[HN Gopher] Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux a...
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Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-
source community
Author : WithinReason
Score : 799 points
Date : 2023-09-22 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| howinteresting wrote:
| There's the whole dialectic in history between structural and
| contingent factors.
|
| Valve and PC gaming is massively, massively contingent. It could
| very easily have been a much worse player at the helm.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Probably just as much a wonderfully successful effort at
| commoditizing their complement[1] as altruism. But the fruits
| they gather are good, so they get my good will regardless.
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
| andrewclunn wrote:
| > The elephant in the room meanwhile is the countless
| improvements Valve engineers have made to the the Mesa OpenGL and
| Vulkan drivers as well as to the kernel graphics driver
| components. Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting
| the Steam Deck's hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and
| then other common infrastructure. But in this area of the Linux
| graphics driver support, Valve's contributions and those of their
| partners have been incredibly beneficial to the Linux desktop
| ecosystem even outside gaming.
|
| Yep. Vulkan (the open version of Mantel) for graphics, Proton for
| low level Windows emulation, driver support and controller
| customization and options (the Steam Controller was NOT a failed
| project, just a precursor), and giving it all away upstream...
| There's something to be said about the ability of a privately
| held company to execute a vision long term. Everyone from
| Canonical, to Nintendo, to Activision/Blizzard should be worried
| about Valve coming to eat their lunch, and they'll do it by
| giving customers a better experience and thinking long term.
| Jyaif wrote:
| > Everyone from Canonical, to Nintendo, to Activision/Blizzard
| should be worried about Valve
|
| Valve have got their shit together regarding technical stuff,
| but not regarding creative stuff. Nintendo will be fine.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Cacnonical, maybe. But I don't think the AAA companies are
| shaking in their boots. Heck, It's a symbiotic relationship as
| long as they think it's not worth 30% rev share to roll their
| own store. And Valve already bent the knee there by offering
| lower share if you make over $Xm.
| blibble wrote:
| > There's something to be said about the ability of a privately
| held company to execute a vision long term.
|
| plus Gabe has so much $$$ already he doesn't care about
| Microsoft's cheques
| wejick wrote:
| Igalia once again proving themselves as the right partner for
| companies seeking to work with opensource projects. I'm curious
| how big Igalia's influence on this "good" oss way of working.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I really only bought a Steam Deck because I wanted to support the
| _spirit_ of a Steam Deck. I thought it could be a really fun and
| interesting computer. I am happy that Valve has been contributing
| back. I think the sales of it clearly drive that attitude. Not
| that they weren't before, but it helps to have a successful
| product to drive the work.
|
| I have ended up buying 2 dozen games since it arrived and have
| gotten back into games. It is a life saver when travelling. At
| home, I leave it on the dock and actually use an old Stadia
| controller as the main input.
|
| The Steam Deck is a special device.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| My biggest complaint with the steam deck is that if you let it
| sleep you often have to manually power it back on, it won't
| come back on by itself.
|
| Other than that, it has some clunkiness, but I'm happy with it.
| kettro wrote:
| Thank you for justifying a steam deck for me. Right now, I have
| to move my desktop over to the TV to play there, but with a
| Deck I don't need to do any hauling. I've been looking for a
| good excuse haha. Are you using just the 1st party dock?
| jzb wrote:
| Pretty much same. I bought a Deck primarily because I wanted to
| support the company putting them out and to tinker with it. I'm
| not a hardcore gamer or anything like that - I've been using it
| a bit to play a few games but mostly when I have time I play on
| the Switch or my gaming laptop that has a higher-end NVIDIA
| card (works great on Pop_OS!).
|
| I do wish that the desktop stuff was a bit more polished. TBH a
| lot of people could probably just use the Deck as a primary
| computing device in addition to playing games.
| james2doyle wrote:
| In my experience the keyboard solution is just a bit too
| awkward to use for anything other than short sentences. I do
| enjoy the keyboard experience but for me to use it as a
| computer would require a lot of accessories. I have used it
| on a plane to watch movies though! Something I needed to
| switch to the desktop for (used VLC) and it worked perfectly.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Similarly, I'd stopped playing computer games as I couldn't be
| bothered/find the time to go and use my desktop windows PC. As
| soon as the Steam Deck was announced, I put my deposit down,
| but was a way down the queue. However, I was on holiday when I
| reached the front of the queue and missed the notification, but
| instead saw the refund three days later of my deposit! Somewhat
| annoyed, I paid the deposit again and joined the back of the
| queue, but luckily they were ramping up production and I didn't
| have to wait too long.
|
| It's the sheer convenience of it that makes it a winner. You
| can just pause/resume it and even just play a bit of a game
| during a TV ad break. It's great for exploring old, unplayed
| games from my Steam collection.
|
| Now, if I can just figure out how to enter a cheat code to get
| me past a Half-Life 2 save point (in Ravenholm) where I don't
| have enough health (or more likely skill) to survive.
| artyom wrote:
| PC gamers, and gamers in general, owe a big one to Gabe forever.
|
| For an industry this big, we have countless examples to know very
| well that it could have gone much, much worse.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Just look at pretty much any other big player and quality of
| their products. I think GOG is only one that comes comparably
| close and they are much smaller.
| artyom wrote:
| They're there for the storefront alone and it shows. Valve's
| vision was to become the _platform_ for the PC and then add a
| store.
|
| GOG at least tries to do things right with far less
| resources. The rest are simply abysmal.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Gabe knows that gaming deserves a home on an open-source OS and
| not a proprietary one.
|
| And he's right, you know. 100 years from now, the only OS that
| will be easily resurrectable will be some flavor of open-source
| OS.
| hedora wrote:
| In particular, that OS will have a 150 year back catalog of
| video games, and the closed ones probably will not.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You never know. Disney survived for 100+ years. It's only
| getting easier to survive these days, short of apocalyptic
| disaster.
| carapace wrote:
| > Igalia is an open source tech co-op success story. We have been
| around for 22 years; we have 140 members. We play an essential
| role in several open web platform projects such as
| Chromium/Blink, WebKit (WPE & WebKitGTK), Firefox and Servo. We
| have contributed to GNOME / GTK+ / Maemo, WebKit / WebKitGtk+ /
| JSC, Blink / V8, Gecko / SpiderMonkey projects, amongst others.
|
| > ...
|
| > We hope that this talk will expand the limits of your
| imagination on what a company can look like, and that next time
| you think about starting your own company or looking for a new
| job, you consider a co-op!
|
| https://archive.org/details/fossy2023_Inside_Igalia_Scaling_...
| bachmeier wrote:
| It's great to see what Valve is doing, but in some sense the
| gratitude should also be flowing in the other direction. The
| origin of this was concern about Windows having control of their
| main revenue-generating platform[1]. Valve was lucky that all
| those developers put the hours into making Linux what it was, so
| they had a good alternative platform to build on.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230709000125/https://www.bbc.c...
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| Thank you, Valve!
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Press F in chat to pay your respects to Gaben/Steam.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| They are still alive?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Gabe Newell aka Gaben, Founder and CEO of Valve, is alive and
| well.
| birracerveza wrote:
| When they initially stated they wanted to bring games on Linux, I
| was ... skeptical, to say the least. It seemed like posturing to
| fend off Microsoft's predatory policies, but ultimately an empty
| promise that would never work out, despite every good intention
| they had.
|
| I mean Linux? Running Windows games? Without hacks and tricks and
| magic and stuff to make it run maybe good enough to say "yeah, it
| kinda runs sometimes if you don't pay attention to the bugs"?
| Absolute lunacy.
|
| But they did it.
|
| The absolute madmen did it in just a couple years. That's
| incredible.
|
| Congratulations to Gabe, Steam devs and proton devs.
| CivBase wrote:
| > Without hacks and tricks and magic and stuff
|
| I'd say Proton absolutely qualifies as "hacks ans tricks and
| magic and stuff". It's just polished and packaged so
| increadibly well it doesn't feel hackey. I'm constantly amazed
| at how well it all just works.
| Sakos wrote:
| I feel like you're unfairly underplaying all the hard work and
| success of Wine. None of this would be possible without it. It
| allowed a _lot_ of games to work on Linux that didn 't have
| native ports. Proton and SteamOS are bridging the last mile
| (particularly in regards to polish and ease of use), which is
| important because of the Pareto principle, but I wouldn't
| credit Valve with everything.
| sh79 wrote:
| Everything builds upon Wine, but when it comes to games it
| alone wasn't doing so well outside older dx9 titles.
|
| It's mostly DXVK/Proton's VKD3D that actually allowed a lot
| of games to work on Linux with little overhead, both are
| funded by Valve. So I don't think calling upon Pareto
| principle in regards to Valve is fair either.
| Sakos wrote:
| And yet none of it would be possible without all the
| emulation of all the other parts of the OS. You need more
| than emulating DX10/11/12 to get games to run. Valve is
| standing on the shoulders of giants here. The original
| comment didn't even mention Wine, which I think is
| criminally unfair. I do think Valve has made insanely
| valuable contributions, I just don't want anybody to forget
| that they're not the sole reason why any of this is
| possible. Wine and all its contributors deserve to be
| mentioned.
| sh79 wrote:
| I don't think anybody is attributing it solely to Valve,
| but it's hard to deny that Valve is currently the main
| driving force behind gaming on Linux, hence they're
| getting lots of praise. The Linux gaming stack consists
| of quite a few open source projects however, and I don't
| think it's that criminal that they aren't being mentioned
| in a comment to an article that does mention them :)
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's easy to be open when you have a money printer by practically
| having a monopoly over PC gaming.
|
| If competitors are just as open they no longer have a competitive
| advantage and are essentially just helping improve Steam.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > If competitors are just as open they no longer have a
| competitive advantage and are essentially just helping improve
| Steam.
|
| Isn't that basically an admission that all of Valve's most
| meaningful developments are Open Source? To the contrary, why
| are competitors having such a hard time when stuff like Proton
| and pressure-vessel is freely available?
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Isn't that basically an admission that all of Valve's most
| meaningful developments are Open Source?
|
| Source 2 is still closed source and they still haven't
| released the SDK despite it now being over 3.5 years since
| HL:A released.
|
| >To the contrary, why are competitors having such a hard time
| when stuff like Proton and pressure-vessel is freely
| available?
|
| Because Valve already has the user content flywheel going.
| Valve has most content that people want and has a large
| install base that developers can target. There are a lot of
| gamers who only want to buy games on Steam due to the
| integrated experience doing so offers.
|
| Convincing AAA devs to release on your platform is not easy
| to do. Adding Proton to your platform won't convince
| developers to use it.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Does Steam force game exclusivity for their platform? No. Do
| they put up barriers to entry to keep small devs / publishers
| out unless they pay to play? No. Do they force you to
| repurchase your games if you move to new hardware? No. Do they
| prevent you from using other people's hardware? No. Do they
| engage in mass censorship or shadow banning of content? No. Do
| they force annoying ads on you? No.
|
| Do they contribute to open source development, upstream so that
| even competitors could use it? Yes. Do they allow you to share
| your library with family (and let's be honest friends too)?
| Yes. Do they allow you to play your games offline while not
| connected to their servers? Yes. Do they allow and actively
| encourage mods and user control of their content? Yes. Are they
| a "first mover" that actively brought new business models and
| technologies to market, which they themselves developed? Yes.
| Have they reversed course when users complain or give negative
| feedback? Yes (such as the paid mod idea years back).
|
| About the only shame thing regarding Valve is that they were in
| on the microtransactions craze along with many others in the
| industry for a bit there (TF2 hats anyone?). Not a perfect
| company, but the "monopoly" here isn't "competitors can't come
| to market." It's more that they just offer a far better service
| and have NOT abused their market leadership in order to chase
| short term profitablity over long term success. More monopolies
| like this please.
| jWhick wrote:
| I think the key to it is that Gabe is a simple guy, not a
| wannabe like half of the investment firms buying stocks.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Does Steam force game exclusivity for their platform?
|
| In the same way Nintendo doesn't, no.
|
| >Do they put up barriers to entry to keep small devs /
| publishers out unless they pay to play? No
|
| Technically $100 is a barrier. The smallest non-free barrier,
| but a barrier nonetheless.
|
| The bigger barrier is the opaque rules they sometimes have
| regarding certain sexual games. Even a few rated by the ESRB
| were rejected, so who knows where the barrier is. The only
| thing worse than a high barrier is a misty one.
|
| >Do they prevent you from using other people's hardware? No.
|
| Because they didn't have their own successul hardware until
| 2021. And 1m copies isn't a market large enough to do much
| with. Even the failed Vita sold a few million in the US.
|
| >Do they engage in mass censorship or shadow banning of
| content? No.
|
| yup, just not for the kinds of games people care to try and
| defend. Except that Stein's Gate one. Never underestimate
| anime fans, I guess.
|
| They've done good stuff but let's not pretend they are saints
| nor perfect.
|
| >Have they reversed course when users complain or give
| negative feedback? Yes (such as the paid mod idea years
| back).
|
| still went through later. Heck, Steam marketplace is worse
| than any paid mod. I'm still so confused how people don't see
| this. Any other AAA studio woulda been burned for this (and
| still are burned).
|
| >More monopolies like this please.
|
| I'll pass.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Technically $100 is a barrier. The smallest non-free
| barrier, but a barrier nonetheless.
|
| To be fair, it's only a barrier to _Steam_. Every device
| that can install Steam can _also_ install another game, app
| or even launcher. Steam will even put it in your library
| and launch it with Proton if you add it, just not give it a
| Store page or discussion /workshop/whatever.
|
| > Because they didn't have their own successul hardware
| until 2021.
|
| How exactly did that change things, though? No part of the
| Steam Deck is capable of being locked down in a potentially
| harmful way.
|
| > yup, just not for the kinds of games people care to try
| and defend. Except that Stein's Gate one. Never
| underestimate anime fans, I guess.
|
| _facepalm_
|
| Taking games off an optional storefront is not
| "censorship". It's the same argument as people who say that
| Walmart is censoring America by taking confederate flags
| off the shelves.
|
| > Heck, Steam marketplace is worse than any paid mod.
|
| > Any other AAA studio woulda been burned for this (and
| still are burned).
|
| You seem to miss the point of why people don't care.
| Contrast these two scenarios:
|
| - Scenario A: EA not letting you play as _Darth Vader_
| until you unlock enough lootboxes; Bethesda making certain
| in-game missions exclusive to pre-orders or specific
| retailers; Blizzard locking off _Overwatch_ characters even
| to paying customers who bought both games; et. al
|
| - Scenario B: Valve selling hats for _Team Fortress 2_ ,
| letting users trade and purchase cosmetics in _Dota_ ,
| giving users a platform to trade game stickers and trading
| cards, etc.
|
| It should be plainly obvious why other studios are burned
| and Valve is not. Honestly speaking, the closest Valve ever
| flew to the sun was with _Mann Vs. Machine_ requiring paid
| tickets to play. The marketplace itself doesn 't prevent
| you from enjoying anything in any of their base games.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Every device that can install Steam can also install
| another game, app or even launcher.
|
| technically, you can put apps on
| Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft's consoles as well. It's more a
| matter of popularity and long term support. I guess we
| can definitely talk about adding other game stores on
| consoles, but it doesn't seem like a conversation that
| got much traction. Even from people like Epic that is
| going hard after Apple over this issue.
|
| >How exactly did that change things, though?
|
| you can't lock down hardware if you don't make hardware.
| I'm not speaking metaphorically here.
|
| Steam is a software company that dabbles in hardware. The
| hardware being open source is not its selling point nor a
| point of business, like other hardware manufacturers.
|
| >Taking games off an optional storefront is not
| "censorship".
|
| in the same lens that rating a game AO isn't
| "censorship", sure. Ewen though such a rating kicks you
| out of all major brick and mortar stores and doesn't let
| you publish on Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo. I agree the
| term is used loosely in the games industry, and I am
| using the term loosely here.
|
| But really, there isn't much ACTUAL censorship in games
| period, so it's not really a plus to say "steam doesn't
| allow games it doesn't allow on its optional store". I am
| more criticizing its opaque rulings and its infamous non-
| communication to devs over such issues.
|
| >It should be plainly obvious why other studios are
| burned and Valve is not.
|
| because others can make money off the cosmetics instead
| of just AAA studios, sure. Makes sense. That's what
| Crypto promised but that also crashed and burned because
| the wrong leadership was behind it, so that boat has
| sailed. I think AAA should just eat the cost like Valve
| and even older games like Second Life and just make a
| normal marketfront. I think Blizzard kinda did this with
| Diablo 3.
|
| That doesn't explain the paid mod kerfluffle, though.
| What's the difference between modding a hat to sell for
| $5 and collecting a hat in-game to trade for $5 to
| someone else? Hell, one of them involves work to actually
| create that asset.
|
| >The marketplace itself doesn't prevent you from enjoying
| anything in any of their base games.
|
| I guess it depends on framing. I don't play GaaS, but the
| only difference between Darth Vader DLC and Darth Vader
| Lootbox is a guaranteed transaction. You can argue
| neither is "in the base game".
|
| But I guess players complained about on-disc DLC back in
| the day too. the difference in "base game" is much more
| ephemeral now that you can launch updates on the fly.
| hedora wrote:
| Valve got where they are by having a solid software packaging
| and installation stack for games.
|
| I don't know of any other software companies that are trying
| for "just works" on Windows, Linux and MacOS, other than the
| electron / web ecosystem. Valve's stuff also cares about
| exposing low-level performance optimizations, unlike that
| stuff.
|
| If I could buy ahead-of-time compiled slack and zoom clients
| from steam, I'd do it.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > It's easy to be open when you have a money printer by
| practically having a monopoly
|
| I'd argue it's actually hard(er), based on history.
| gmerc wrote:
| Without valve we would have to pay per download/install. Because
| that's what the publishers wanted. Or what Unity is trying to
| bring about.
|
| Valve is privately held. Thank god.
| babuloseo wrote:
| based
| entuno wrote:
| I don't have a Steam Deck, and I've never used SteamOS. But it's
| been incredible over the last few years how much better the
| support for games (both old and new ) on Linux has become, to the
| point where it seems more likely than not that a game will be
| playable.
|
| It's been great to see that Valve have been pushing so many of
| their improvements upstream rather than trying to keep them to
| themselves - long may it continue.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| I have been a gamer my entire life and about three years ago I
| became a full-time digital nomad. I preordered the Steam Deck
| the moment the window opened and received mine in the first
| couple of batches. It has been absolutely phenomenal. It is not
| perfect and not everything runs great, but _almost_ everything
| I want it to run works and _almost_ everything I play on it
| runs pretty well. I have even been playing BG3 on it. When i do
| finally settle back down and build a new gaming rig it will run
| Linux.
| bil7 wrote:
| I can't believe the current state of things is so good, that
| I'd default to using the Proton version of a game over the
| linux native port.
| yyyk wrote:
| It's more how bad the state of things is regarding Linux
| binary compatibility...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'd ask how we fix this as someone planning to make a linux
| port of their game. But a place full of consumers in a
| Valve thread may not be the best place for productive
| answers.
|
| Like, I've used Linux through college and dual-booted for a
| good decade, so I'm familiar with how Linux works as a
| daily driver. But what makes it so hard to distribute a
| Linux version? Even for devs who do think the same they
| seem to struggle with that compatibility.
| ric2b wrote:
| There is the extra complexity of differences between
| distros and such, but it seems like the biggest reason is
| simply that companies don't dedicate the same resources
| to a Linux version that they do to Windows, due to it
| being a much smaller market.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Alright, thanks. I just want to make sure I'm not walking
| into some weird pitfall where suddenly some very niche
| Linux distro has some core graphical issue to address. I
| know I can't optimize for every flavor of Linux under the
| sun.
| godshatter wrote:
| I'd also like to give a shoutout to protondb.com. The
| combination of proton taking us 90+% of the way for most games
| out there plus the reports on protondb.com that show the tweaks
| that allow you to make it the rest of the way is huge.
| mabbo wrote:
| I saw a cool looking indie game the other day on steam and
| excitedly bought it.
|
| Then realized it doesn't support Linux. I can't install it. I
| was shocked.
|
| And then I realized how crazy it is that I had _presumed_ a
| game would run on Linux. How far we 've come.
| sentimentscan wrote:
| even with proton?
| temp0826 wrote:
| I think there's a switch to flip in Steam's settings that
| allows you to use any game with Proton even if
| untested/unsupported. (Something to that effect, can't look
| now)
| mabbo wrote:
| No no don't tell me this. I had things I wanted to get done
| this weekend!
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| If you go into a game's properties in Steam (the little
| gear icon), and and then choose "Compatibility" from the
| resulting window, you can choose a version of Proton to
| run the game, usually the latest stable is good,
| sometimes you have to play around to find a good version.
|
| Once you've chosen a Proton version, the option to
| "Install" will be available in your game menu.
|
| I gave up on Windows a couple years ago, and most Steam
| games run in Linux using Proton through Steam. Some
| modern titles with fancy DRM don't work, but I generally
| don't buy those anyway (Denuvo, certain anticheats, etc).
| murrain wrote:
| You can also check compatibility on protondb
| (https://www.protondb.com/)
| sickofparadox wrote:
| If you go into properties, you might be able to install it by
| choosing a specific version of proton (I think the option is
| properties> compatibility).
| taeric wrote:
| As the others have said, odds are you only need to flip the
| switch in steam to ignore OS. I've been overwhelmingly happy
| with how many games work this way.
|
| To the point that I'm far more likely to find a game with
| clunky default controls on Steam Deck than I am one that
| won't play. And learning to use some of the more advanced
| control features of the system goes a long way to fixing
| that.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > And learning to use some of the more advanced control
| features of the system goes a long way to fixing that.
|
| I need to take the time to do that some day. I've seen
| people swear Factorio was playable and fun on the deck, but
| the controls were just always too much of a struggle to get
| working in a way that worked for my brain.
|
| I could play, but I just couldn't get it smooth enough that
| the controls got out of my way.
|
| I'd love (and hate) to have Factorio playable on the steam
| deck.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| If it's been a while since you last tried it on the Deck,
| you might want to try again since recently they've added
| official controller support.
|
| I had managed to get used to the Steam Input mappings so
| my experience may not reflect too much on you, but the
| official mappings are also pretty nice. IIRC they also
| show control hints underneath the map for context-
| sensitive actions, which help a lot too.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > If it's been a while since you last tried it on the
| Deck, you might want to try again since recently they've
| added official controller support.
|
| Thanks, that's deeply concerning to me since I have a
| baby I need to keep alive. But I'll give it a go
| sometime.
| coldpie wrote:
| > It's been great to see that Valve have been pushing so many
| of their improvements upstream rather than trying to keep them
| to themselves - long may it continue.
|
| Yes, the Linux team at Valve really understands how open source
| incentives align with their own. Since they & their contractors
| upstream almost everything they do, they don't have to maintain
| a diff, or even build most of the software they ship (they just
| use Arch packages for most stuff, as mentioned in the article).
| Unlike many proprietary companies who try to keep as much as
| possible in-house, Valve understands you get higher quality
| software with a lot less work overall when you work with and
| are friendly to upstream projects, even if it means a bit more
| work and negotiation up front.
|
| I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years
| (2016-2021), and from day 1 Valve understood that most of the
| work we did for them would be going upstream[1]. It wasn't even
| a conversation point in the early meetings. They've taken the
| same approach with every other OSS project they've worked with,
| and it shows in the great results & community relations. Valve
| is a great open source citizen.
|
| [1] E.g. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/aeikum/2019/3/27/how-
| proton...
| ncallaway wrote:
| > I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5
| years (2016-2021),
|
| Wow, than k you. I know it takes a village, and it's always a
| team effort, but still thank you. My windows PC is gathering
| dust now. I only use my Linux laptop and steam deck now. If a
| game doesn't run on Linux, I just won't play it anymore.
|
| That's a huge change, and I really appreciate it.
|
| Thanks to everyone who contributed.
| coldpie wrote:
| Thanks, it was quite a ride! Definitely a team effort, not
| only developers, but also a fantastic QA team that puts a
| ton of work into polishing every single release. Also don't
| forget that Proton was built on top of 20 years of hard
| work on Wine before Valve even entered the picture.
|
| I know I'm not the only (ex-)Wine/Proton dev who posts here
| on HN :)
| yomlica8 wrote:
| It bothers me a bit when I see the narrative on here that
| the introduction of the Steam Deck changed everything for
| linux gaming, but really it is a culmination of steady
| ongoing work that didn't even start with Valve. I've been
| primary linux gaming since probably about 2014. When
| Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly brushed it
| off and continued investing in the general concept.
| entuno wrote:
| There was a huge amount of work by WINE (and others), but
| it really was a huge leap in how accessible Linux gaming
| was to people.
|
| Going back a few years, my experience was that you had to
| do some research to see if a game was likely to work,
| install it through wine, and then usually faff around
| with a load of winetricks/configurations/packages/etc to
| get a game that mostly worked (often with some weird
| bugs, performance issues, etc).
|
| Now there's a whole library of games that you can just
| right click -> install and they work perfectly well on
| Linux. And of course that wouldn't have been possible
| without the years of work building up to it - but it was
| a massive improvement when Valve threw their weight
| behind it and built it directly into the Steam client.
| xethos wrote:
| > When Steam machines fizzled out Valve just quietly
| brushed it off and continued investing in the general
| concept.
|
| I remember being really disappointed when they did - I
| assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path,
| because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall
| by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it?
|
| Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve
| saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon",
| they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly
| full.
| [deleted]
| danparsonson wrote:
| Side note: thank you for your contributions to Linux gaming -
| Proton helped me finally shed Windows as a base OS and I
| couldn't be happier about it.
| solardev wrote:
| Do you think Mac gamers would ever see similar love, like
| Game Porting Toolkit integrated into Steam?
| coldpie wrote:
| I don't know anything about Valve's future plans, and I
| don't know anything at all about that toolkit (it was
| announced after I stopped working on Wine). My gut feeling
| is it's unlikely. There was a lot of incentive to target
| Linux with this tech, even though it's a smaller market
| than macOS, because you can control the whole stack and do
| cool stuff like SteamOS, which is what allowed the Deck to
| happen. On macOS, all you can do is sell stuff to end-
| users, where you also have to compete with the Apple store,
| which is owned by Apple, who also make the OS. Apple has
| also shown they're a bad partner for game companies (nuking
| 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support; no Vulkan support;
| shaky record on OS updates breaking stuff). My experience
| is there's generally a lot of bad feelings and skepticism
| about Apple and macOS in the gaming industry due to that
| record.
| rollcat wrote:
| > Apple has also shown they're a bad partner for game
| companies (nuking 32-bit support; crummy OpenGL support;
| no Vulkan support; shaky record on OS updates breaking
| stuff). My experience is there's generally a lot of bad
| feelings and skepticism about Apple and macOS in the
| gaming industry due to that record.
|
| In your opinion, what steps should Apple take, and in
| what order, to make Mac a compelling, long-term platform
| for third-party game developers? They're certainly
| showing some interest in making games happen (GPT,
| raytracing), but most of the efforts so far seem to be
| pre-aligned in their favour (Metal, Apple Arcade).
| coldpie wrote:
| I don't know that I'm the best person to ask, my scope is
| fairly narrow and definitely more Linux-focused (I don't
| even own a Mac). But, I think inventing a time machine so
| they can avoid making their partners write articles like
| this[1] would be a good first step. After that, stop
| putting out stupid special-snowflake APIs like Metal and
| adopt industry standards like Vulkan and OpenGL. Then
| build a 20-year track record of API and OS stability so
| game devs & users can expect their back catalog to
| continue to work.
|
| I dunno, man. They've burned a lot of bridges, and they
| are a small piece of the pie[2]. Not a lot of incentive
| for people to put up with their BS.
|
| [1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-
| 4E62-B6...
|
| [2] macOS: 1.57%, Linux: 1.82%, Windows: 96.61%
| https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-
| Softw...
| solardev wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation!
| pmarreck wrote:
| I was a long-time "Mac gamer" who held out until the very
| end (where I personally define "very end" as Blizzard
| releasing their first non-simultaneous-platform-released
| game, Overwatch).
|
| I'm here to inform you that that ship (with some notable
| exceptions, such as Baldur's Gate 3 releasing on Macs
| _today_ , I think, which is FANTASTIC) has more or less
| sailed. Tim Cook is neither a programmer, nor a gamer, nor
| an open-source advocate, and every move Apple makes and has
| made since he took the helm shows where his priorities lie,
| and they're not in the AAA gaming market (and additionally,
| they're starting to be open-source-developer-hostile,
| IMHO). I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success
| (it would have basically become a better, more user-
| friendly Linux) had Apple open-sourced it and simply made
| Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware (between you
| and me, I also think this move would have instantly
| garnered Gabe's support), but it's simply not going to be.
| Apple likes their walled garden and their 30% App Store cut
| and their iOS-specific lame-games and their proprietary
| CPU/GPU/SoC architecture that is only being pried open by
| extremely clever individuals like Asahi Lina
| https://github.com/asahilina and Alyssa Rosenzweig (with
| zero help from Apple other than "leaving the door open,"
| essentially... Which, by the way, they can still shut at
| any time...)
|
| I've become more of a Linux fan over the years but only
| after I found NixOS- which unfortunately has kind of a
| steep learning curve. The reason why I couldn't use Linux
| as a daily driver until NixOS is that Linux's huge
| customizability (and my need to experiment and explore!)
| also lead directly to huge opportunities to brick your
| system or just break things in general (which happened
| again, and again, and again for me, across many distros
| such as Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Pop_OS, etc.). Linux is thus
| like a hugely customizable sports car without brakes or
| safety belts. NixOS gives you both of those, so you get to
| fly with the sports car, enjoy all the customizability, but
| if anything goes wrong (which it rarely does, thanks to
| NixOS's architecture), you can instantly roll back to any
| prior version of the OS and its declaratively-installed
| apps and configs. It's the best of all worlds, currently,
| completely open-source, but the learning curve is still too
| steep for most. (I have hope that a NixOS-derived more-
| user-friendly distro like https://snowflakeos.org/ may help
| here, but it will take time.)
|
| In parallel with that, gaming on Linux became "viable"
| (modding is still tougher than on Windows, but that will
| eventually be easier too) thanks to Valve's Proton efforts.
| solardev wrote:
| I hear ya. Here I'm hoping that with Apple Silicon and
| GPT, maybe some devs will take it upon themselves to port
| games even if Apple and Valve don't.
|
| Gaming on Mac is definitely not my first choice, but I
| don't have the time, energy, or budget to deal with
| separate computers these days (or the fan noise and
| summer heat of a desktop GPU). Limited to whatever comes
| out on Mac or GeForce Now :/
|
| And unfortunately it's hard to use Linux on desktop for
| frontend work. Adobe Suite is a must for me, and Linux
| font rendering is different enough to Macs and Windows
| that it's hard to get an apple to apple comparison of how
| a web page would look on mainstream computers.
|
| I'm sure it's come a long way though! When I first tried
| desktop Linux in the 2000s, it didn't have the right fan
| drivers and melted my laptop, cracking the glass table
| underneath lol.
|
| In the meantime... off to play BG3!
| depressedpanda wrote:
| Ever consider a Steam Deck?
|
| I'm a frontend dev happily using Linux, btw. I have no
| use for Adobe Suite, though. Figma is enough, and runs on
| any OS with a web browser. I agree font rendering is a
| bit different, but not so much that it's ever been a
| problem in my experience.
| solardev wrote:
| I tried a Steam Deck but ended up selling it. Coming from
| high-end PC gaming from my younger days, the Deck just
| wasn't quite enough, between the low-medium graphics and
| the lack of mouse/keyboard + big monitor (yes, you can
| dock it, but then you're running at a super low FPS even
| on ultra-low settings, especially without DLSS support).
| It was also really loud. These days I usually play with
| GeForce Now, which can do ultra graphics with minimal
| lag, works great on my ultrawide, is totally silent, and
| doesn't eat up the battery.
|
| In fact GFN works so well I ended up getting a Logitech
| GCloud (https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-
| gaming/cloud-...) to replace the Deck, because it has a
| much better screen, battery life, and is like half the
| weight. It only streams games though (cheap Android
| hardware) and has sketchy ties to Tencent, unfortunately.
| But for anywhere with good internet, it's wonderful...
| ultra graphics on a nice screen in a lightweight and
| quiet form factor.
|
| As for dev on Linux, yeah, that sounds right! I use Adobe
| less and less these days, frankly, but I do really enjoy
| any chance I get. Used to do a lot of graphics work with
| the dev work, before my job became super-specialized :(
| Right now I'm really happy with my Macbook, but if ARM
| ever gains a foothold in the PC laptop market and we see
| better hardware (especially performance/watt and
| decibels/performance) in the future, I'd reconsider that.
| Apple Silicon is pretty phenomenal for the time being...
| blows my old ThinkPads out of the water.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success
| had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware
| the "reference" macOS hardware, but it's simply not going
| to be.
|
| Success in the gaming market, maybe. But Apple isn't a
| dedicated gaming company like Vavle. Mac is still a
| status icon (and most of the time, a pretty good machine
| in general) and macs dominate college campuses and
| especially the art industry. Which is why they have a
| higher market share than Linux.
|
| Their moves are more hostile to open source, but it has a
| similar goal to Valve: make and own the entire vertical
| stack. And now with M1, they can converge that and more
| or less launch IOS and Mac devices on the same chips.
| That's why the IPhone 15 is running pretty modern games.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Hah! I had roughly the same route; I held out for things
| to improve on MacOS up until Catalina, then drifted
| around to settle on NixOS. Funny how things work out like
| that.
|
| Largely though, I agree with your conclusion. It speaks
| volumes that Apple's most significant GPU translation
| efforts to-date (Game Porting Toolkit) is largely based
| on Open Source DXVK code. Apple and Microsoft basically
| have the same tactic now; push a high-level GPU API
| across your software platforms, using your clout to force
| developers onto it and 'lock them in' to your ecosystem,
| so to speak. The bigwigs might try to tell you that this
| is necessary for a quality native port, but I've doubted
| those words since I beat Elden Ring on Linux. Apple
| publishing the G.P.T. is their shameful admission that a
| Vulkan driver would fix gaming on Mac.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| My understanding is that GPT can't actually be used to
| port a game to sell, ostensibly it is for proving out
| performance possibilities available from when you do port
| your game (to native metal). Has that changed?
|
| To me it sounded like there was a group within Apple that
| wants to create an emulation layer (and did essentially)
| but that leadership hates the idea and in its current
| state it is a compromise that it even exists at all.
| solardev wrote:
| > To me it sounded like there was a group within Apple
| that wants to create an emulation layer (and did
| essentially) but that leadership hates the idea and in
| its current state it is a compromise that it even exists
| at all.
|
| Heh, I hadn't heard that, but I can totally believe it.
| Openness really isn't their forte.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Thank you for your, and your team's, work on Proton! It's one
| of the biggest software leaps I've experienced. I'd been
| using Wine to launch games on Linux for more than ten years
| and across all those years, it remained inconvenient and
| success rates remained fairly low despite some definite
| improvement. Then with the first Proton release, most of the
| games I wanted to play... just worked. These days my default
| expectation has changed to games working well on Linux unless
| they have stuff like kernel-mode DRM (such as Denuvo) and I
| refuse to buy games using that anyway.
| treis wrote:
| It's interesting to see people stay this. I tried switching
| over to Linux full time and Rocket League plays but stutters
| badly. It's about the only game I play these days so not sure
| if I'm unlucky or if it's a continuation of the "Year of Linux
| Desktop" stuff I've been hearing for like 10 years.
| o0banky0o wrote:
| And the fact that they aren't stopping the use of scene cracks in
| distribution is cool too, that is awesome.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Shameless plug for Steam Remote Play:
| https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/remoteplay
|
| Here's a case where there were no good alternatives (in linux) to
| remotely play latency free. Now, some prefer this method for
| remote desktop more than VNC.
| figmert wrote:
| For PS owners there's also Chiaki for Playstation Remote Play.
| It can be launched from Steam OS as with everything else.
| Sakos wrote:
| Sunshine and Moonlight are fantastic though?
| ireallywantthat wrote:
| Look at https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine
| [deleted]
| BimJeam wrote:
| I thank you too, Valve. Longtime Steam user here.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Valve can do things like this because they have a huge stable of
| some of the best and most experienced C++ programmers on earth,
| (and pretty much all SWEs on staff are expected to be at least
| fluent).
|
| World class culture and compensation will do that for you.
| diesal11 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they outsource/fund a fairly large amount of
| the work, the article mentions Igalia & from memory Codeweavers
| are largely responsible for Proton.
|
| Valve itself is a pretty small shop. Although their own efforts
| & funding absolutely should be praised.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure they outsource/fund a fairly large amount
| of the work, the article mentions Igalia & from memory
| Codeweavers are largely responsible for Proton.
|
| Userspace stuff for sure. But the drivers are mostly Valve.
| idontknoworcare wrote:
| In 2008 they outsource all the kernel work I read
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Take a look at the PDF of the talk from the article. There
| are numerous examples of Igalia contributions to the
| kernel.
| sylware wrote:
| Too much c++ though, I would have prefered plain and simple C
| (ofc course, without the latest ISO tantrums), for instance for
| mesa amd aco, or backporting some of dxvk in wined3d (even though
| vkd3d for dx12 seems the way to go on forward and forget about
| dxvk and wined3d).
| bobse wrote:
| You don't own games rented on Steam. Sage!
| marcodiego wrote:
| No kernel has ever had such a gigantic mind share and
| adaptability as Linux. Very few tasks demand so much of different
| areas of an operating system as games. The moment game
| developers, especially the ones who deeply optimize engines,
| start contributing and tuning Linux to get as much performance,
| throughput and low latency as possible will be the moment when
| games will improve in ways that current option can't compete or
| offer anything close.
|
| If any of the big vendors of AAA is reading this, please consider
| that there is a severely under served community who is willing to
| collaborate, help and improve everything that is needed to make
| your product run better. Consider that your company would have
| the power to tune the environment in ways that the competition
| can't even dream of. Consider what we did to servers, mobile and
| HPC and enable us to do just the same with games.
| camdenlock wrote:
| I've been terrified for years that MICROS~1 is going to figure
| out some way to do a hostile acquisition of Valve...
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Proton is really an incredible project, and a great example of
| why Steam is such a beloved platform by the community! Expanding
| choices, increasing compatibility, and all for no direct profit
| motive.
|
| Now if we could just get those anti-cheat companies to support
| Linux, protonDB scores would explode upward overnight.
| variadix wrote:
| They definitely have a profit motive, mostly to avoid being
| subject to MS shenanigans. It's just mutually beneficial for
| Linux users
| Avshalom wrote:
| And they were pretty upfront about that when they started
| their Linux work.
|
| That said I'd bet they're pretty happy with that decision, I
| don't know that Linux has made them any money yet but
| Microsoft has definitely continued to shenanig
| mpixel wrote:
| It's making them money even if it doesn't up in a balance
| sheet. A push from MS that would threaten Steam's business
| model would only trigger a stronger push towards the Linux
| side of things and MS knowing that would tread carefully,
| which affects the Windows side of the business for Valve.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > They definitely have a profit motive, mostly to avoid being
| subject to MS shenanigans. It's just mutually beneficial for
| Linux users
|
| Good! I would prefer them not to go bankrupt while working on
| all those wonderful things.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Meanwhile, all the flak devs get when they charge more than
| $5 for a game... Rough market.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Huh? I haven't played Baulder's Gate 3 yet but I have
| seen nothing but praise for that game, and I don't
| believe a copy has been sold for less than $60 yet.
|
| I don't think games being too expensive is the issue.
| Games simply not being interesting or fun is.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| it's more for indie games than AAA stuff. But AAA did
| have complaints of going from $60-70, so there's that.
|
| >I don't think games being too expensive is the issue.
| Games simply not being interesting or fun is.
|
| Certainly. When prices raise demands change. But I don't
| think any other industry would call a $10 price hike
| "anti-consumer". That's where it gets a bit weird.
|
| It is ultimately internet noise either way, though. Not
| reflective of how consumers really buy. Zelda sold fine
| even without a new console to justify its price raise to.
| I'm not worried about Spiderman 2 either.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| If they profit in a way that gives back to everyone else,
| that's pretty good as I see it. Even RMS wouldn't be against
| this idea (though he'd hate the proprietary binaries of games
| ofc).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Technically Epic does too, but consumers still hate them.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| Consumers hate epic cos Tim is a liar and pretends to
| care about gamers and developers. In reality he's jealous
| of gabe.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Case and point.
| Zambyte wrote:
| RMS is also not against the idea of selling software for
| profit and not giving back to everyone else. All that he
| cares about related to this is:
|
| * The sale includes access to the source code
|
| * The access to the source code includes the right to
| redistribute it, or modified versions.
|
| If the people who pay for software choose not to
| redistribute it, it would not benefit everyone else.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Honestly, I consider a profit motive to upstream open source
| work more altruistic than selling a proprietary graphics API.
| qwertox wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this. Good to know.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The way they've been pushing gaming forward on Linux is just
| fantastic, others have tried with some success here and there,
| but none have had quite the same weight.
|
| Thank you Valve!
| mdtrooper wrote:
| These last weeks, in several spanish webs was writing about
| Micro$oft tried to buy Valve. It is a easy plan, they cut green
| sprout to avoid the future forest.
| ronnier wrote:
| Reddit speak has twisted the meaning of words, when I read "Valve
| is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux" I don't know if it
| literally means that or if it's saying the opposite.
| tomalaci wrote:
| I think big reason Valve is so good is because they are a private
| company and that allows non-traditional management style.
|
| Unlike certain public companies that bring in executives that
| perform spectacularly bad decisions (cough, cough, Unity).
| no_time wrote:
| This is my thought process too. But at the same time this
| doesn't answer how CD Projekt, a public company, can own and
| operate GOG.com, which is even more consumer friendly than
| Steam.
| dividuum wrote:
| I'm incredibly fearful of the day Valve's leadership changes at
| some point. They really are one of the few bigger players (heh)
| in the gaming industry that's not driven by corporate greed.
| fallat wrote:
| There have been a couple of interviews with Gabe and the
| company, and the guy that's "next in line" really seems just
| as fit and right as Gabe. No worries.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| Who? Do you have any links?
| ric2b wrote:
| That's no silver bullet of course, Twitter being a very visible
| example lately.
| hx8 wrote:
| The influence of Wall Street and Private Equity firms play a
| large role in enshittification. Private ownership might be the
| strongest protection against it for for-profit companies. This
| protection can feel temporary as human mortality will force the
| company to change hands. Wall Street seems content to wait for
| their chance to pounce.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Somewhat relevant: Chet Faliszek (ex-Valve) is currently
| posting videos about how the flat hierarchy works:
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814172402960335...
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814409728508593...
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814159128240653...
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Private and they didn't just grow for the sake of market cap or
| "because they can" until it's a unwieldy behemoth
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Parallels to Craigslist. Lots of value, profitable, not
| beholden to the ghouls who would squeeze everything good out
| for every last dividend or share buyback.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I completely agree. Enshitification eventually becomes
| mandatory IF you are a publicly traded company. Because the law
| forces you to try for "line goes up".
|
| A private company though, like a 500 year old vineyard in
| Tuscany, can just do what it does, make profit, maybe not, and
| be satisfied that it makes enough money to keep the people
| there employed for the long term so they can maximize their
| craft. Great products are the natural result of that nurturing
| and revenue tends to follow great products.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| I think this is part of the equation, no investors means
| enshittification hasn't come knocking.
|
| But there also seems to be an element of vision at Valve that's
| been allowed to flourish. Where other companies would produce
| an MVP and walk away if there's not enough money being made,
| Valve seems to have consistent enough resources and vision to
| dedicate itself to long term research, development, and
| planning. In a sea of public companies that are always getting
| greedier, Valve appears to have made the open source world and
| maybe the world at large a better place.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Having the leeway to dedicate itself to long term R&D&P,
| regardless of vision and resources, is also an effect of no
| investors demanding quarterly profits.
|
| Long term thinking is basically impossible for publicly-
| funded companies.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| Absolutely. But, just because it's impossible for publicly
| traded companies doesn't mean a private company can't chase
| the short term. Private companies don't necessarily behave
| like Valve is by default. So, I'm also praising them for
| choosing to take the risk on and invest in the long term.
| mathfailure wrote:
| Jesus Christ what a difference between Michael Larabel's old and
| new photo. So he's not Dorian Gray after all!
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Many entities deserve appreciation: Valve, the Proton community
| outside Valve (e.g.: Glorious Eggroll), the Wine community, the
| DXVK community, Lutris and others.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Valve is a darling. Not simply because of steam (though, that
| enables them) but because from HL1, they truly cared about making
| good games, providing gamers a platform for good, working on
| problems outside their wheelhouse (Linux, VR, etc) for the
| betterment of gamers.
|
| Seriously. Yeah give them flak for steam's store policies and
| such but Valve has _always_ cared about gamers. They just don't
| have the means to do it all (maybe they do?). I'm a fan. Not for
| HL1 or 2, not for Portal or TF2, not for CS, but for their never
| ending support on making sure "gaming" can be enjoyed by all.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| They haven't really cared about games since Portal 2.
| Counterstrike simply enabled them to benefit from their own
| marketplace, which spread to other games. And we don't need to
| Talk about Artefact. Alyx was really good but inherently niche
| given its focus on VR (which made sense, because they had a
| hardware investment in VR).
|
| They have billions so they can do both games and services if
| they want to. But it sounds like there was a lot of brain drain
| from the game designer perspective as Valve's priorities
| shifted. Why risk something as unstable as a game if you can
| focus on steady income from others making games?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| As much as I like half life games, there are a handful of
| studios capable of creating interesting sci-fi shooters but
| no other company can really have things like Steam Deck,
| Proton, etc. as some of their core products
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >no other company can really have things like Steam Deck,
| Proton, etc. as some of their core products
|
| well of course not. These aren't product that directly make
| money. Maybe a small chinese startup can do it, but they
| would still prefer to ship with Windows.
|
| I only really played Portal so I have no real fond memories
| of TF/CS/HL. But I'm just saying that Valve definitely has
| the money to invest in games if they really wanted to.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Alyx was really good but inherently niche given its focus
| on VR
|
| I'm being pretty critical of Valve on here in other places,
| but I would say that taking the time to make an excellent
| game even though a platform is niche and even though that
| game is essentially just a hardware advertisement and even
| though that advertisement isn't likely to move that platform
| to be non-niche to me shows a strong commitment to good game
| design.
|
| Alyx didn't really need to exist I don't think. I don't think
| it moved the needle on making VR any less niche. I don't see
| it as a good economic move. And yet it's arguably one of the
| best shooters on VR.
|
| I do think they're a lot less interested in game development
| than they used to be, I do have criticisms of some of their
| monetization schemes, but whenever they do get interested in
| games enough to actually make something, they seem to do a
| pretty good job of it. Even with Artefact, I'm not sure if
| the game was bad as much as just part of a crowded market and
| burdened with Valve's (admittedly awful) monetization
| philosophies for games as a service.
| subtra3t wrote:
| They had the means to implement a good refund policy for Steam
| (evidenced by the fact that they have a good refund policiy
| _now_ ) but they didn't implement it until they were legally
| forced to.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > but for their never ending support on making sure "gaming"
| can be enjoyed by all.
|
| Oh how I wish that was true. Steam's accessibility story is an
| utter and inexcusable piece of garbage. Using Steam with a
| screen reader is a constant struggle, to the point where people
| had to write guides [1] on how to go about this. It got a bit
| better recently, at least on Windows, Mac still sucks. There
| are plenty of Steam games that a blind person can play,
| sometimes natively[2][3], sometimes through special
| accessibility mods[4][5][6]. Not to mention the Steamdeck,
| which has no accessibility support at all, despite the fact
| that Linux screen readers do exist[7], and consoles like PS5
| and Xbox implement their own[8][9]. Valve really doesn't care.
|
| [1] (outdated) https://www.mail-archive.com/audiogames-
| reflector@sabahattin... [2] https://blind.shadows1428.com/ [3]
| https://mortalkombatgamessupport.wbgames.com/hc/en-us/articl...
| [4] https://github.com/bradjrenshaw/say-the-spire [5]
| https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/16205 [6]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQC6TJkBElY [7]
| https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/getting-started-with-orca/
| [8] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-
| profile/accessib.... [9] https://www.playstation.com/en-
| us/support/hardware/ps5-acces...
| idontknoworcare wrote:
| Their policy is for you to get a Gameboy clip on
| magnification panel. Ebay has them.
| danShumway wrote:
| I don't think that would help blind users.
|
| In before Steam has moved off of web interfaces (I haven't
| checked in a couple of years so they might be doing
| something different now particularly with big picture
| mode), but I'm frustrated that we all started building
| interfaces for native platforms in HTML/Javascript and it
| didn't lead to embracing any of the accessibility features
| that those same interfaces would get by default inside of a
| web browser.
|
| To be fair, my understanding is that Linux screenreader
| support is pretty bad, but it does seem like if a developer
| is going to the trouble to build the majority of their
| interface in a semantic XML-like pure-text format, there
| should probably also be an option to read that text out
| loud.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Part of Steam is indeed HTML, and that is the accessible
| part. They're rewriting more and more of their UI in that
| technology, and that's definitely a good accessibility
| move.
| kart23 wrote:
| wat. enabling kids to gamble with csgo skins and then only
| doing something about it when it got exposed in the media? the
| amount of money and stress that minors were going through with
| the entire csgo gambling racket was insane. they caused real
| harm imo, and they didn't even make a change prohibiting it
| until this year.
|
| https://kotaku.com/valve-steam-gambling-csgo-skins-ban-18504...
|
| they don't care about gamers wellbeing when the alternative is
| a money printer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
| Fluorescence wrote:
| I want to see what happens when Gabe retires. If Steam goes
| public, starts hiring EA management and begins to squeeze the
| sponge ala Unity, we will regret not challenging Steam's
| supremacy earlier.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Gabe will find a way to AI himself to be Valve's CEO in
| perpetuity.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, it's already bad enough you can no longer play games
| through Steam that were made for the respective OS, e.g.
| Windows XP, and soon Windows 7... like, I bought games on
| steam nearly 20 years ago, and the games I bought at that
| time were designed to run on the systems of that time (and
| many haven't been updated since). I expect to still be able
| to play those games on my old computers... but I literally
| can't (unless I pirate them), because Valve decided old
| computers just don't matter and you might as well throw those
| in the trash, I guess? Cool.
|
| Take your favorite game today. In ~20 years, you'll be lucky
| if you can even play it at all.
|
| I guess luckily the backup insurance we have is Linux... but
| that's also a matter of how far back of a Linux install you
| could log into Steam with. I guess we'll see. :)
| waihtis wrote:
| Well said. Many Valve products have been absolute artisanal
| masterpieces. Very rare today.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Steam Input alone gets them a lot of respect from me.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Developers don't get much sympathy from users over Valve's
| store policies precisely because Valve cares so much about the
| users.
|
| Epic makes a big deal about digital storefronts only needing a
| 12% cut to turn a profit, but Epic isn't turning around and
| investing that money into things that make the platform better
| for _everyone_ like Valve does (Steam Input, Proton, Workshop
| just to name a few things).
| danShumway wrote:
| >into things that make the platform better for _everyone_
|
| Correction, for _Steam users_ , not for everyone.
|
| Steam Input and Workshop are completely proprietary services
| that do not work outside of Steam. Steam Input configs are
| difficult (not impossible, but unnecessarily complicated) to
| access/share across services, meaning that even if you do use
| Steam, if you bought a game outside of Steam and are
| importing it, you're probably going to be rebuilding the
| Steam Input config from scratch. Steam Workshop is also
| inaccessible to games purchased outside of Steam even if you
| import those games into Steam. And not only has Valve not
| built a way to link imported games to a Workshop and not
| provided mechanisms for games to make use of Workshop outside
| of Steam as an independent service, the company has actually
| clamped down on efforts to circumvent that DRM and shut down
| community projects.
|
| Both Steam Workshop and Steam Input are very clearly designed
| to be vendor lock-in. To gamers who only use Steam and
| nothing else, it feels like Valve is making it better for
| everyone, but it's a lot more like the Apple ecosystem --
| Valve is leaving behind anyone who buys games outside of
| Steam and almost explicitly punishing users who get games
| from other storefronts. The company offers a lot of services
| that can't be debundled from Steam -- you can't as a
| developer pay Valve to make use of Workshop outside of Steam.
| And so a lot of these "universal" benefits are really only
| benefits for people who buy games exclusively on Steam.
|
| That's not to say Valve doesn't do great work elsewhere.
| Proton is genuinely good for the ecosystem, even though Valve
| still ties it heavily into Steam and combines it with Steam-
| specific features like shader caches that are inaccessible
| outside of Steam. I think the Steam Deck is a wonderful
| device hampered only somewhat by the fact that it's so
| reliant on Steam Input which is entirely proprietary. But
| it's still miles above other consoles and I'm genuinely
| grateful that Valve built it and even more grateful that they
| based it on Linux. It's repairable, it's far more open than
| other consoles. Valve might "punish" users for installing
| 3rd-party software on it but at least installing that
| software is _allowed_.
|
| Valve is neither perfect nor evil. People get enamored with
| Valve because our standards for companies have fallen so
| unbelievably far, to the point where just allowing people to
| install 3rd-party software and responsibly contributing back
| to an ecosystem that Valve is heavily reliant on feels like
| being granted an unexpected gift. We're used to companies
| abusing consumers even when there's no reason to do so. And
| so Valve saying "yeah, it makes more sense to us contribute
| upstream and it makes sense not to treat our customers like
| crap" is a refreshing difference.
|
| But Valve is still a company and is still willing to
| prioritize its own hold on the PC marketplace over consumer
| and developer rights; it has plenty of vendor lock-in and
| plenty of proprietary services and systems that are designed
| to make it so that you as an end-user can buy the exact same
| game on two platforms and run both versions on the same
| device, and one of them will literally perform worse, will be
| harder to configure, and won't have mod support.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought
| elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to
| your library.
|
| Though even if they didn't, I can't see how these features
| being exclusive to Steam "punishes" users for buying games
| elsewhere. The most probable alternative scenario is that
| these features wouldn't exist at all.
|
| The biggest alternative to Steam Workshop is Nexus Mods,
| which is ironically far less friendly to mod developers.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games
| bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam
| games to your library.
|
| I've talked about this in a sibling comment more, but as
| far as I can tell, no they really don't. Valve does
| ownership checks for a nontrivial number of games before
| downloading workshop mods. And I'm not sure where you're
| getting the idea that 3rd-party games can be linked to
| the workshop, I am not aware of any mechanism to do that.
| I'd definitely be using it if it existed :)
|
| Steam Input _partially_ works with 3rd-party games but
| won 't work with things like glyphs and seems to (in my
| experience) have very limited support for searching for
| existing configs.
|
| > The most probable alternative scenario is that these
| features wouldn't exist at all.
|
| I strongly disagree with this, and I think if we slip
| into thinking in this way, you can excuse almost any
| abusive behavior. It's just as plausible to say that
| without Epic's exclusive sponsorship a number of indie
| games also wouldn't exist -- and in fact many developers
| have outright said that Epic is the reason their games
| were able to be funded at all.
|
| But I'm not going to give Epic bonus points for doing
| timed exclusives, it's still abusive behavior. And
| similarly I'm not going to give Valve bonus points for
| building services that are arbitrarily tied to a specific
| storefront. There is no reason Steam Workshop and Steam
| Input couldn't be debundled from Steam.
|
| We're on here praising Valve for upstreaming code to Wine
| through Proton. If Wine wasn't already Open Source and
| Valve had built it from scratch, I don't believe they
| would have Open Sourced it. What I'm asking for
| (particularly with systems like Steam Input which could
| be standardized outside of Steam and which are heavily
| reliant on clientside APIs that run entirely locally) is
| for Valve to not conditionally engage with Open Source
| communities only when they have to or are they working
| with codebases that are already Open Source.
|
| "We wouldn't build this if we weren't able to use it for
| lock-in" is how companies get away with a lot of
| consumer-abusive behavior. And I just don't buy it -- if
| anything, the opposite is more likely true; we might have
| standardized on more Open mod platforms and might have
| gotten true platform-agnostic controlling binding support
| within libraries like SDL much sooner if Steam Input
| didn't exist and games/gamers weren't able to just ignore
| the problem and stick with Steam's solution.
| skeaker wrote:
| Regarding Steam input, can't you add any program as a "non-
| steam game" and apply custom inputs with it? I haven't used
| it much myself, but as far as I know there isn't any sort
| of lockout on what you're able to apply it to.
|
| And regarding the workshop, I would be lying if I said that
| I never bought a game on Steam only for the convenience of
| using the workshop for said game... But then I have also
| paid Nexus for their mods because by default they cap
| downloads at 1 mb/s. I am also aware of tools that let you
| download workshop mods for games you don't own. It's
| certainly less convenient to have to manually download them
| and drag-and-drop them into your mod manager or mods folder
| or whatever, but they hardly make it impossible, so it's
| not like the mods are actually locked in to the platform.
| danShumway wrote:
| > can't you add any program as a "non-steam game" and
| apply custom inputs with it?
|
| I mentioned this -- you can only do so if you use Steam
| as the launcher, Steam Input is tied to using the overall
| Steam client. Additionally, you'll have to make that
| config by scratch, Steam's community sharing for configs
| is much more limited for non-Steam games. This seems like
| a small complaint but if you're buying new games you
| don't know what the optimal config is, so the Steam Input
| experience for non-Steam games is that you load up the
| game and as you play it you constantly adjust the config
| until you find an setup that works, as opposed to Steam
| games where you just download the highest rated community
| config and go from there.
|
| On top of that, there are Steam Input features that flat-
| out don't work for 3rd-party games; specifically input
| glyphs within the game. Steam offers an API for
| developers to define "action sets" that among other
| features will make sure that instructions within the game
| use the correct keybindings and pictures. 3rd-party game
| are (as far as I can tell) completely locked out of that
| service.
|
| ----
|
| > I am also aware of tools that let you download workshop
| mods for games you don't own [...] but they hardly make
| it impossible, so it's not like the mods are actually
| locked in to the platform.
|
| I mentioned this as well, Steam has actually gone after
| and shut down community projects that allow you to do
| this. It's much harder than it used to be and for some
| games it's outright impossible.
|
| Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm concerned;
| there are plenty of games that are completely
| inaccessible. Even if that wasn't the case, the inability
| for 3rd-party games to be linked to Steam Workshop
| profiles by users is vendor lock-in. The vast majority of
| gamers didn't have the technical skills to route around
| Steam's restrictions even before Steam started shutting
| down community projects and putting ownership checks in
| front of downloads.
|
| ----
|
| What would be far more market-friendly and what would
| actually benefit everyone would be for Valve to debundle
| those services from Steam -- I'm not saying every
| developer should be able to use Steam Workshop for free,
| but Steam Workshop should not be tied to Steam. It should
| just be "Valve Workshop".
|
| There are a lot of games that are Steam exclusive
| specifically because there are Steam APIs that they can't
| take advantage of on other storefronts. And it's very
| common for games to come to other platforms outright
| missing features (particularly online content) because
| developers don't even have a choice to pay to utilize
| those features outside of Steam.
|
| I think modding and input configuration are the two most
| obvious examples of this, but if you've ever bought a
| game on GoG and then found out after the fact that it's
| missing an entire game mode, Steam is (in my experience)
| probably the reason for that.
| subtra3t wrote:
| > Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm
| concerned; there are plenty of games that are completely
| inaccessible
|
| I think that the Steam Workshop would be at least
| partially fine _IF_ they allowed all Workshop items to be
| downloaded without a steam account. And even if a game
| developer enables this option, steam randomly disables it
| occasionally and the game developer has to re enable it
| all over again (this happened with Terraria).
|
| Furthermore, its really, _really_ hard to download
| Workshop items for a lot of games. Short of buying the
| game (a good $30-70 down the drain), your only options
| are to:
|
| - Download through steamcmd. this only works if the game
| has explicitly enabled the anonymous download thing I
| talked about earlier. steamcmd (like the name suggests)
| also has a CLI which a lot of gamers can't/won't
| navigate.
|
| - Go through external services. These external services
| often charge you if you download Workshop items for
| popular games or if you download Workshop items that are
| new.
|
| - As a player playing through steam to download the item
| and then send it to you. In the Terraria discord server
| you'll find plenty of these people (I'm one of them!).
| This also doesn't work for games without an active
| playerbase.
| danShumway wrote:
| I think you've phrased the problem better than I did.
|
| > As(k) a player playing through steam to download the
| item and then send it to you.
|
| If anything this might be my biggest critique of Valve's
| handling of the situation. Even with the DRM on top of
| Workshop mods, community mirroring of locked-down games
| would be possible to do in a way that was convenient for
| end-users outside of Steam... if Valve didn't
| occasionally just straight-up send cease-and-desist
| letters to those services.
|
| It wouldn't cover every game, it would still be a
| problem, there would still be legal and ethical questions
| about distributing mods without modder consent, but it
| would be a lot better than the current situation. Right
| now if a game has those restrictions turned on (which
| Valve seems to specifically encourage) you kind of have
| to go underground or interact with shady services or ask
| players directly, and so coordination between communities
| becomes very difficult.
|
| I can't read Valve's mind, but I lose a lot of sympathy
| for them when they're both not supplying any option for
| users to get access to mods without rebuying the game on
| Steam _and_ stopping anyone else from trying to solve the
| problem Steam created for them -- at that point it 's
| very hard for me to avoid thinking that Valve is being
| deliberately anticompetitive.
|
| I'd still have criticism of a less locked-down system,
| but it would be easier for me to assume Valve just
| doesn't see it as worth the effort to support rather than
| thinking that they seem to be taking a lot of active
| steps to make the situation worse than it needs to be.
| skeaker wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying, in particular about the workshop.
| I think you're right that the service could definitely
| stand to be decoupled from Steam. While that might be
| easier said than done (you would still have to implement
| Valve's downloading/update checking to match the quality
| of the Steam client to make it as seamless), it would
| definitely be huge for modding. I mentioned Nexus in my
| post to get at the idea that modding for a lot of games
| is far from an ideal system and you pretty much have to
| pay to get around that in most cases, but an independent
| Steam workshop page that developers pay to opt into would
| be a good approach to that. Now I want them to do it...
|
| The input thing does seem like a niche complaint, sorry
| to say. I don't think I've ever encountered that, and I
| think even if I did it wouldn't stop me from playing the
| game, I would just bind the controls myself. I guess this
| could be decoupled as well, but I don't think the reason
| that it isn't is necessarily lock-in; I would bet that
| there just aren't enough people that care about it, so to
| Valve it would be wasted effort. But now I'm assuming
| intent so what do I know, really.
| danShumway wrote:
| That's fair, the input stuff is annoying but it doesn't
| get in the way of actually being able to play the game or
| get content -- stuff like modding and multiplayer/online
| storage is arguably a much bigger issue than needing to
| build your own controller mapping. I just think it would
| be really low-hanging fruit.
|
| SDL is currently working on an Action Set equivalent, and
| I think their plan is to just use configuration files on
| disk for the most part. So in the same way that ProtonDB
| is mostly community maintained and outside of Steam and
| you can look up a game's settings and apply them to a
| 3rd-party game, what I think would be the easiest
| improvement would be allowing arbitrary search for
| community-supplied configs and moving that to be an
| independent URL that Steam hits that just downloads an
| encapsulated config file that Steam reads.
|
| There is _some_ way to do share non-Steam configs, if you
| link a 3rd-party game in Steam you will sometimes in
| community configs and then see a subset of the normal
| configs? I have no idea how that subset is calculated or
| if users need to do something to enable it though, the
| entire interface around sharing Steam Input configs even
| for games purchased from Steam is a little bit of a mess,
| or at least it is on Steam Deck.
|
| I feel like I'm settling by saying this because I'd also
| like straight-up input binding outside of Steam, but even
| ignoring stuff like action sets, 3rd-party clients --
| just being able to load a community config by typing a
| game name into a search box instead of needing to build
| my own would get rid of a lot of my problems,
| particularly for control schemes like flick stick that
| require me to take measurements of mouse/gyro
| sensitivity.
|
| ----
|
| > but an independent Steam workshop page that developers
| pay to opt into would be a good approach to that
|
| My current plan for my own games I'm working on is to
| leverage git for modding support -- I'm not going to
| build a studio-specific mod hosting service or partner
| with a company, I similarly don't really like ModDB that
| much and don't think they're great community players. So
| instead I'm going bundle a small git client with the
| final game and use that to download/update mods and
| handle stuff like versioning, readmes, etc...
|
| That doesn't help with discoverability or ratings, but my
| thought process is that a lot of games (Terraria,
| Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc..) are organized around
| Github/Gitlab/Codeberg already for the primary modding
| engines, so at least if people are using that they can
| get issue trackers and embedded wikis, there's a standard
| way to download, it encourages releasing the mod source,
| you can look at activity to see whether or not a mod is
| active, you can have beta branches, you can check for
| updates without re-downloading everything, you can have a
| canonical source URL without wondering if a mod is only
| updated on Workshop/ModDB/whatever.
|
| At least for the moment I don't plan to enable Steam
| Workshop for any of the games I'm working on, I think git
| will give me most of the same features minus a search
| function and user ratings. To be fair, search and user
| ratings are pretty important though, so :shrug: I'll see
| how that goes.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > Epic isn't turning around and investing that money into
| things that make the platform better for everyone like Valve
| does
|
| Epic invests in devs. Valve invests in users. I guess the
| difference in focus is why you'll see such different
| reactions to Valve vs. Epic online vs when talking to actual
| devs.
| skeaker wrote:
| >Epic invests in devs.
|
| Is this true? I know they pay up front to have exclusivity
| for some games, but I don't know if I would consider that
| "investing in devs" in the same way that Valve "invests in
| users." Valve puts money into platforms and tools that
| users enjoy (things like forums, hosting mods, user
| reviews, community pages) as their investment. Does Epic do
| something similar for devs? The only thing I can think of
| is using funds to polish Unreal Engine, but that would only
| invest in devs that use Unreal which is not really
| applicable to most devs.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Valve puts money into platforms and tools that users
| enjoy (things like forums, hosting mods, user reviews,
| community pages) as their investment. Does Epic do
| something similar for devs?
|
| Sure,
|
| - They invest in Unreal Engine and all the adjacent tech
| available, some of which can be used without Unreal
| Engine (Epic Online services). Of course, tech like
| Metahuman and Quixel want to draw people into UE but if
| you are already using UE it's a strong consideration.
|
| - Similar to Unity, they have an asset store which
| enables some devs to make money selling tools/assets to
| other devs
|
| - Lastly they do directly fund various games and tools.
| The forced exlusivity didn't put a good taste in
| consumers mouths but I'm mostly talking about Epic
| Megagrants. No strings attached, they can just throw
| money at good devs and most notably they invested into
| Godot and blender (again, no strings attached. True
| grants just to make open source tooling better).
|
| most of their stuff is skewed towards Unreal Engine, but
| I don't see it as any different from Valve being skewed
| towards Steam. The difference is that consumers want to
| buy games while devs want to make money. So while there's
| a stronger business angle to every Epic solution, it fits
| with what a dev would want to do.
| skeaker wrote:
| All good points, I had totally forgotten about their
| asset store as well. Thanks!
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Just like Apple? I do agree with you overall but 30% is still
| excessive
| happymellon wrote:
| Better than Apple.
|
| Apple don't reinvest in creating open standards, and don't
| invest in improving user experience for everyone.
|
| Their investments are generally to increase lock-in.
| deelowe wrote:
| Steam got so much flak when it first came out because it
| supported DRM, facilitated the death of physical media, and was
| generally kind of clunky and buggy. However, looking back, I'm
| thankful. I think Gabe did truly care about gamers/gaming and
| was worried about Microsoft's growing interest in gaming. I
| think he knew that that the transition to digital distribution
| was inevitable and made it his mission to get a platform out
| there before Microsoft did, because they would ultimately
| create something that was not gamer friendly.
|
| Perhaps this is all wishful thinking, but history has proven
| that Valve was perhaps the best steward we could have asked for
| in supporting the transition to online distribution. If we look
| at the alternatives be it Microsoft, Epic, or even GOG, no one
| has done it better. And, when tested, Valve continues to show
| they strive to do the right thing. For example look at returns.
| I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for
| digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple
| process. On top of this, when the policy doesn't work (e.g.
| games which are broken outside of the return window), Valve
| again does the right thing and creates exceptions.
| [deleted]
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| It got flak when it came out because it was released at the
| same time as HL2 and steam was the _only_ way to get HL2. If
| you wanted HL2 then you were installing steam, even if you
| weren't interested in it.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Steam came out before that. You missed the HL1 mod era.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I was around before HL1 existed, I didn't miss anything.
|
| I wasn't trying to imply they were released on literally
| the same day, of course steam was out before HL2, but HL2
| is what drove its popularity because people were forced
| to install steam to get access to HL2.
|
| And most people resented them for it. At that time, store
| purchases was still the common way to get at PC games.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| I resent them now for the same reason but on another
| game: Civ 5. I even bought that one in a box from a
| store.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| and still had to install steam? ouch, yeah, that would
| irritate the crap out of me too.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Yes. DVD was pointless. Online steam was required. Worse
| still it happened to be down that day. The worst possible
| first impression.
| [deleted]
| semi wrote:
| For some context on the early days of steam, I remember the
| Friends network having reliability issues presumably due to
| scaling as everyone adopted steam.
|
| But by reliability issues I don't mean it occasionally
| failed. It did, but that was early on. I assume they just
| killed the backend and never pushed a client update to remove
| it because I remember what was at least months if not a full
| year of the friends UI just saying it failed to connect to
| the Friends network.
|
| The actual matchmaking never had any real issues that I
| remember, but the login servers definitely did, and deleting
| clientregistry.blob and restarting steam was just a routine
| thing you did to get steam working again.
|
| None of this is really that surprising though, steam was
| originally a tool just for beta testers, while the live game
| used WON for matchmaking. WON was shutting down and Valve had
| to rush steams public release.
| grumbel wrote:
| > I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy
| for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple
| process.
|
| That was however not Valve's idea, but only came in response
| to EA Origin offering a return policy in 2013, Valve follow
| up in 2015 with their own.
|
| One of the very rare cases where the competition was a little
| ahead for once.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| Valve's 2 hour refund option came in direct response to a
| 2014 lawsuit from the Australian Competition and Consumer
| Commission[1].
|
| Rod Sims, head of ACCC at the time, asserted that Valve's
| original no-refund stance broke Australian law.
|
| > Under Australian Consumer Law, everybody who buys a
| product or a service has a right to a refund if the product
| doesn't work. They have a right to a refund, or a repair.
| Those rights are enshrined in Australian Law, and our
| allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer
| rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law
|
| [1] https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-
| why-w...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| UK Consumer Rights Act gives you two weeks for no fuss
| return of items bought remotely. IME, Steam do not adhere
| to the law here.
| solardev wrote:
| Digital items too?
| angus-prune wrote:
| No, GP is incorrect. Digital goods are treated
| differently under the act.
| subtra3t wrote:
| full form of GP?
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Grandparent [comment].
| blibble wrote:
| steam was terrible when it came out
|
| however it was still miles better than "Games for Windows
| Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games
| that still require it
| Insanity wrote:
| I remember using Steam for the games library and using
| Xfire for the ingame chat features. At some point steam
| because the only survivor there.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Xfire is something that died a sad death. Used it to chat
| with many people I met playing Star Wars Galaxies and
| Empire at War - think it was actually bundled with that
| one.
|
| The profile pages and screenshot uploads were fun too.
|
| Another online community lost to the sands of time, alas.
| the_biot wrote:
| The Steam client was always, and is still, a gigantic pile
| of shit. The massive CPU usage when idle, the crazy game
| start delays, it's all plain and obvious to anyone who
| installs it.
|
| But for some reason people will insist on ignoring those
| problems, or instead compare it to some earlier experience
| with standalone games or some Microsoft pile of garbage,
| and will defend Steam in places like this.
|
| Valve's Steam _service_ is super nice for consumers (though
| developers get squeezed terribly), but the client is just
| horrible.
| Kuraj wrote:
| I wonder if it's going to become even more web based but
| it has also accomplished things like a sorta unified
| desktop/web/mobile experience and the steam deck. So
| there's that.
| deelowe wrote:
| Odd. I have no issues with the client and it's miles
| better than any other client out there.
| waymon wrote:
| > steam was terrible when it came out
|
| Do people really think this? I remember applying updates to
| CS before steam and it was awful. Steam streamlined that
| and gave us a much needed friends list. I never ever
| thought steam the application was a bad.
| blibble wrote:
| the friends list didn't work for 5 or so years and
| neither did the download limiter (not a big deal these
| days, but on dialup... yeah)
|
| the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do
| anything
|
| this wasn't a meme for no reason:
| https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o
| jonatron wrote:
| I spent ages looking for that meme recently, thanks!
| waymon wrote:
| ha, im just forgetful. thank you.
| wredue wrote:
| Internet and DRM back then were absolutely shit. So a
| company coming along and embracing DRM in a consumer
| friendly way during a time where DRM was rightfully a
| major topic of contention put a lot of negativity out
| there.
|
| Few people then knew that it was way ahead of its time,
| and even fewer knew how much of a fight valve would be
| putting up against capitalist regimes trying to kill
| gaming.
| mpixel wrote:
| Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007.
|
| Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also
| didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you
| had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is,
| but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience
| Steam.
|
| It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to
| put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly
| disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in
| hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004.
|
| It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam,
| Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-
| made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly,
| why did you have to install an additional app on your
| limited hardware?
|
| And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their
| contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome.
| There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows
| comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same
| interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything
| else today.
| philipov wrote:
| Do you remember before Steam won, there was also
| Stardock. They're still around now because they make
| Galactic Civilizations, but back in the day, they were
| also one of the early innovators in having their own
| store launcher for distributing their and others' games.
| Kuraj wrote:
| It's kinda funny that there's a company out there that
| does both game publishing and popular desktop utilities
| pdntspa wrote:
| I remember that. It was a really good store, the first of
| its kind IIRC. Every so often I think about what happened
| to the games I owned on there?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I still use stardock fences on my windows pc.
|
| I also... Fondly?... Recall the time everybody was
| excited to have Xmas or star trek themes desktop with
| windowblinds.... Funny how not just fashion changes, but
| even need for fashion - virtually nobody customizes their
| windows desktop anymore :)
| gabereiser wrote:
| Oh child, Stardock was originally a windows shell...
| Dressing to be modded like your Winamp skins.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| This is giving me a flashback to the time when I was
| still on dialup (the off-campus dorm I lived at had a
| shitty shared cable connection that was often slower or
| less reliable than dialup) and spent about three days
| downloading Half Life 2 on launch.
|
| It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realized I could
| take my laptop to campus, download it over their
| incredibly fast WiFi, and then transfer the files to my
| desktop that had a decent GPU.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam,
| Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-
| made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly,
| why did you have to install an additional app on your
| limited hardware?
|
| My understanding was they were solving the update
| problem:
|
| Back in the day, every CS update broke the community -
| not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update
| then you can only join a server that's updated. Most
| people don't update immediately, and servers want to only
| update when most users have updated, so as a result the
| _servers_ don 't update. But now users don't want to
| update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.
|
| This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.
|
| Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason _not_
| to update. The community stays unified, updates aren 't
| inherently socially painful. That's what Steam
| accomplished for CS.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| At the expense of Valve exerting more control over what
| CS version that server admins and players run
| sylens wrote:
| And downloading patches often meant waiting in a queue at
| places like FilePlanet for an hour or two, then
| downloading it at a snails pace
| yomlica8 wrote:
| And then manually applying them. If the game was old
| enough you might need to apply multiple patches,
| something you'd have to figure out. I definitely had
| mixed feelings about Steam at first, and my internet
| connection at the time was such I'd hoard some larger
| patches and didn't like the idea of re-downloading them
| on reinstall but there is no doubt now that where Valve
| was going with this was the future.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Haha I totally forgot about that aspect of the Internet
| deelowe wrote:
| Yep. That's essentially why "the cloud" became a thing.
| gabereiser wrote:
| It wasn't just CS, Team Fortress had a huge player base.
| Natural-Selection as well. There were like 7 or 8 mods
| for HL1 that were "on-par" with the quality of HL1, which
| says something about Hammer Editor and the toolkit they
| had at the time. GTkRadiant is great but Hammer Editor
| (formerly WorldCraft) was excellent.
|
| The popularity of the mods, CS included, is what drove
| Steam to become the store that it is.
| ta1243 wrote:
| It's odd seeing Counterstrike because I haven't really
| done gaming (and certainly not FPS) since Counterstrike
| was a free mod to Half Life.
|
| Wikipedia tells me that "window" of time was a year or
| two
| internet101010 wrote:
| It's crazy that it came out before the bulk of its
| professional players were born. It is truly a timeless
| game.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| One nice thing about Steam (back then, maybe still now?)
| was _after_ the mod status left.
|
| One copy of the Half Life box set (with Blue Shift,
| Opposing Forces, etc) could basically become as many
| copies as the whole thing.
|
| I turned that one box set into several Steam accounts for
| my friends/I to share. Each 'mod' (turned game) basically
| granted a new Half Life license and cloned the
| derivatives
| semi wrote:
| There was also a separate release of counterstrike called
| condition zero that included a single player campaign and
| a tweaked version of counterstrike multiplayer.
|
| That was not included as part of that bundle.. but if you
| used the dedicated server tool to download the czero mod
| and copied it to your halflife folder you could play both
| the single player and multiplayer version on steam
| gabereiser wrote:
| I still have my 6 (7?) digit ID from those days as my
| steamID. It got rolled into a larger one but still kept
| the old digits. Pretty cool of them.
| pradn wrote:
| It seems like any product named "X for Y" is terrible
| enterprise-y drivel. It means the project is part of some
| umbrella corp, which ofc means they can't possibly actually
| care about anything by profit, move slow, and are un-
| responsive.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I have heard nothing but good things about skype for
| business!
| stonogo wrote:
| Hearing nothing was a pretty widespread feature of that
| product!
| elesiuta wrote:
| > "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even
| try replaying the games that still require it
|
| If it's even still possible to install/activate them.
| Whenever any of them became available on Steam I would
| rebuy them there just for the convenience.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| Steam came out almost 5 years before GFWL.
| blibble wrote:
| probably about the same time they managed to get the
| Friends service to work
| dspillett wrote:
| Giving GFWL less excuse for being as bad as it was.
| They'd witnessed Steam's early problems, yet repeated
| them (and added more besides).
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Steam continues to be the best platform because it shares
| per-game and per-user cross-game transactional data with
| everyone. It's kind of hard to explain why this is so
| important, but it is unique to Steam, compared to all pay-to-
| play and subscription media as far as I know.
|
| Whereas things like DRM and returns and even royalties differ
| amongst platforms, and none of those have the same hegemony
| as Steam does; and the compulsory platforms, like the App
| Store and Google Play, developers complain bitterly about
| them in a way I've never heard regarding Steam, which they
| participate in voluntarily.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Valve will never say "You know what, we are going to go
| this direction, market be damned. Follow us if you want to
| be cool" and proceed to introduce a new graphics API. Don't
| get me wrong, we needed one, but the current state of
| graphics "drivers" sucks. Here comes Valve: "Hey bro, I
| heard graphics apis suck and are bifurcated by platform,
| here's a wrapper that wraps them all into an API you
| probably already use." (Initial version of their
| DX9->OpenGL bridge).
|
| Years later, Valve again: "You know, we just kept going on
| that thing we told you about, here's a full fledged x86
| win32 compatibility layer for anything posix. We had to
| patch the kernel but they were receptive." Who does this?
| No one. Not a single company does this. They all have
| ulterior motives. Patch Linux for some hardware they are
| introducing for sale or patching it for some platform to
| get your PII data. Valve is the only company that is
| patching to make things better for the sake of making "the
| ecosystem" better. Apple: "We have the best products" yet
| those products aren't helping the compute ecosystem.
| Microsoft: "We have AI" yet those products are still being
| worked out and is under active litigation from pretty much
| every creative out there. Valve: "We just want to play,
| make sense of players, to make better play experiences, to
| make better games, and not write more code than we have to.
| Our business is games, not code".
| DanielHB wrote:
| I might get some flak for this, but Meta is pretty big
| contributor to open source projects. The amount of bugs
| and features that they work on that are not used in their
| own products is quite staggering. Their open source
| projects are very embracing of the community.
|
| Google on the other hand...
| have_faith wrote:
| > was generally kind of clunky and buggy
|
| Steam is by far the jankiest program I have installed on my
| machine. It's TSAB (time to seeing a bug, I just made it up)
| is measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. I know they're
| raking in money for being what is mostly a very large FTP
| server (I kid...), but please spend some of it on the basic
| experience.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Of all the "app store" type programs that I have to
| interact with, Steam is somehow the least painful one.
|
| And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft
| Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung)
| Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-
| stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net
| Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play
| Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in
| comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as
| hell.
| subtra3t wrote:
| Maybe its just my bad system (integrated graphics, 4 GB
| ram, i3 8th gen processor) but Steam actually performs
| far worse than MS store, Gnome Store, and the Google Play
| Store (though thats on my phone and not my laptop).
| jstarfish wrote:
| Your system is either old or a Chromebook heh. Same
| problem here.
|
| Try disabling the options that preload and refresh all
| the store/community "stuff" behind the scenes. Maybe
| auto-updates too.
| happymellon wrote:
| Strange, Steam is quite stable for me. On both my
| SteamDeck, my couch PC on the main TV, and my laptop.
|
| A lot more stable than Tim Sweeneys ego.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I have only seen one Steam bug once in the last 6 years and
| that was a game that restarted its download from scratch,
| followed by the client crashing. Never happened again,
| never saw another bug either.
|
| Used it on hard drives, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy
| for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple
| process.
|
| In general their policy very good, but it's not quite no
| questions asked--they're pretty strict about the 2 hour
| playtime limit, which is quite a short time to decide if a
| game will actually be fun. In many types of games by the time
| you get through the tutorial and have access to all the game
| mechanics you're already past the two hour mark, and they
| also can't tell the difference between actual play time and
| time in the menu while you're doing something else.
|
| EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad policy, there
| are obviously reasons for this. But it's not truly no
| questions asked.
| pseg134 wrote:
| It is quite literally no questions asked. It isn't meant to
| be a demo system which is what you seem to want.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Yeah I always considered something used to make sure the
| game will run correctly on my system and I feel like 2
| hours is generous enough for that use case. I suppose it
| doesn't preclude game breaking bugs later in the
| experience but nothing is perfect.
|
| Valve is there to facilitate the sale of the game, not
| guarantee the game is good.
| lolinder wrote:
| No, there's a single question asked: how long have you
| had the game open on your computer?
|
| Costco has a no-questions-asked return policy, and demo-
| ing your purchase is _absolutely_ part of the expectation
| for how people will use said policy. Steam even
| explicitly includes "it wasn't fun" as a valid return
| option, as long as you reached that conclusion quickly
| enough.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying the policy is _wrong_ , it's
| clearly designed to prevent abuse, I'm just saying that
| it's not no-questions-asked.
| pseg134 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| ragestorm wrote:
| The frequency of the returns probably plays a part.
| Anecdotally, I've returned a couple of games over the 2h
| limit and they have refunded, no questions asked.
| dspillett wrote:
| Was that 2 hours since purchase, or 2 hours play time?
|
| The current limits are 14 days since-purchase as long as
| you've played the game for less than 2 hours.
| lolinder wrote:
| My only experience with hitting the limit was also the
| only time I've ever tried to return a game. I'm sure it
| mostly depends on the service rep handling your claim and
| how many bogus returns they've seen so far that day.
| dspillett wrote:
| IIRC, the refund window used to be longer, but was abused.
|
| It still is abused for short indie games, with people
| buying them with the intention of speed-running through and
| refunding.
|
| The refund policy is intended more for "crashed
| repeatedly", "far too slow despite my machine matching the
| stated specs", and "simply wouldn't run", type problems,
| rather than not liking the game. There isn't much a service
| like Steam can do about that, that won't be abused, other
| than offer demos (enough for you to try out those core
| mechanics) which is really down to the game creators and
| out of their power. Other than that you just have to not be
| first in line, and wait for reviews from sources you trust.
| lolinder wrote:
| Right, I get that. I've added a note to my comment above
| clarifying that I'm not critiquing the policy, just
| trying to clarify that "no questions asked" isn't a good
| characterization of it. It's a _very good_ return policy
| for the industry and medium Steam operates in, but it has
| hard limits that are worth being aware of.
| jstarfish wrote:
| I wish more devs offered shareware/demo releases. Not
| doing so was unthinkable in the hardware hell of the 90s.
|
| Too much shovelware on Steam these days, and the user has
| to pay retail price to even try it.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| It helps that they aren't beholden to shareholders and the
| "value" of showing unlimited growth. You'll never see
| enshitification there. They're a group of creators who want to
| create. Sometimes they slip up, but it's no more than anyone
| else would.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| That their games aren't filled with Pay To Win
| microtransactions and Day 1 DLC is yet another reason to love
| Valve. If someone wants to spend a few bucks to buy a hat in
| TF2, that's fine by me.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Conversely, CSGO and DOTA 2 has facilitated real money
| gambling among the youth on third party sites for years.
| Valve has attempted to crack down on gambling sites, however
| it's still possible for a fourteen year old to insert credit
| card details and lose real money gambling for virtual skins.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Which could easily be fixed if Valve decided to put a hard-
| cap by selling skins for a fixed price, even if they were
| only for sale a couple weeks a year.
|
| They'd also pocket all that money, but I guess they don't
| want people who spent more than said cap to get their
| skins. But people who are spending 100+ on skins should
| know they are playing the NFT game.
| ysavir wrote:
| And Artifact has card packs that are effectively loot
| boxes, and a whole marketplace to facilitate selling/buying
| them. I don't know how much/if they made any cut from the
| marketplace, but it's certainly a form of "play to win".
| waveBidder wrote:
| this is nothing compared to Roblox
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
| babypuncher wrote:
| They should kill their RNG skin distribution and open a
| normal cash shop like everyone else. I find this cosmetic
| market where people pay hundreds or even thousands for items
| they want skeevy as hell. It's a big black mark on Valve's
| otherwise exceptional reputation.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Why do people spend this much? Are they being tricked or
| something?
| usea wrote:
| Yes. They sell items via loot boxes where you don't know
| what you're buying until you've already opened it. It's
| gambling. Distributing purchases this way is well known
| to increase spending and hurt people. It's why they do
| it.
| dcow wrote:
| The stock market is also gambling. Plenty of informed
| consenting adults visit casinos all the time. What's the
| "responsible adult" way to spend your discretionary
| entertainment budget these days? NFTs? Disney+? Binge
| drinking at cocktail bars after work? High yield savings
| accounts? I mean seriously I'm not pro psychologically
| damage people with manipulative feedback spirals. But
| let's not ignore the fact that 1) owning a cool cosmetic
| and looking good stomping noobs is _fun_ , and 2) that
| people are willing to pay purely for entertainment.
| usea wrote:
| I'm not passing judgment on the victims of this practice.
| We should be regulating it, instead of allowing companies
| to abuse people.
| michaelt wrote:
| It's difficult to come up with an informed opinion on
| this sort of thing because it's nigh-impossible to talk
| to the people involved. I certainly don't know anyone who
| spends thousands of dollars on TF2 hats.
|
| One possibility is that they're gambling addicts in
| countries where gambling is heavily restricted, and
| buying "loot boxes" containing random items is the
| closest they can get to playing a casino slot machine.
|
| Or perhaps they think of themselves as clever investors
| in collectables, which they hope to sell on at a profit
| later on. You and I might think they're buying the
| equivalent of tulips or beanie babies - but they think
| their purchases are more like fine wines or rare postage
| stamps.
|
| Perhaps the big spenders actually only spend big five
| bucks at a time, and they're merely poor at managing
| their personal finances - spending five bucks a day for
| five years, unaware of how it's adding up.
|
| Or it could be money laundering - perhaps there's some
| criminal scheme where bank transfers are heavily
| monitored by the cops, but transfers of rare TF2 hats
| aren't.
|
| Perhaps the big money transactions are actually fake,
| aiming to pump up prices or make people spending mere
| hundreds of dollars feel better about it because at least
| they're not spending thousands.
|
| Yet another option is that they're super-successful
| billionaires, and a thousand bucks is nothing to them,
| not even worth bending down to pick up if they saw it in
| the street.
|
| People who make games with microtransactions for a living
| probably find it a lot easier to sleep at night if they
| think all their whales are billionaires.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| The people I know who have thousands of dollars in TF2
| hats, have played the game for thousands of hours and so
| want to show off a little bit with cool looking items
| while doing so.
|
| They have a fair amount of disposable income, but
| certainly aren't billionaires.
| dcow wrote:
| Or, maybe they just value the skins? Maybe they want to
| contribute financially to a game they really like in the
| hopes of keeping it healthy? I do know people that buy
| every new cosmetic that's released and they enjoy doing
| it. They aren't even millionaires. So what?
| skyyler wrote:
| When it was TF2 and not CSGO, there was a lot of money
| laundering.
|
| Not sure if that's still happening.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Depends on how you define tricked. The whole practice
| relies heavily on FOMO driven by artificial scarcity.
| It's all psychological manipulation, that many of us are
| susceptible to even if we think we aren't.
|
| I bring it up because games like Overwatch 2 get
| regularly shit on for introducing things like a battle
| pass and paid skin shop. Those rely on FOMO as well, but
| not nearly to the same extent. There are no gambling
| mechanics, and there is no Blizzard-sanctioned auction
| house where the most desirable items sell for thousands
| of dollars. The most desirable cosmetics in the game can
| be had for 10 dollars plus spending some time playing the
| game.
|
| As a player, it also just feels really shitty that
| customizing my character the way I want is reliant
| entirely on blind luck through gambling mechanics or
| spending obscene amounts of money.
|
| So if Blizzard is gonna take heat for this (and they do
| deserve at least some of it), then Valve absolutely
| should get raked over the coals for their far worse
| system.
| dcow wrote:
| Pokemon as an entire game relies on artificial scarcity
| and psychological manipulation. It's just a fixed cost up
| front for the game (and arguably not even strictly so
| these days with Pokemon Go). Same with any game ever that
| has loot and drop tables. Allowing people to pay more
| money to get more drops is the only thing that's really
| changed. And honestly it seems the feedback depends
| entirely on how "sleazy" the game studio's street
| reputation is. Dota2 cosmetics are considered tasteful
| while Genshin Impact is "gacha". But heh even Genshin
| gets a pass because it's such a good game and not one of
| those mobile penguin island simulators (which even get a
| good rap in many circles for being cute and fun to play).
|
| My new thesis is: if "winning" is "looking cool by
| getting good loot", then allowing people to pay for drops
| is effectively pay to win. I think this nuance is often
| skipped over in the conversation about whether some new
| game's micro-transaction framework is sleazy or not.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| 1) People really like skins
|
| 2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins,
| Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open
| market for Steam credit.
|
| Valve takes 5% of each market transaction and many skins
| hold their value quite well so using a $200 knife for
| years and years could only end up costing $10 (+
| opportunity cost) or so assuming the market stays flat
| and you will eventually buy $200 of games in the future.
|
| The real losers in the system are the people with
| gambling addictions opening cases and hoping to get
| something really good for less than market price. Cases
| are free drops but cost $2.50 to open and the average
| market value of what you win is usually less than (value
| of the case)+$2.50. Because the cases can be sold there's
| no limit to the amount of gambling one person can do.
|
| https://csroi.com/
| skeaker wrote:
| >Valve takes 5% of each market transaction
|
| ... on their own community market platform. Valve
| supports third party stores that don't have a Valve cut,
| and they freely provide the ability for users to trade
| items for items with no fees to allow third party stores
| to work. These systems kick off a whole third angle of
| businesses being propped up around the exchange of these
| items and of people doing speculative trades on certain
| items.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The market where Valve takes a cut of all cosmetics sold
| also incentivises them to maintain an extreme level of
| artificial scarcity for the most desirable cosmetics in
| the game.
|
| To me this is infinitely worse than just having a skin
| shop and/or battlepass.
| dcow wrote:
| I bet valve makes more off the hundreds of thousands of
| $2 transactions than the occasional $100 or $1000
| transaction. I mean think about it...
| Mustachio wrote:
| As someone who played a lot of CSGO as a 15-16 year old
| back in 2015, it's all psychological. Why does anyone
| become addicted to gambling? The thrill releases enormous
| amounts of dopamine. Satisfy this over and over, and the
| threshold for the same euphoria becomes higher and
| higher. That's how yo end up with people, and
| particularly teens and young adults spending massive
| amounts of money for 'some pixels'. I think I sank about
| 1.5k into it in total over the years. When Belgium
| decided to ban such loot boxes I was happy to see the
| addiction forcibly ended. They just need to repeat it for
| predatory battlepasses and the likes.
| dcow wrote:
| Because they value the content. Might not be your style,
| but participating in battle passes and cosmetic drops is
| enjoyable for many people. What else should they be
| spending their discretionary income on? Stonks?
| callalex wrote:
| Yes, Valve is relying on gambling mechanics to entice
| people, the same way a casino does.
| ant6n wrote:
| But when will Half Life 3 be released.
| xinayder wrote:
| Don't forget that:
|
| - they did a massive fuck up with Artifact, thinking they could
| pull out MTG's monetization model for an online game (where you
| didn't even receive card as rewards for levelling up, you
| actually had to spend money to enjoy playing the game)
|
| - they released Underlords and killed it right away, the battle
| pass is still the first one and the game hasn't received any
| balancing patch in 3 years
|
| Underlords could be a real good competitor to TFT. and Artifact
| would be nice to compete against Hearthstone's cash grab.
| Thankfully they actually listened to our feedback and put a
| nail on the coffin for Artifact.
| lsaferite wrote:
| My personal Steam customer support 'win' was several years back
| when I decided to start building a game library for my son. I
| had purchased Conan and Elite Dangerous while they were on deep
| discount and gifted them to my son's account. At the time I was
| unaware that gifts can expire and be refunded. So, at some
| point the gifts expired and they refunded the purchases, but
| the game were no longer on that deep discount. I was fairly
| upset and contacted customer support. The initial customer
| support agent was unhelpful and I sent a follow-up contact to
| Gabe that expressed my discontent. I explained that they'd
| managed to alienate a user that had been on the platform since
| 2005 and who had a massive library of purchased games at that
| point. I told them I would no longer be using the platform and
| would not be using it for my kids either. This email elicited a
| response from one of the Steam devs and they agreed that my
| initial interaction was not what they wanted the experience to
| be. He sent me copies of the games that have been refunded and
| he sent me to codes for "all present and future Valve titles"
| for me and my son to be able to play together. In the end he
| turned it around fully and only increased my appreciation for
| the company and platform.
| lsaferite wrote:
| As a small follow-up to this that exemplifies the continuing
| good interactions:
|
| I posted the email exchange I had below another comment. In
| that exchange you'll notice that the dev said they'd added
| the games under my inventory to gift to my son at a later
| date (when he was older). That came about _2 years later_
| when he was 12. The problem was, when I tried to use the
| gifts from my inventory they both failed for unspecified
| reasons. I reached out to the initial dev again, hoping he
| was still there. He was and he helped resolve the issue right
| away.
|
| I know some people have had bad customer service with Steam
| or have other complaints, some valid and others not so much.
| In the end, I'm a pretty satisfied Steam customer and will
| generally speak well of them when the situation arises (like
| today).
| oynqr wrote:
| You "own" Half Life 3 in some timeline.
| eropple wrote:
| Yeah, Steam has always some really impressively dedicated
| help when somebody escalates. It's probably harder to access
| now, but I remember one time in college when TF2 came out of
| beta and performance was awful. Steam Support didn't have
| anything, so I sent an email to GabeN; he put me in touch
| with a senior Source dev who had me press some debug buttons
| and hop in a game with a bunch of Valve folks (I was pretty
| good but this was definitely an exception to "game devs are
| worse that their games than players", I got my ticket punched
| worse than when I was playing in competitive leagues). A few
| weeks later there was a patch that significantly improved
| perf on my particular flavor of hardware.
| rollcat wrote:
| These kinds of cases can be rare enough that finding them is
| absolutely worth that cost, in terms of fixing a rare but
| annoying bug, helping customer retention, "word on the
| street", etc.
|
| I don't do customer support very often, but when I do, it's
| my default response.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Talking about customer service, the best I've _ever_
| experienced has been with Sweetwater, on online music
| store. I seriously rave about them to anyone that will
| listen. Someone should do a case study on their CS program.
| callalex wrote:
| I'm glad everything worked out for you in the end, but it
| seems like the Steam policy here is pretty reasonable, and
| you come across as unreasonable.
| lsaferite wrote:
| I know I shouldn't engage, but your comment irks me.
|
| This is the email I sent, make of it what you will:
|
| Mr. Newell,
|
| I figured I would email you as a sort of spiritual goodbye
| to my fandom of Steam.
|
| I have been a customer for as long as I can remember. I'm
| pretty sure it's longer than the 15 years my profile lists
| as I had a profile that I lost access to before this one.
| For this entire time I've been a staunch supporter and
| advocate of Steam. I've slowly built my collection over the
| years and would always prefer to buy via Steam vs.another
| platform or even direct. I would always recount my many
| positive experiences with the Steam platform when
| discussions online turned negative. Overall I was a very
| happy customer and advocate.
|
| My son is now 10 and I had finally decided to start a game
| library for him. We are a multi-PC family and we frequently
| want to game together or just want to all play games at the
| same time, even if they are different ones. As the Steam
| sharing feature means we cannot all play different games I
| decided I'd just buy him some of the games he asked for or
| that we could play together. The last two of those
| purchases is what triggered my loss of faith in Steam. And
| to be honest, it was such a trivial thing to trigger it in
| the end. I purchased a copy of Elite Dangerous: Commander
| Deluxe Edition and a copy of Conan Exiles - Complete
| Edition. They were both on sale for a good amount off, 75%
| for ED and 40% for CE. As I seem unable to just purchase a
| game and hold it as a later gift to someone and instead I
| have to specify the recipient right away I went ahead and
| sent it to my son's email address. That address is simply a
| group that goes to myself and my wife until he's a little
| older. Apparently I missed the fact that I needed to go and
| accept the gift or the gift would be REFUNDED. Eventually
| the gifts were both refunded and I had missed it until the
| second gift was refunded. I immediately reached out to
| support to help un-refund the purchases. They said that
| they were unable to help me.
|
| That is really where the story ends I'd say. Nothing
| dramatic, but I told them they'd lost a customer for giving
| me my money back. Pretty ironic really.
|
| I keep getting emails about deals on items on my wishlist
| and I keep realizing that I meant what I'd said. You guys
| lost a customer. I've gone so far as to start buying games
| I already own on Steam on GOG instead now. I won't walk
| away from my Steam library and I'm not saying I'll never
| spend more money on Steam. But I'll never do it as a first
| choice and I'll never do it as a happy customer.
|
| I just wanted to write to you on the off chance that you
| might read this so perhaps you can do something for the
| future to not lose another loyal customer over such a
| trivial thing.
|
| And this was the response:
|
| Hello Mr. [X],
|
| My name is [Y] and I am a developer on Steam. Thank you for
| taking the time to email us and bring this issue to our
| attention.
|
| I have reviewed your help request and I am contacting you
| to apologize for the responses that you received. Your
| request was not handled appropriately and we will use it as
| well as your feedback to improve how we handle cases like
| yours in the future.
|
| We would like to add free copies of the games that were
| automatically refunded to your son's account. From your
| email, it sounded like you were hoping to delay giving him
| these games until he is a little older. So, I have added
| giftable copies of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe
| Edition and Conan Exiles - Complete Edition to your
| account's inventory. You can access your inventory through
| the dropdown menus near the top of the Steam Client and
| gift them to his account at any time.
|
| We also think it is great that you are starting a game
| library for him and we would like to contribute some games
| from Valve as well. I am including two CD keys which you
| can register on both of your accounts so that you can play
| the included games together. These keys include all present
| and future Valve titles:
|
| [CODE1]
|
| [CODE2]
|
| Thank you again for bringing this to our attention. Please
| let me know if I can help with anything else.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| >but I told them they'd lost a customer for giving me my
| money back.
|
| That sounds unreasonable.
| subtra3t wrote:
| I have nothing to add except that this is such a
| wonderful interaction between two polite people. On the
| internet, too!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Other than DRM, what's not to like about Steam policies?
| alexb_ wrote:
| They've caught a TON of criticism for Counterstrike cases,
| which is where they make an absolute crapload of money. I
| don't think it's a big deal, but others do.
| belltaco wrote:
| Taking 30% of indie developers revenues while being a near
| monopoly, so indie devs have to be on Steam. Something like
| Epic's 12% would be a fair cut given storage and bandwidth
| costs have gone down over the years. Being able to keep an
| additional 18% of their game's revenue would be huge for
| developers. Some may call it rent-seeking.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Ah, that's a fair criticism.
| ric2b wrote:
| They're a monopoly in the same way that Amazon is: they're
| not, there are plenty of popular alternatives and
| publishers aren't locked from selling wherever else they
| want.
|
| They're just the biggest player and the 30% cut is worth it
| for all the additional sales.
| belltaco wrote:
| >there are plenty of popular alternatives
|
| Like what? GoG? And what else?
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| Epic Games comes to mind. Or just buy the game from the
| developers.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I don't know if this is accurate, but IIRC, if you're banned,
| you lose access to even the single-player games in your
| collection.
| Quikinterp wrote:
| That sounds odd, because how does your steam account even
| get banned? If you cheat in a game and get banned, your
| steam account isn't banned
| lvass wrote:
| AFAIK most horror stories are from people who move
| between countries, particularly from one with "cheaper"
| prices like Argentina to one with more expensive ones.
| Not sure if the account itself gets banned but the games
| previously bought do get locked out.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Back in the day playing on VAC servers and attempting to
| use exploits would get your whole account banned.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I don't think that happens. You might lose access to
| features and multiplayer, but not the games you own.
|
| At worst, you cannot buy more games or gifts or trade your
| items. But you can still download the single player games
| you already have.
|
| EDIT: Generally it seems account suspension is possible,
| but that usually means they noticed something illegal or
| extremely suspicious activity.
| no_time wrote:
| Erosion of the concept of ownership. I can lose access to the
| content I have paid full price for through no fault of my
| own. Just because they've decided to no longer support the
| platform I've never stopped using. Also not being able to
| resell the product I supposedly "own".
|
| To be fair, none of these things were pioneered by Valve, but
| more of a general change in what society accepts as the new
| normal.
|
| Even though I can remove SteamStub DRM with an automatic tool
| to solve these issues, It still irks me how there isn't a
| regulatory solution to these problems
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Years ago I lost access to my steam account that I had since
| HL2 came out.
|
| I was able to get back in by emailing Valve support the account
| name, and photos of the box and serial key HL2 came in.
|
| I was genuinely impressed - up to that point I had absolutely
| despised Steam as DRM shovelware that almost never worked right
| due to constantly downloading updates over my shitty internet
| connection.
| meesles wrote:
| I whole-heartedly agree. They seem good for the right reasons.
|
| That said, I'm scared about the inevitable creep of capitalism.
| What happens when Gabe retires? Or some legal/financial event
| changes things?
|
| I have no reason to doubt them, but history gives me reasons to
| be cautious with my optimism. We've seen similar parallels with
| beloved tech companies in the past.
| taink wrote:
| I had to dig a little so here's the link to the talk the article
| is mentioning: https://youtu.be/L98v4epQmrg?t=15121
| mastax wrote:
| Here is a link to the presentation, it starts at 4:12:04.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/L98v4epQmrg?si=T-snMWdtnDLpN_TJ...
|
| And here are the slides:
|
| https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/osseu2023/83/steamos-a...
| syklep wrote:
| The talk mentioned in the article starts here:
| https://youtu.be/L98v4epQmrg?t=4h12m6s
| ho_schi wrote:
| I would love to see some kind of _Native Linux Game Awards_ by
| Valve. * Best native game for Linux gets an
| award, highlight in shop and 50% discount on shop fees. *
| Best native - platform exclusive - game for Linux gets an award,
| highlight in shop and 100% discount on fees.
|
| Why?
|
| Proton is helpful like WINE but it is an aid which needs a lot
| work (and even more by Valve) and hinders *high-quality* native
| ports. We need more games like HL2 and CSGO natively. Valve
| shouldn't do the work of application developers. The resources of
| Valve are in long term needed for Linux, Mesa, SDL and other
| utilities. I respect the amount of work in Proton but Valve
| cannot do that for another decade. The job of Proton should be
| making itself superfluous?
|
| Isn't that is unfair? Not as long others use incompatible APIs
| (Mantel and Direct3D) and enforce users to switch platforms (all
| consoles). Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo use platform
| exclusive titles for decades.
|
| PS: Great native games? HL1, HL2, CS1, CSGO, Civilization, Tomb
| Raider, OpenRA. Especially Day-1 ports are important.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The high-quality ports are being limited by how dependencies
| work on Linux distros. You're tied to a very specific version
| of a library. Fine if you can just recompile the code every
| time the version changes, but not fine if you're shipping an
| unchanging binary.
|
| Meanwhile in Windows land, you static link everything and
| import only the system DLLs, and everything is great. You can't
| do that on Linux even if you wanted to.
| accelbred wrote:
| Its pretty easy to statically link with musl on linux.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I heard that attempting to load dynamic libraries from an
| executable using MUSL was difficult. Specifically when the
| library you want to load imports libc.
| ho_schi wrote:
| That is what closed-source software does on Linux and Windows
| and Mac. Usually all required libraries are shipped with the
| executable. Most don't link statically, sometimes this even
| isn't possible.
|
| People also ship Microsoft's system libraries. Windows tends
| to be in "undefined state" due to missing package management
| (file corruption), broken Windows-Update or whatever went
| wrong.
|
| It is hard teaching developers not to package their software
| for Linux! Native packages are maintained by distributions
| and require well documented dependencies only. Instead many
| developers maintain themself various packages for outdated
| distributions not used by anyone. Examples?
| * Amazons MP3-Downloader (that's old) * Valve
| (shipping only for Ubuntu but they learned to allow
| redistribution quickly, one of the first requests came from
| Arch) * Microsoft with Teams (yes, they should
| know better...)
|
| But they want to package?
|
| Do it once with Flatpak. No Snap! No AppImage. Just Flatpak.
| It is designed for that usage.
|
| Else?
|
| Provide binaries in tar.gz, document instructions, allow in
| any case redistribution. Always. If need the distribution
| maintainers will care. If not the users can copie them just
| on disk.
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| I used to feel like this, but then ran into games like
| S.H.O.G.O:MAD and Terminus, and The Bard's Tale - those have
| native Linux ports, and they're pretty much un-playable these
| days. Using Proton, I can run even problematic old games like
| Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (that won't even run on Windows
| anymore!).
|
| I feel like insisting on Linux native ports is letting perfect
| be the enemy of the good, and that native ports don't
| necessarily guarantee anything at all.
|
| I certainly do appreciate developers who can provide native
| ports, though. In the end, I just want to relax and shoot alien
| space nazis in the face, and not think about how to get the
| alien space nazis to run on my machine.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Hey, someone who thinks the same way I do. Never thought I'd
| run into another native port advocate in 2023.
|
| That said: it's funny you talk about rewards offered by Valve
| and then list 4 Valve Games. I know they wouldn't do that, but
| it'd be hilarious to think about.
|
| > Isn't that is unfair? Not as long others use incompatible
| APIs (Mantel and Direct3D) and enforce users to switch
| platforms (all consoles). Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo
| use platform exclusive titles for decades.
|
| I don't see it as unfortunate, since very few devs are going to
| make games specifically to compete for saving 15% on rev-share.
| That's a huge gamble. And no one is going to bet on Linux
| exclusives for a chance to save 30%
|
| The only potentially unfair issue may be that some AAA game
| ends up getting the rewards, the sort of studios who'd need
| that money the least. But that is ultimately what we want to
| encourage, so IDK. Maybe 2 rewards, one for general and one for
| "small teams" (defining that term will take a lot of
| fanagling).
| ho_schi wrote:
| I hope for both and the categories are aiming for both. I
| assume "also Linux" for AAA and the "only Linux" for small
| independent developers :)
|
| What I expected for 2023 was Half-Life 3 with a Linux port.
| And the press release stating that a Windows port "may"
| follow later but not now.
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