Its possible that being the platform meant they wouldn’t have been bought up.

I disagree with your definition of “killed Linux gaming.” It killed native Linux development perhaps. But using Linux for gaming is more viable than ever thanks to Valve. They single handedly boosted Linux gaming, if anything.

And they also offer more than the competition. For a while there games on EGS were just telling people to get support on steam forums because epic had nothing for supporting games they sold. Steam has forums, screenshot storage, achievements, remote play, friends lists, a shopping cart (🙄) and is adding new features like clips. I’m not using steam because it’s a monopoly, I’m using it because it’s a better platform.

I don’t fully disagree with you. I personally don’t pirate things (I can afford to just pay up front, and if I don’t want to support a dev, I just fully don’t play the game, I don’t want to accidentally be lumped into any metrics that might show support), but the game dev themselves said “No skin off our back”.

If I steal your car, you no longer have a car. If I steal your game, you’ve lost absolutely nothing. Code is infinitely reproducible. You’re only out the sale.

This dev made art, and they care more about sharing the art they created with more people, than they do about getting every last transaction paid for.

It’s usually the publisher that has strong opinions about this, because they didn’t make the art nor do they care about people seeing it. they only care about getting the money, but again, if you can’t afford it, they were never going to get your money anyway. It’s technically a victimless crime. No skin off anyone’s back.

The issue is when enough people who CAN afford to pay use the “no skin off their back” logic to not pay, and a good game winds up not being profitable (or profitable enough to the publisher) and a studio suffers as a result.

Also if the alternative was “no money, still can’t buy the game” then they are losing no money in the process anyway.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24152137/xbox-hi-fi-rush-tango-gameworks-matt-booty

Oh i know. microsoft should buy tango gameworks! Brilliant. solved their problems for them.

All Microsoft needs is a few award winning small dev studios…

What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts

This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.

You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.

The cross platform friend requests bugs mean I still havent been able to play with the friends who convinced me to buy the game in the first place. But yeah, otherwise quite fun.

Its 100x better of a starship troopers game than the actual starship troopers game that came out last year

Valve fixing EGS on Linux is exactly why im OK with them getting a bigger cut than EGS: they actually build support systems around things instead of just being the point of sale and then disappearing.

Its also free to play.

Or as some streamers say: its a $60 game with an incredibly generous free trial.

These sorts of decisions can impact future decisions. It is to early to say that this is a trend, so people shouldn’t get all up in arms over things. But still, using other company histories as a basis, it is concerning about where this could end up.