It will be valuable information when we have more data points to compare it against later. The console’s high initial sales may very well have little to do with anything except how many Nintendo had available, for instance. It could do Wii U numbers (unlikely), or it could be a mega success, or anything in between. The third party sales might be reflective of the fact that the games are all older and available on other platforms, or it could be that customers are strapped for cash after a higher console purchase price, or any of a number of other reasons. I would just encourage people not to make a narrative out of this yet.

It’s really too early to extract much of anything out of this.

I think this was a misunderstanding on my part based on exactly which text you quoted.

What bugs do you run into? I just click on the store button, and it basically is just a browser.

But since you have the option to play without the client, they can’t and don’t use it to restrict refunds.

I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would put good money on this being closer to Excite Truck in the public consciousness a few years from now rather than one of the most successful games of all time. So no, it’s not bold to think that Drag X Drive isn’t going to supplant Rocket League.

First and foremost it’s bold to put this out before Drag x Drive releases which is just weird enough to become its own thing.

That’s cute.

Do tell.

GOG’s? Which part of it?

You boot up Heroic, you point it at your GOG account, then you go to the clearly labeled Wine Manager in the left panel. Choose the latest Proton-GE (Glorious Eggroll fork) or a version of your choosing. Then go to library and download the game you want. It will prompt you to choose a Wine version that you’ve already got installed, and it seems to detect the ones you have installed via Steam and via their Wine Manager; I recommend sticking to Proton-GE. The installation process for each game works much the same as any other launcher you use.

If you want to try the game on GOG first, they have a 30-day no questions asked refund policy, since they can’t exactly track how many hours you’ve played. It’s just kind of on the honors system that we’re not abusing it as customers, or maybe if you do it too much. Most games just work, but I have found the odd exception. For some games, like The Thaumaturge, I had to run Winetricks to download some VC++ runtimes to get it working (which I was only able to deduce based on the depots visible on steamdb.info). I nearly bought a copy of The Alters today, but early reports on ProtonDB are that it’s got some crashing issues, so between Valve and GloriousEggroll, I figure that problem will be solved in the next couple of months.

The refund policy on GOG is so good that you can just try it first and buy the Steam version instead if it doesn’t work out. The 10% referral code that benefits Heroic shows GOG how much of their customer base are on Linux, and it should enhance the Linux experience via funding at the same time.

It’s got a controller semi-friendly interface, so it’s better for the Steam Deck, and it isn’t so much running compatibility scripts but just leveraging APIs inherent to each storefront to download and install the same way that GOG Galaxy does, more or less. It’s got achievement compatibility and beta cloud save support.

Friendly reminder for us Linux folks: you can send 10% of your purchase toward Heroic Games Launcher development by buying through their client.

Typically, that’s how you’d measure a flop. Seeing as you only need two other people to play, this game isn’t dead as long as there are 3 people who want to play and a server running to facilitate them.

Even if you like it, there’s a high chance you’re not playing it for more than a month.

No, it did not, and concurrent players is a very bad metric to use for something like this. They sold north of 3.5M copies. At $40 each, that’s about $100M. Even looking at concurrent players, right now, at 98k players, it’s the 14th most played game on Steam, so with the information you did use, as a paid game and not free to play, it would be hard to say that it flopped.

Is this the much talked about Steam integration? I’d doubt it (what manufacturer will let you use their service to give money to another platform?!), but…I do hope I am wrong!

It’s not just a throwaway line. It’s something they’ve been building up to in their public statements for a while now. The direction the wind is blowing in a lot of countries right now is that of breaking down walled gardens, often times via legislation. Not only is this a matter of them accepting this as an inevitability, but none of their own walled gardens are responsible for their own success. Yes, they’ve got a Windows Store, but it doesn’t make the kind of money that Apple’s does. Their competitive advantage is that they can say, “look how nice and open we are,” while Sony goes about business as usual. Meanwhile, in a world where the next Xbox is expected to just be a PC, they can legally play the Windows version of God of War on a machine called “Xbox”, and there’s nothing Sony can do to stop it. All of that exclusivity money they spent is worthless. And the appeal to an Xbox is that it plays all of those games and is a cheap entry point for Game Pass. The part of this most recent PR statement that throws me for a loop is how they’re getting the full backward compatibility with old Xbox games, because that’s the only piece of evidence that points to them making a traditional console and not a Windows PC in disguise.

As for what I’ve been playing, I made good progress in a number of games lately. I finally hit the turn in Devil May Cry 4. Even knowing roughly what it would be through cultural osmosis, it’s every bit as disappointing to get to the halfway point of the game and realize they’re just going to make you go through the exact same levels as the first half of the game but backwards. It’s sort of like making New Game + mandatory in order to see the ending.

I also played a number of quests in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and it looks like I’m at about the halfway point in the main story. The biggest problem with the game so far has been anything relating to its stealth systems, as they don’t give you much to go on, and the punishment is severe, but the story is pulling me along, and I finally leveled my way out of most of the game’s tedium.

And here or there, I’ve been playing some more missions in Borderlands 3. The upgrade in game feel is hard to overstate. The writing’s not great, but it’s not so unbearable like its reputation would lead me to believe. The skill trees are much better, the shooting feels much better, the quality of life is vastly improved; all keeping me pumped for the fourth game in a few months. The DRM situation isn’t my favorite, but I’ll deal with it.

EDIT: Breaking GOG news, Perfect Dark: Devil May Cry 1-4 are now available via GOG’s Good Old Games program. Of course they did this as I’m nearing the end of my journey through this series, but combined with Breath of Fire IV, Dino Crisis, and Resident Evil showing up on the service lately, I take this to mean they’ve got a good partnership with Capcom right now. I emulated DMC1-3 when I played through those lately, because I heard there were weird artifacts when playing the Steam versions through Proton, but maybe the fixed up GOG versions fare better.

Honestly, much like with Marathon but on a shorter time scale, I think they just bet that there aren’t enough fans of the old one to be precious about the name. The name had very little to do with why I (still) haven’t played Prey 2017.

What the data pointed to, with tests going around the same time, is that Arc Raiders will likely hit and Marathon will likely bomb very quickly. Destiny isn’t proving to logistically be a solution to their problems either. As we’ve learned more about Bungie since the Sony acquisition, it appeared that they banked on their success continuing forever, but it was very much running out.

It was a single word title that they own. It’s probably how Prey 2017 used the same title as Prey 2006.

An extraction shooter from Bungie, wearing the skin of a game that company made 30 years ago, that didn’t test well.