Nils

I agree, and I am glad we are on the same page.

I just think it is important to highlight missing key-points, that people often misunderstand and can misconstrue, like the devs and lawyers from the now class action from the post. So it is important to clarify to prevent further misinformation.

• Steam does not care how much you sell keys for different platforms(e.g. GOG, Epic), just Steam Keys (i.e. keys for the Steam platform).
• And when you sell Steam Keys in different stores, you need to give Steam Store Customers comparable, but not necessarily at the same time or same price.

If you check the historical low on “is there any deal”, often stores have games with historical low lower than Steam’s historical low. From what I saw, the prices are usually around 10%~12% lower.

Technically, you can sell Steam Keys for less. But if you sell Steam Keys somewhere else for cheaper, you need to plan giving Steam Customers the same opportunity at some point.

Steam Key Rules and Guidelines https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

I bought Steam Keys for cheaper in different stores, like Humble Bundle. I also got Steam Keys for free from devs/publisher (events, giveaway, press).

And If you don’t mind Steam Keys, you can buy games from GOG or Epic and the price is not always the same as Steam.

You can compare prices in “is there any deal”, they only allow authorized vendors. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/shadows-of-doubt/info/ You can see how the base price of Steam Keys are very similar, but the discount changes from vendors.

Borg is arguing in bad faith, don’t give him more attention.

A good part of what the said about Apple is not even true, and nothing he said has anything to do with Steam vs Apple Store.

From the first line, recently Apple released an OS update that broke some software from the Apple Store, like MS Office. They made people call the support from the app developers, Apple did not help anyone with that.

Borg went on an unhinged rant about how bad they are at deploying software to specific hardware, and how little they know about the industry. Completely unrelated to what you are asking.

It is not worth spending time, please don’t feed the troll.

If you want to talk seriously about the industry, there are better places to do it.

2024 is not a great year for VR, and I hope Valve pushes some more updates to imporve steam vr next year.

I imagine Metro Awekening is a contender for 2024. Name brand, and many reviews. I think others to qualify, for the same reasons, would be Metal Hellsinger, Maestro and Arizona Sunshine Remake.

I feel like I mostly played old games this year, at least it helped me to pick Labor of Love: Cassette Beasts.

Cassette Beasts is made with Godot, devs are still releasing content, and they just added support for steam workshop.

There were so many good games for this category that it was hard to choose. e.g. I learned from Lemmy about Shattered Pixel Dungeon, that is open source and has been receiving updates for almost 10 years.

My other picks are: Shadows of Doubt, Tactical Breach Wizards, All Quiet in the Trenches, and Tiny Glade.

I also liked Star Fetchers : Escape from Pork Belly, but they released it as DLC rather than its own game.

I was thinking about Keep Driving, and Dice Gambit for the soundtrack, that was also when I thought about Cassette Beasts. But they are not from 2024. I will probably vote for the abbot rapping in Esperanto from Metaphor.

Those metrics are bollocks.

For Denuvo, you don’t need their data. Plenty of games let you play a week before release, then add Denuvo, wait a few months, then remove. During Denuvo days, there is a flood of poor reviews associated with performance.

For the 20%, they just invented a number, there is no real base for that, at least not a solid one. I wonder if Denuvo takes in account the number of games returned because of them.

A long time ago, a game distributor was a guest lecturer to a class I was taking, and I learned a bunch there. For piracy, it seems that their company navigate the seven seas to count downloads and estimate black market sales, multiply by the game price, and assume that was lost revenue caused by piracy. It was very weird, as some games piracy numbers were 100 times bigger than the amount sold and sounded like they were losing billions of dollars in revenue per game because of that. I asked if they really think they would sell that number of games if there was no piracy, if the people pirating games would buy/could afford the full price they took in account - they went from a well-formed teacher to straight red face mouth foaming dogma discourse. There is a lot of money in DRM, and it seems they want to keep that way with doctrine and/or bribery.

For the class, we (students) had to do a market research, and of our small reach (local game forums, malls and where people buy pirated CDs - this was a long time ago), we did not meet a single person self identified as pirate, who would buy a game they want to play if the pirated version was not available, either free from web or street vendors, they would just play something else they could find and afford. That did not bode well with the guest lecturer, but a lot of our findings about piracy narrowed it down to availability, price and convenience - well, there was a minor percentage of people that would always and only pirate for the most diverse reasons even if they could afford the game.

My favourite tool is GPU Screen Recorder - https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/

This is a screen recorder that has minimal impact on system performance by recording your monitor using the GPU only, similar to shadowplay on windows. This is the fastest screen recording tool for Linux.

It works with AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs. It is also the one that performs better. Official repos AUR or Flatpak, or you can install from the source above. The flatpak already comes with the UI gtk https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder-gtk/

Other tools I used were OBS and Steam - you can enable Steam to record your games in the Settings > Game Recording > Record in Background

OBS was very laggy for me.

It depends on the tasks you are planning to do.

Here is a list with a bunch https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Multimedia#Video_editors I tested most of them. While they all work fine, I had better experience with the flatpak versions when available.

If you just want to do some quick cutting, trimming or merging - LosslessCut https://mifi.no/losslesscut/

I use ffmpeg from terminal for quick stuff that I do often. Like resizing a video, cutting, getting an image from a frame.

Lightworks and DaVinci resolve are industry standard, but require a license to use most of it. The problem with their free version is the limitation of input and output formats. Ideal if you are making movies/going professional. I prefer DaVinci Resolve, keep an eye for hardware sale, sometimes it comes with a license bundled - Speed Editor being the cheapest.

Kdenlive is well-rounded, from the open source is the most robust, and with most maintainers. I use it mostly for gameplay and to add voice over to videos.

For recording voice over and sound FX, there is nothing better than Ardour https://ardour.org/

Natron is great for Visual FX, you can also use Blender for pretty much everything.

Unless there is a x86 to ARM translation layer on Linux that I’m not aware of?

https://steamdb.info/app/3043620/

It appears Valve is working on Proton for arm64, I was wondering if this is to attend the mobile market, a new Index or maybe a smaller Steam Deck.