Or Jurassic Park or the Star Wars trilogy. It really is a shame.

To be clear, this is a different system than stores listing non steam key games.

That depends. For GOG and EGS, yeah, those stores don’t want to sell Steam keys, they want to sell keys for their own platform. But other stores like Fanatical sell Steam keys, and I’m not exactly sure how those work.

My point is that devs can sell keys on their own and take 100% profit if they want, they just can’t undercut Steam. And that’s pretty common in retail, if you see a product in store, it’ll be a very similar price to buy direct. It turns out, retail stores don’t like providing marketing just to get undercut on your website or a competitor store.

Valve doesn’t get a free pass just cause they have a better platform

Neither does EGS just because they take a lower cut and give away free games.

AFAIK, Steam isn’t doing anything differently than other retail stores. If EGS were in Valve’s position, you can bet they’d be way worse.

That’s a choice those devs made, not an exclusivity deal.

As for Borderlands 2, it looks like it was available on most consoles as well. It was released in 2012, which was before Steam even came to Linux, before the original GOG Galaxy, and way before EGS. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, The Witcher 1&2 were “exclusive” to Steam until ~2012 when GOG relaunched their website, so CD Project Red didn’t even bother selling their own games on their website. If they don’t, why would other devs?

I get it, I’m sad we don’t have good alternatives to Steam, but it’s not because of anything nefarious Valve is doing, it’s because their platform and policies are just better. I didn’t even have a Steam account until 2012 or so when they came to Linux, it just wasn’t necessary because everything I wanted to play was available elsewhere (e.g. direct from devs). These days I use Steam almost exclusively because they make playing on Linux so easy, not because I don’t have other options (I also play EGS and GOG games through Heroic, a community solution to support those stores on Linux because the stores themselves haven’t bothered).

The only exclusives AFAIK are Valve games (understandable) and games that don’t bother listing elsewhere. I also think Valve’s “no undercutting” policy is reasonable. They give you free keys to sell elsewhere if you choose, and you can have sales happen elsewhwre at a different time (or the same) vs Steam, the only requirement is that you don’t undercut Steam.

That’s very far from monopolistic behavior. Adding to that, Valve also invests heavily in their own platform, providing features like Steam Input, Proton/Steam OS, etc.

Epic, on the other hand, bribes users to come via free games, bribes devs via paid exclusivity, and hasn’t meaningfully invested in their platform, they’re still lightyears away from Steam, and even GOG is way better from a features standpoint.

Which is showing more monopolistic behavior? Epic, and it’s not even close. The only “monopolistic” behavior from Valve is being really popular, and I think they’ve earned that.

Should be feasible, many of my bills allow it. If there’s an issue w/ lag, they could always allow it only for wallet top-ups and people could use that.

But I think the issue is that if they accept these payment processors at all, they need to comply w/ their policies. Completely cutting them off could significantly hurt sales.

Exactly. I really don’t understand this whole mentality.

If I supported this project, I’d either be donating money, code, or tech support time. Using something isn’t “supporting” it, it’s just using it.

Eh, I use Linux and am annoyed at issues from users on other systems. I don’t know Windows dev very well, so fixing issues on Windows is a pain for me. Likewise for macOS.

So I get it.

That said, the proper way to handle this is to make it explicit what platforms are supported and which are not, accept fixes for unsupported platforms that don’t break supported platforms, close issues related to packaging and whatnot on other platforms, and leave open and ignore issues for unsupported platforms. Let the community support what they want, and focus on what you want.

Agreed. I use GNOME on one system and KDE on another, and I think it’s good to have a group that’s very opinionated since consistent systems are much easier to support and more intuitive for new users. I don’t think GNOME itself is ideal, but I do think the ideas they’re pushing are worth discussing.

That said, there’s a reason I’m not all-in on GNOME.

It’s probably not, unless all contributors agreed to the license change.

He is a dev and doesn’t know that?

I think it’s reasonable that he doesn’t. He doesn’t use Arch (or any Linux flavor), so isn’t aware of how packaging for Arch works. I’m guessing someone submitted the PKGBUILD and he just accepted it, and now people come to him for support instead of the person who submitted it.

I 100% agree w/ removing the PKGBUILD, but he doesn’t need to go out of his way to remove Linux support. Just state that the project doesn’t officially support Linux, but is open to Linux-specific bug fixes. Then if anyone complains about a distro-specific issue, close the issue and move on. If someone opens what seems to be a legitimate bug w/ Linux, leave it open and move on.

That’s really all the community should expect here.

And that’s the real fail. AUR users need to understand how things work, AUR packages are community maintained and supported. If the build fails, complain to the AUR maintainer, and they will raise the necessary bug reports to the upstream project if the bug is w/ the project instead of the build instructions.

What makes it worse?

I’m somewhere between 21 and 98, depending on where my scroll wheel happens to stop.

No, 1984 is way worse, but what we have is still awful.

Parents can, and the only thing the government should be doing here is teaching parents how.

Yup. My coworker likes to RP as a furry and has like 4 cats, and they’re super rad. I’ve never met a juggalo in person, but I’m sure there are rad juggalos out there.

I’d really rather not make an account.

asterisk

It’s really not, it’s just a funny commentary on how obsessed people are with their phones.

So, kinda like Men in Black.