPU virtualization which should contribute to that future as well.
Presumably. Look in the game forums to see. Oh, wait…
Steam has a list of supported games, as in, they make sure to have one Proton version that works being seamlessly installed with the game (avoiding duplicates now, I think). They also have functionality for a user to manage it for other games, but the user is on their own (same as before, just prettier, I guess).
So if something actively being patched works at this current point in time, I don’t know. I’m still using my old old of doing things out of habit, just with the patches on top.
If you don’t want to avoid Windows, or avoid wasting a lot of resources, sure. OTOH, Wine will support older programs/games longer than virtual machines will support, say, XP and the games that break on later versions.
Came here to say this. Wine often supports old games better than Windows supports old games.
What do you base this on? I have been able to run old DOS games and Windows XP games without any trouble at all on Windows 10.
Wine emulates old interfaces fairly reliably, whereas Windows tends to upgrade interfaces and forget about them over time. You can look through the GOG forums, vogons.org, or PCGamingWiki, to see the trouble people have with old games on Windows 10.
Nah. You can just run a Windows XP VM.
I guess there would be an edge case if the old OS doesn’t have drivers for your GPU, though.
I apologize for the delay in responding to this, I was to busy playing the game I purchased on the Epic Game Store. “Close to the Sun” is a lot like Bioshock without the combat… so Bioshock without one of the worst parts of Bioshock. Sorry, I tried to replay that a few months ago and was frustrated. Anyways…
Yeah, Sly Frog read me right. Epic’s store is, currently, a terrible place to shop for games. It works absolutely fine as a place to play games. Making it hard for consumers to spend their discretionary funds at a place of business is less anti-consumer and more just bad business. Epic compared to what Windows Live was when it launched is practically heaven! I lost my first Bioshock save to that monstrosity…
Somebody else mentioned a laundry list of features it does NOT have. Despite averaging 15-20 hours of PC games a week, I have not used any of those features in at least the last 2 years, with one exception mentioned below. I can only give a review from my perspective and I don’t miss them.
The one exception is Tabletop Simulator which I believe uses Steam Workshop. As far as I can tell, Tabletop Simulator is exclusive to Steam. This is not a problem. There is no doubt that Valve has done a lot to make gaming more accessible. The problem is for many they are the only option, whether or not Steam’s terms are a fit for that project. Speaking of which…
As somebody who plays a lot of niche genres and titles, I do care a lot about this even if I am still paying the same list price. A developer sees an extra 25.7% per sale between a 30% and a 12% commission. That is huge for a business, and might be the difference between sequels and expansions getting made and a development house going under. Or, for the real small projects the difference between breaking even and struggling with debt if the horror stories I hear about the indie market are real.
Agree, I have the luxury of not being particularly price-sensitive, but it’s completely true that games haven’t increased in price in, like, 30 years. I paid $79.99 for Ultima 7 in 1992. That was an extra expensive title, but normal games cost $50-60 back then. They still do today.
Of course the market exploded since then so they benefit from economies of scale, and digital distribution is much lower cost than selling physical copies, but it’s very telling that games haven’t increased in price since H.W. Bush was president.
I want developers and studios to make tons of money, so they keep making games for me to play. Not through predatory crap like loot boxes and pay2win that intrinsically harm gameplay, but by selling the game itself. Pumping up their margins by the distributor taking a lower cut for what is, inherently, a very low value service just makes sense.