Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

As a publisher, we would like to deliver it to PC users as well, but per our agreement with Vanillaware, we are only releasing on console. In other words, there are no plans to port it to PC currently.

That’s from the game’s producer at Atlus. If the publisher wanted to get a PC port, they would have found the money to do it (or found a third-party to manage the port if Vanillaware wasn’t willing/able). Per the quote, Vanillaware themselves do not want it on PC - nothing about not being able to afford to port it or anything like that. This tracks with how they’ve never released a single game on Windows aside from an MMO they made for Square Enix almost 20 years ago, before they were even known as Vanillaware.

Vanillaware just doesn’t have any interest in PC, and while that’s quite frustrating, it’s their prerogative.

This device is not for sale; it has been developed for Skull and Bones promotion only.

😠

Microsoft at least owns the trademark on it. Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if that’s at all decoupled from “the IP” or not, but I suspect they’d be tied fairly close together.

It would also be weird if Mistwalker signed a contract giving MS ownership of Blue Dragon (which is on the list, but has multiple games from different publishers) but not Lost Odyssey. I guess maybe the solution would be to remove Blue Dragon from the list rather than adding Lost Odyssey. 🤷‍♂️

Imagine leaving Lost Odyssey off of this list.

(Although I suppose maybe you need more than one game to be considered a “franchise” 😢)

Sunset Overdrive(Good)

Released in 2014, so while good, doesn’t quite fit the “from the last 5 years” criteria (unless you’re specifically talking about the PC port, which just squeaks in by a month, but I’m not sure that’s quite in the spirit of the discussion).

Why should it matter which launcher I use?

This is answered in the OP article itself:

Why don’t some publishers do this? The reasoning is pretty simple really: Valve take a cut of all sales on Steam, including DLC and micro-transactions. So if you purchased directly before, publishers will want to keep you there so any extras you purchase don’t get a cut eaten by Valve.

Imagine thinking anyone knows or cares what currency you’re talking about when you don’t bother to specify.

The website you linked doesn’t account for Gamepass discounts.

You’re making your case even worse. I like consoles, but arguing that paying a monthly fee to get a 20% discount is better than the regular deep discounts that PC games get is laughable.

I got Dredge on Xbox for $12, lowest its been on PC is $25.

What are you even talking about? $25 is the base price on PC; are you claiming that it’s literally never been on sale on the platform? Because that’s obviously, hilariously, wrong.

Meanwhile, the lowest it seems to have gotten on Xbox is $20 (check the History tab there - I can’t find a way to link directly to it).

The dude you’re arguing with is an absolute toolbag with his blind PCMR bullshit, but you aren’t helping the case against him by spewing blatant bullshit of your own.

It looks more modern

Not OP, but as an old.lemmy.world user myself, this is not a selling point.

i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

They don’t. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it’s their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.

if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them

To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.

Man, Gamers™ get fuckin’ vicious when it comes to things like this that make them click different icons than the ones they like. It’s pretty gross.

*cries in FF6*

All them uppity French peasants?

Not only the same, but better. Epic will automatically just refund you the difference if a game you bought goes on sale within a certain period of time after your purchase (allegedly even beyond the two week refund window, although I haven’t been able to find any definitive statement of how long they watch it for). Just flat out, you get an email one day telling you they’ve credited back X amount of your purchase.

Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.

There are. For more than four years now. The problem is that, just like with Steam, they can only put the option out there - it’s up to devs to actually implement it. And there are a lot of devs who haven’t done so, which lots of people interpret as EGS not having cloud saves at all.

Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer.

That’s the point. No, nobody’s forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve’s chosen policy.

Don’t think Valve doesn’t understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.

Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features

This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.

Tell me you didn’t actually read my comment without telling me you didn’t read my comment.

There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.

There was one game that happened to. Metro. And anyone who had already pre-purchased on Steam had it fulfilled through Steam at launch.

The rest of the games people claim this happened to were Kickstarter projects in which the backer reward promised a “digital key”. Now, at the time of those Kickstarter campaigns, the only stores that existed were Steam and GOG, so there was an assumption made that the keys would be to one of those two. But by the time the games were getting ready to launch, another option came into existence and devs who clearly needed money (or they wouldn’t have been going to Kickstarter to begin with) made a deal.

They can’t “push and pull” anything. With Sweeney owning 50%+1, Tencent and anyone else he sold shares to can literally do nothing - he will always have the final say. And since the company is private, there’s almost certainly an agreement/contract in place on those share purchases that if someone wants to dump them they have to offer them back to him/the company first. Since it’s not a public company they can’t just go sell their shares on an open market. The threat of a large shareholder is gone in a case like this - they can’t stage a hostile takeover and they can’t dump and run.