[HN Gopher] The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly
___________________________________________________________________
The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 257 points
Date : 2025-04-03 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (isomorphism.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (isomorphism.xyz)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this
| post is related to the Switch 2 announcement?
|
| Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best
| endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
|
| (Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I
| picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported
| to it -- and was duly impressed.)
| butlike wrote:
| A licensing deal between Nintendo and Valve. Once could dream.
| Get the entire Steam lib on your Switch, then Valve gets a
| "Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 - Only on Nintendo" store listing
| on Steam.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's sticker price shock for sure. Historically speaking, this
| will just smooth over and people will set their sticks in the
| sand. If the 900 dollar PS5 pro can shrug it off, then I doubt
| there's much issue here.
| jagermo wrote:
| For me, the switch is the only console I trust to leave my kids
| alone with. Nintendo builds great games for kids, but you pay
| for them. I mean, launch games like Mario Odysee and Breath of
| the Wild are still sold at full price, years later.
| garrettjoecox wrote:
| I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I
| cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being
| prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters.
| My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back
| on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the
| controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back
| into the game (because they pressed the Home button)
|
| Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child
| in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I
| could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids
| to avoid"
|
| Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites
| for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find
| that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet
| connectivity.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| > Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best
| endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
|
| If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so
| everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the
| consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown
| off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk
| footage is authentic.
|
| Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their
| single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable
| mouse. This will actually be a _better_ experience than the
| Deck (assuming the mouse doesn 't hurt your hand). The Deck has
| best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, _but_ if
| the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller
| and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a
| control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the
| buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-
| analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is
| just a mouse.
| whytevuhuni wrote:
| They're not saints, especially with the games distribution
| platform monopoly they're sitting on top of, but...
|
| I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the
| "don't be evil" motto nowadays, even if they don't advertise
| themselves as such.
| dagurp wrote:
| By the low standards set by other companies in similar
| positions I think they're doing quite well.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| I hope Gabe Newell outlives me, because I don't want to see
| Valve go down the road of other game studios...
| Brybry wrote:
| My main long term worry with Steam is that Gaben will die and
| then Valve will IPO.
| tjpnz wrote:
| The spectre of a post-IPO Half Life 3 is something which
| fills me with dread.
| dpatterbee wrote:
| Steam isn't really a monopoly though, everyone is free to use
| whatever marketplace they choose on PC. Steam's just the best
| one.
| butlike wrote:
| It's economies of scale. I strongly feel "just grab it on
| steam," which my friends say, is colloquially equivalent to
| "grab a band-aid".
|
| Both Steam and Band-Aid are brand names.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Same with Microsoft in 90's
| dpatterbee wrote:
| Microsoft used its influence over OEMs to stifle their
| competition in the browser market. This blog post is about
| how Valve are very much not doing that.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Valve used its influence over game publishers to stifle
| their competition in the digital distribution market.
|
| I'm a happy Valve customer, and I'd still likely buy with
| them even if other platform's offered lower prices, but
| that doesn't change that they've leveraged their market
| domination to force concessions from publishers that
| benefit their business at the cost of competitors and
| customers.
| SXX wrote:
| I'm game developer, co-founder of my own company and I
| hate Valve 30% cut.
|
| Yet Valve did nothing to stiffle competition. Their only
| major requirement for games published on Steam was that
| games suppose to get same efficient discounts as they get
| on other storefronts. E.g you cannot constantly sell your
| game on Epic Games store for $10 while Steam version cost
| never drops below $12.
|
| Also game developers are allowed to request sane amount
| of Steam keys for free and sell them elsewhere while
| pocketing all the profit while Valve covers all the
| distribution costs.
|
| Epic Games stiffled itself. Their store is shitty and
| dont even have player reviews. No surprise they have no
| customers except those who come to play Fortnite or get
| free games.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Publisher's should be allowed to price their product
| differently based on the distribution fee of the
| platform. Steam does not allow you to do this.
|
| For example a publisher could price a new title at $69.99
| on Steam or $59.99 on Epic and make the same gross
| margin, given the platform fees.
|
| That Epic is a sub-par distribution platform does not
| change this, and Steam's agreement precludes the
| possibility that competitors can compete on price. Amazon
| was forced to remove price parity after regulatory
| pressure.
|
| So like Microsoft of the 90's, Valve is using their
| market dominance to force publishers into agreements that
| limit competition. It's only different because we
| generally like Valve. Epic and GOG cannot compete on
| price and use that as a mechanism to grow their business
| because Steam could threaten to remove your product. It
| just so happens that Steam is so good that even with
| price discounts it's unlikely that competitors could use
| that as a major advantage.
| jagermo wrote:
| And there are tons. Epic, EA, Ubi Play - they are pretty
| shitty.
|
| Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but
| they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not
| because they hinder the competition, but because the
| competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
| sneak wrote:
| Not only is Steam not a monopoly, TFA mentions how it's
| possible to easily install alternative app stores on the Steam
| Deck.
|
| It's not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it's
| uncharitable given that they are not engaging in
| anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and
| arguably having the right) to do so.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by
| definition anti-competitive.
|
| Valve takes 30%. You can't, in practice, sell your game on
| Steam and on another store at a lower price. That's
| anticompetitive.
|
| Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the
| transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against
| Valve before you do! They're not a good look for Valve to say
| the least.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > Valve takes 30%. You can't, in practice, sell your game
| on Steam and on another store at a lower price.
|
| Note the use of 'store' here. You can sell your game on
| your own website for a lower price.
|
| One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com
| than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble
| all sell at the same price, however.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > Note the use of 'store' here
|
| No. It's an implicit rule. You don't get to language
| lawyer.
|
| > One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on
| factorio.com
|
| Just checked, $35 on both.
|
| Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their
| website for a lower price so long as the game sales
| numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very
| less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct
| Valve would not be pleased and there would be
| consequences.
| cma wrote:
| Isn't that only true for selling steam keys, not the
| whole game? Bigger problem with the monopoly is less
| sales on steam means less visibility in steam's
| algorithm, so you get punished for having people buy off
| steam.
|
| Same if you want a video on your site: if you don't
| YouTube embed and instead host yourself, you get less
| amplified by youtube even if people want to watch it just
| as much. YouTube ends up getting to plaster ads
| interrupting your website trailer as much as they do on
| YouTube.
|
| If you spread your marketing to a steam competitor with
| better cut you get the same problem, less amplification
| on Steam. Steam is today stone soup, Valve used to put in
| more of the meat and veggies but now that's more and more
| up to the captive devs. For a time Valve was the most
| profitable major company per employee in the US from this
| stone soup arrangement, but they did eventually have to
| drop their rates on the biggest devs, announced either a
| few days before or after the Epic Games Store launched.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| This is entirely what one of the major lawsuits is about.
| The official word age is that this is a clause for using
| steam keys. But internal emails shows there's definitely
| preferences even for non steam keygames to do this
|
| https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/the-judges-ruling-a-
| maj...
|
| >Initially, it was believed that this policy applied only
| to Steam keys, but the emails indicate a broader
| application, raising serious concerns about Valve's
| business practices.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > > One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on
| factorio.com
|
| > Just checked, $35 on both.
|
| This might be a regional thing then. When using a UK IP,
| it's PS30.00 on Steam, GOG and Humble. It's PS27.03 on
| factorio.com. I checked before posting.
| zuminator wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious. If that's the case, how is it that I
| have bought dozens of games on the humblebundle store (for
| Steam) that were far cheaper than the retail price on Steam
| itself?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Humble bundle uses steam keys, so they are working in
| tandem regardless.
|
| That said: enforcement on such things is not going to be
| 100%. Larger companies will either be purposefully
| ignores or make their own internal deals and contracts to
| follow. Some smaller games will slip through like
| everything else in life (Valve can still let Malware slip
| in once in a blue moon. I'm not surprised you can find
| some niche Japanese game sold for cheaper on DLsite or
| wherever).
|
| But the point is that they can push thst in devs because
| of the monopoly. And that's how you get stuff like the
| Wolfire lawsuit when a few people do push back.
| protimewaster wrote:
| > given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive
| practices
|
| Well, not quite. They did get sued for having
| "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge
| John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and
| that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal
| monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual
| arbitrations to do so."
|
| (Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but
| developers were apparently allowed to.)
|
| So, perhaps not all good.
|
| (From https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| IIRC their big TOS clause they had you sign in October
| flipped it around. So I think now gamers can make a class
| action.
|
| This was in defiance of the fact that some lawyers were
| arranging a mass arbitration lawsuit over this stuff. So
| Valve is flipping the table hoping to evade that.
| saghm wrote:
| I bought a Steam Deck OLED last year, and it's honestly
| astounding to me how well it both provides an amazing out-of-
| the-box experience for both the "gaming mode" Steam interface
| and the "desktop mode" with a regular Linux desktop without
| sacrificing basically any customization. It's a glorified
| tablet that in my baggiest pair of jeans I can just barely
| fit into my pocket, and somehow probably the most realistic
| attempt I've seen at making something suitable for the
| mythical "year of the Linux desktop", which wasn't even the
| goal!
|
| It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been
| building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and
| developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as
| frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with
| much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the
| controller for it so that they weren't going in without any
| experience as a company dealing with physical products...I
| can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for
| most companies due to how much they had to be willing to
| invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to
| succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to
| say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux
| gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on
| a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much
| time and effort into the tooling for running the games
| independent of their distribution network. At this point, I
| probably would have been willing to forgive them for
| releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead
| they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable
| from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change
| or remove things. There have been so many discussions about
| whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not
| on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even
| fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
| ziddoap wrote:
| How do you qualify them as a monopoly?
|
| I have 3 different non-Steam game stores and another 3 or 4
| non-Steam game-specific launchers on my PC.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> How do you qualify them as a monopoly? _
|
| If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and
| your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The
| sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other
| alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released
| their games on Steam.
|
| Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can
| have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10%
| market share and you have >90% then you're basically a
| monopoly.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _If you 're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter,
| and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist_
|
| That's an exaggeration.
|
| World of Warcraft, COD, League of Legends, all exist just
| fine. For brand new games, The Bazaar is doing very well
| and they're using their own launcher.
|
| (Slightly off-topic, but The Bazaar is _really_ good, for
| anyone who likes card-based auto-battler games! Highly
| recommend.)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Those games are the exceptions that prove the rule.
| There's some major gaming franchises out there that
| basically have their own gravity field at this point and
| can drive people to different storefronts(Fortnite,
| Minecraft, etc), but outside of those games, forget it,
| if your new game isn't a AAAA blockbuster and isn't on
| Steam, most people won't really carea bout it.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| That's hyperbole at best, especially given that places
| like itch.io and GoG exist.
|
| CDPR also puts all of their games DRM free from release
| on GoG - including The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| As long as Steam's pricing parity rule of thumb exists,
| there's only so much those others can do to compete. The
| only real reason people use alternative stores is to save
| money, and Valve put a silent hand on that.
| delecti wrote:
| I agree with the thrust of your point, that a _tiny_
| handful of games have their own gravity field which lets
| them ignore the titan that is Steam.
|
| But nit: that's not what "exception that proves the rule"
| means. An example of that saying is a sign that says "no
| parking 2-4pm", which proves that there is a rule that
| you can park any other time. WoW, Fortnite, CoD,
| Minecraft, those are just "exceptions".
| keyringlight wrote:
| Besides Fortnite (which is a big hit on mobile/consoles)
| all those examples hit their stride before steam opened
| to third parties or early in that period. Others like COD
| or Minecraft may have started on PC but migrated their
| main focus to other platforms too.
|
| What stands out to me is that while most studios accept
| that they've got to pay their tithe to valve in order to
| succeed on PC, for many it seems to begrudgingly so and
| where they have the capability they investigate using
| their own or alternative channels to get a better rate.
| It's an interesting parallel to Valve's moan around 15
| years or so that Microsoft could E.E.E. PC gaming and the
| linux direction was hedging against that.
| PokestarFan wrote:
| Also so far Riot's games don't require upfront purchases
| so that changes the equation a bit.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Why is the existence of the largest games on the market's
| survival proof thst Steam doesn't own 90% marketshare? Do
| people remember what monopoly means? Do they think any
| small dev can be a COD competitor tomorrow?
|
| Btw, based on my friend Bazaar still has its own balance
| issues arising every other patch.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Why is the existence of the largest games on the
| market 's survival proof thst Steam doesn't own 90%
| marketshare?_
|
| It's proof that what the parent commenter said, the
| portion I explicitly quoted, is an exaggeration.
|
| > _Btw, based on my friend Bazaar still has its own
| balance issues arising every other patch._
|
| I mean, sure. Can you name any competitive game that
| doesn't have balance issues? I can't. What matters to me
| is the iteration speed to address balance issues, which
| The Bazaar does at a really nice cadence.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's an exaggeration in that sure, it literally exists.
| But at this point you're not really engaging in good
| faith if that's your argument. Can we not do that ?
|
| >Can you name any competitive game that doesn't have
| balance issues?
|
| Sure. But I'm not entirely sure Bazaar is stable enough
| yet to have the mood swings of Overwatch 2. That's the
| danger. Make too many fans angry in this beta stage and
| you lose all goodwill for the full launch.
|
| I do empathize highly with the devs as someone who will
| try to do that song and dance themselves one day. But
| that's why I'm not only making my game with direct sales
| figures in mind.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _But at this point you 're not really engaging in good
| faith if that's your argument. Can we not do that ?_
|
| Can we not say people aren't conversing in good faith
| solely as a method of shutting down further conversation?
|
| They stated something as an absolute and I gave examples
| of why it isn't an absolute. That's a perfectly normal
| conversation. It's not even an argument.
|
| As for Bazaar, it seems like you haven't played and
| aren't a fan, which is totally fine, but just a note that
| it is not in beta anymore. I'm not sure what your
| comments about _" making my game with direct sales
| figures in mind"_ are referencing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Can we not say people aren't conversing in good faith
| solely as a method of shutting down further conversation?
|
| I will call a duck a duck as long as it quacks like one.
| I simply want to maintain the spirit of the guidelines
|
| >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith
|
| They made a hyperbolic statement and you are responding
| to the literal hyperbolic point and dismissing the main
| point in the same comment about the 90% monopoly. I don't
| see that as following the guidelines. There's no
| interesting conversation to have about "does your game
| not existing if it is not on Steam?", not even in a
| philosophical sense.
|
| >it seems like you haven't played and aren't a fan, which
| is totally fine,
|
| I'm just worried about its future. Especially in these
| turbulous times. You don't really get the luxury of
| rocking the boat that much. Maybe the founders will be
| fine, but the last thing I want is more layoffs over
| extemelty preventable issues.
|
| > I'm not sure what your comments about "making my game
| with direct sales figures in mind" are referencing.
|
| I wouldn't worry about it too mucn. Just personal
| ramblings. I'll just say "when I a good rush, sell
| shovels".
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I find it funny that every time other publishers try to
| recreate Steam with their own catalogues, a good chunk of
| gamers (myself included) just refuse to buy "exclusives" on
| other platforms, to the point they eventually crawl back to
| Steam. EA held out for a LONG time. I broke my reluctance only
| once because I wanted to play the latest FarCry game, but
| otherwise, I've kept all my games on Steam. They eventually
| caved too.
|
| What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if
| you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls
| Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your
| Steam account.
|
| My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new
| games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but
| they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this
| regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team
| Fortress spiritual successor.
| mazork wrote:
| Deadlock is absolutely not a Team Fortress spiritual
| successor, it has much much more in common with Dota 2 than
| TF2, and is really full of interesting features and polish
| for where it's at in its development.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| In some ways, it's because valve caved and did the equivalent
| of tax cuts for the rich. You have revenue more than like, 25
| million/yr as a publisher and you reduce your infamous 30%
| cut to 20%.
|
| Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
| lolinder wrote:
| > They're not saints, especially with the games distribution
| platform monopoly they're sitting on top of
|
| They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others
| debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to
| their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly
| evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it
| through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone
| claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making
| noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
|
| The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape
| possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all
| customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against
| that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse
| than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but
| as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on
| a standard platform.
| nottorp wrote:
| > by being very very good to their users
|
| For example, I still don't use Epic. And I've probably even
| paid on Steam for games that Epic gave away for free.
|
| What's worrying is Steam has enough mass to preclude me from
| buying games on GoG to a point. Linux support, for one.
| Frictionless playing on a Deck if i choose to get one in the
| future, for two. Steam built in streaming, for three.
|
| I bought GoG first for a couple years, but now I'm agnostic
| again. Esp with games that have Linux versions.
|
| ------------
|
| Still, the only games you really own are those you've
| downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM
| free.
|
| And only if you have a good backup strategy :)
| dividuum wrote:
| > [...] by being very very good to their users [...]
|
| Helps that they don't have to be very very good to
| shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want
| money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what
| happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, when you wanna be evil, be evil to devs. They are stuck
| on two fronts and gamers are already pre-disposed to blame
| them for any problems anyway.
|
| >If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
|
| Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding
| light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking
| "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller
| cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
| butlike wrote:
| Does Epic take a smaller cut for the store? I know it
| becomes exorbitant to lease their engine, UDK, since they
| take a percentage depending on the licensing contract
| you've signed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yes. 12% cut from Epic, and I believe certain UE fees are
| waived if you release on EGS.
|
| For UDK: they did get a lot better with that for UE4/5.
| These days, the first million dollars in that project's
| revenue has no cut, and after that it's a 5% royalties
| (there's also mandatory $1850 subscription seats per year
| if you have over a million gross revenue a year).
|
| It's about as indie friendly as you can be for such an
| everpresent tool.
| protimewaster wrote:
| > If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means,
| sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are
|
| They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on
| pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that
| those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim
| compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike
| developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
|
| So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have
| at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
|
| (Quoted text is from https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-
| case-explained)
| lolinder wrote:
| I did somehow miss this lawsuit, but this is an
| advertisement for the law firm, not actual documentation of
| the ruling, because the ruling hasn't been issued yet. The
| wording is very precise here: the judge ruled that those
| claims were credible and allowed the case to move forward.
| That is not the same thing as the judge siding with the
| plaintiffs.
| protimewaster wrote:
| That's true, but it's definitely not the case that nobody
| has accused Valve of being anticompetitive. They have a
| variety of plausibly anticompetitive practices and
| accusations.
|
| It's also possible that some gamers did actually get
| money from Valve via arbitration, so they could've been
| found to have acted in an anticompetitive way, separately
| from the lawsuit. I've not been able to find anyone
| specifically saying that they did the arbitration,
| though.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Gabe Newell became a Microsoft millionaire decided to have a
| company who did things his way. Turns out he's quite an ethical
| guy.
| butlike wrote:
| Isn't it kind of a bloodsport to get into the midweek madness
| or seasonal sales? It's like curated playlists in the music
| apps but for games.
|
| Anecdotally I've heard it really does help to get on those
| Steam lists.
| haunter wrote:
| My bigger problem with Valve is their unregulated underage
| gambling platform that they could shutdown in a second but they
| don't because $ $ $
| Shacklz wrote:
| Unlike other corporations, they actually didn't really do all
| that much to make it a monopoly though. It's kind of an organic
| monopoly simply by being better than everything else, by a wide
| margin.
|
| There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the
| platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible
| or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know
| uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in
| discord and similar anyway.
| piyuv wrote:
| The library one amasses is a huge lock-in though, you're
| downplaying it
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I don't see it as lock-in as you don't have to keep buying
| games from Steam - you can just buy games from other places
| if you want and then have multiple libraries.
| mrighele wrote:
| > They're not saints, especially with the games distribution
| platform monopoly they're sitting on top of
|
| They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are
| taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie
| games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing
| that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their
| market share)
| whytevuhuni wrote:
| I believe saints would implement some sort of distributed
| platform that others could interoperate with, by sharing the
| launcher's list of games (e.g. have Epic games automatically
| appear on the list), share the list of friends and
| achievements between platforms, and so on.
|
| Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work
| against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled
| gardens.
|
| Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
|
| Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live
| in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
| piyuv wrote:
| Saints wouldn't have DRM, a-la GOG
| vel0city wrote:
| They profit off getting kids addicted to gambling. Is that not
| evil?
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| Right. There is 1 good thing about Steam (it can be
| summarized to the point of openness), and the rest is evil. I
| don't get the article.
|
| They have no morals with how they make money. No morals in
| politics. They are running a monopoly with a 30% cut.
|
| How is that a "do no evil" company? Because you can install
| an app from Epic? Give me a break...
| Rohansi wrote:
| While I don't disagree with you I also don't think Valve is
| particularly bad in this area. Valve's games are not made for
| younger kids and Steam's parental controls are excellent.
|
| Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they
| target much younger children with less parental control.
| glenstein wrote:
| It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of
| development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or
| so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware
| partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor
| of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam
| OS.
|
| It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly,
| I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge
| Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an
| overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according
| to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines
| than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole
| was a failure.
|
| And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at
| least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication
| in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of
| hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant
| rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on
| Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.
|
| I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular
| distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to
| play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight
| success.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious
| about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| There are rumors about an Xbox handheld
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/2656008/leak-more-
| evidence-o...
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were
| serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.
|
| Or they'd realize that the Deck is successful because it's
| open and bring Steam to the Xbox.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think they're too hung up on GAME PASS [1] to do so, on
| the other hand, GAME PASS might be more fun if you could
| use it on a portable.
|
| [1] Personally I remember how bundling ruined the brands of
| Cable TV which makes GAME PASS seem like a disaster to me,
| but objectively, the Cable TV ecosystem resisted change for
| 30 years and only really broke when Tubi came along, so
| maybe they'd be happy to be the new cable.
| vel0city wrote:
| I use GamePass on a portable all the time. There are many
| portables that support GamePass today. I mostly play
| GamePass games on a Lenovo Legion Go. Sometimes even
| cloud streaming.
| vel0city wrote:
| Far more likely they'll fully support GamePass/Xbox on
| SteamOS
| galkk wrote:
| You already can play xbox remote (that is part of game
| pass) on steam deck. Microsoft even published tutorial
| how to do it on their site:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/xbox-cloud-
| gaming-...
|
| There are also apps that let you do it.
| spookie wrote:
| The next Xbox is a handheld.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer
| Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the
| project as a whole was a failure.
|
| I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the
| steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat
| tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a
| business at the end of the day.
|
| But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is
| apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late
| stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the
| company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to
| the ground.
|
| >a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is
| being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the
| absence of overnight success.
|
| Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't
| know what happened to Microsoft in that time.
| glenstein wrote:
| Breaking the seal and demonstrating the capabilities, and
| getting it into the hands of consumers set the conditions for
| the Steam Deck's success. The Steam Deck exists because the
| Steam Machine existed, and it's in this context that the
| Steam Machine succeeded. You don't need overnight instant
| success for the program itself to succeed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Dark souls exists because Demons Soul existed. But if you
| ask Sony or even FromSoft, they'd never say Demons Soul was
| a success. It just didn't bomb so dosasteroisly as to
| prematurely cancel an entire sub-genre.
|
| You can have disappointments and even failures while Also
| admitting they lead to successes by not giving up. That was
| all I was saying.
| glenstein wrote:
| I don't agree that Fromsoft and Valve were operating from
| the same definition of success in those respective cases.
|
| I also don't think it makes sense to suggest that the
| Fromsoft timeline starts at Dark Souls. My understanding
| is their first game was Kings Field, which had modest
| commercial aspirations compared to the Dark Souls
| franchise.
| sotix wrote:
| It seems you're conflating financial success with all
| types of success. There can be engineering successes and
| artistic successes in this context.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| This is a semantic debate about what "success" is. You're
| both making different points at each other.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Valve should acquire Framework and have them do Steam Machine
| 2.0.
| lreeves wrote:
| Please no, all due props to Valve but they really can't count
| to 3.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Tends to be a lot of Holy Grail fans at Valve one would
| surmise.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I'd much rather a partnership than an acquisition. Valve is
| great, but open, repairable hardware is not their core
| mission. I think Framework needs to stay independent to
| maintain that.
|
| But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own
| already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and
| upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd
| rather there be a greater number of companies all
| independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a
| commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh
| that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for
| us".
| paxys wrote:
| Does that mean it can run Steam games offline and DRM-free?
| INTPenis wrote:
| You can run steam games offline on a regular PC.
|
| But I think you're trying to make a point about Steam DRM.
|
| Someone once said; there are two DRMs that everyone loves,
| Apple and Steam.
|
| And I have to say it's true. I am normally not a proponent of
| DRM, I've been pirating since TURBO 250 tapes on c64, but I do
| love Steam. I love it for what Gabe has done for us gamers on
| Linux.
|
| In my opinion he deserves 30%.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Neither of those DRMs have ever prevented me, the owner, from
| using my content. Ubisoft once locked me out of some Star
| Wars game while I was trying to install it because it kept
| crashing during the install and consumed all of the
| "licenses". I returned the game.
| butlike wrote:
| It's not about the 30%, it's about giving you the ball for
| $3.30 then taking the ball away sometime later saying you can
| no longer play with it and no, there won't be any refunds.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate here but I've had a Steam account
| for well over 15 years now and my library of games has only
| grown.
|
| I am sure there are stories and certain situations where
| people have lost access to games, but I think they're
| fringe cases.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And they are fringe cases with most DRM, since most of
| any of my libraries still exist if I check it.
|
| But people seem so Gung ho about DRM being bad. except
| for Steam.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I still don't love it. DRM is DRM and I've watched enough
| heroes fall from grace to know it's onto a matter of when
| they yank your chain, not if. I will avoid to the best of my
| ability any attempts to retract back products I purchased
| myself.
|
| That's why I wanted to stick to consoles and a physical
| medium. But even those have devolved into what's basically a
| digital download, now with the _disk_ (or cartridge now, with
| Switch 2) being the DRM. The Onion couldn 't write a more
| ironic headline.
|
| Now I'm wondering if all that "virtual sharing" stuff for
| switch 2 cartridges means difficulties with the used market.
|
| >In my opinion he deserves 30%.
|
| Even Gabe doesn't agree, given the cut he gives to AAA
| publishers. I'm not exactly onboard with the idea that the
| richest people get the best tax breaks, even in video game
| world.
|
| A progressive platform cut would be much friendlier to
| smaller devs and put the biggest burdens on the ones likely
| using the most amount of bandwidth. That's how the game
| engines have started to leverage their tooling. And they put
| a lot more work in than a hosting platform
| paxys wrote:
| It's perfectly fine to love Apple and Steam. They are both
| great companies and offer great products. The issue I have is
| in trying to extrapolate that love into labeling them
| pro-"software freedom", which is idiotic. Both these
| companies ship opaque binaries of their storefront and
| products. Their apps/games have restrictive DRM. You cannot
| install/register games without an account and internet
| access. They artifically limit resale/sharing/lending of
| digital goods. They are actively user hostile (such as not
| offering refunds until forced to by courts). Even the Steam
| Deck is full of proprietary blobs which would be illegal to
| revese engineer and reshare. Nothing about the experience is
| FOSS.
|
| Again none of this is inherently bad if your argument is "I
| like the convenience and don't care about the restrictions".
| But don't delude yourself into thinking this is "freedom".
| bigyabai wrote:
| Name literally a single computer that does not ship with
| proprietary blobs while supporting DXVK. Bonus points if
| you can find a wireless networking chipset that isn't from
| 2011 to go along with it.
|
| Your entire comment is splitting some pretty fine hairs,
| but I just don't know how anyone can play the "muh
| firmware" card in 2025. I don't actually know a single
| Linux user or even hardware retailer that ships blobless
| hardware, if that means they aren't pro "software freedom"
| then I guess nobody is. But I think we can define "pro" to
| mean something other than "hardline absolutist" in this
| instance.
| guax wrote:
| The Steam Deck does a good job of running games offline. The
| mix bag will be the online style cash grabs from Ubisoft and EA
| but most work too.
|
| DRM is a thing we have to live with but valve does a decent job
| of making it invisible when it's theirs. The ones that suck the
| most are the aforementioned studios which roll their own on
| top.
| danso wrote:
| You can run your GOG library on Steam Deck even without having
| to change the OS
| mystified5016 wrote:
| You can run _games_ offline and DRM free.
| lawn wrote:
| It does mean that you can install games any way you want, and
| even do things like emulate Switch games.
| a3w wrote:
| And subscription service free is high on my wishlist, too.
|
| I could perhaps live with subscription terms that are still
| variable amount / mount (currently 0) as servers do cost money.
| Even if their quasi-monopoly would allow them to extort us. But
| what needs to be more reliable, is that the ToS I applied to
| when I bought the game should not change afterwards in a one-
| sided proposal to keep access to my game licenses. Which is not
| allowed in our jurisdiction at least, so steam was found non-
| compliant in the EU.
|
| (Back in 2021)
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/ip_21_...
| maelito wrote:
| If only there was a powerful linux phone with convergence. The
| steam deck is not far from that.
| danso wrote:
| Sounds like the Switch 2 might be a bit more powerful and
| similarly priced to the 3-year-old Deck. But even if Switch's
| hardware feature set was substantially better, Steam's much
| cheaper (and more expansive) library is still the killer feature.
| I don't think the Switch 1's Zelda launch title has ever been
| discounted lower than $40 despite being 8 years old. On Steam,
| virtually every top title will be 50% within 2 years, if not 1.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is
| sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.
|
| Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2,
| mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering,
| which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.
| jerf wrote:
| I would agree that the Switch's really big feature at this
| point is that it is where Nintendo games appear, and in that
| family-friendly-but-still-high-quality niche they are still
| worth chasing if you want them.
|
| I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are
| sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on
| Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is
| effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top
| to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one.
| Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one
| company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of
| the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's
| literally _everything else_. In particular, the XBox
| exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life
| support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that
| doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten
| into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam
| as a first-class citizen, for instance.
| keyringlight wrote:
| As far as quality goes, the main things steam looks for [0]
| to release is that it launches on the platforms you say
| it's available for, and that it matches the store page
| you've made for it. Presumably it'd have to be absolutely
| malicious for them to get involved past that
|
| [0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review_process
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Malicious, or to have an anime school and get on the bad
| side of a particular reviewer.
|
| No, I will never forgive the Chaos;Head NOAH . Especially
| since it only got through from blowback as being part of
| the famous Steins gate franchise and dozens of other
| games got quashed later.
| jerf wrote:
| I would submit that in terms of whether a library is "sub
| par" we are generally looking towards the top end rather
| than the bottom.
|
| The Nintendo Switch lowered the bar substantially for
| what it takes to get on that platform, and broadly
| speaking, I support that, I'm not complaining about it.
| lawn wrote:
| > My impression is that the general quality of games on steam
| is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.
|
| An impossibly high bar given that the Zelda games are some of
| the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
| butlike wrote:
| It's not impossible... it happened once already, in 1986
| with the release of Legend of Zelda 1. And it keeps
| happening with every new Nintendo console release where a
| new Zelda comes along.
|
| You can absolutely make a game to the quality of Zelda as
| an indie developer.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Can you really? Maybe, but I don't think it's cost
| effective. It requires a flawless art and tech pipeline,
| alone side masterful game design. You see how Nintendo
| can spend 2 years alone perfecting Mario's Jump and you
| realize the budget for that level of polish is enormous.
|
| Not as enoirmouus as paying a studio in California to
| make a failed GaaS shooter service. But still a large
| step past a AA budget.
|
| I'd say at the bare minimum you need a very solid staff
| of 5 to pull it off though. Hollow knight did it with a
| rough core of 3 devs + composer (and other support, of
| course). The very ambitious Toweers of towers of aghasba
| was reportedly 6 devs IIRC, but that's TBD and might have
| scaled up.
| kuhaku22 wrote:
| Nintendo games have consistently disappointed me with their
| lack of depth in their stories. _Breath of the Wild_ had an
| amazing open world, but the characters came off as two-
| dimensional and the final boss was completely disappointing.
| (there 's something especially uncanny about having a
| protagonist who doesn't utter a word, even if it's meant to
| help players self-insert) _Mario Odyssey_ was even more
| pitiful in how it retread the same surface level cartoonish
| villainy of Bowser kidnapping the princess. Nintendo
| certainly makes games that are fun to play, but as an adult,
| I 've come to expect more from art, and plenty of the games
| on Steam actually respect the capability of their audience to
| not turn off their brains.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Ehh, sounds like it wasn't your genre or mood, not that you
| "need adult games That respect your brain". Do you expect
| Cuphead to have this rich lore or to recreate the feeling
| of playing a Fleischmen-era cartoon?
|
| Tastes will be different and I can respect that. But I feel
| there's no worse kind of criticism than one that is
| berating a game for something it was never targeting to do
| in thr first place. Why lambast a Mario game for it's lack
| of deep characterization instead of saying "I prefer a
| story-heavy game" and picking up the Last of Us?
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > My impression is that the general quality of games on steam
| is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.
|
| My impression is that the general quality of games on the
| Switch (or Switch 2 or eShop) is sub par the quality of, e.g.
| Zelda. This is obviously because Zelda is a landmark title
| and it doesn't make sense to compare it with "the general
| quality" of games on Steam. It would make more sense to
| compare it with the quality of other landmark titles on Steam
| e.g. Baldur's Gate 3.
|
| You can compare the general quality of games on Steam (which
| includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5") with the general
| quality of games on Switch (which includes games like "Hentai
| Waifu 5"), though I'm not sure it is that interesting of a
| comparison, since no one buys the "average" game but what
| they consider to be the best games on the platform.
|
| I'd suspect that any attempt at an "objective" comparison
| (obviously, an impossible task) would land in favour of Steam
| simply because it has basically all of (core) gaming for most
| of history on it. Though obviously such an "objective"
| comparison would be meaningless for something like this where
| literally your subjective opinion should matter the most for
| your choice.
| nothercastle wrote:
| A lot of games need ui redesign for hand held controllers.
| That's often the biggest issue.
| dezzadk wrote:
| Totally. Steam store looks like a god damn aliexpress
| marketplace and is tasteless design.
|
| The Store UI is disgusting and intrusive compared to all
| other competitors who actually have a decent overview and
| design..
|
| You can collect gems, cards and other misleading virtual
| currencies.. Tons of misleading business practises and time-
| consuming bloatware distractions hidden behind that terrible
| UI.
|
| Steam is first and foremost DRM. A game-prison. You don't own
| a single thing. Gamers have totally drunk the kool aid.. They
| forgot back when Steam was bloatware forced on Half-Life and
| Valve games and it was despised for a decade before they
| became complacent little worshippers.
| prophesi wrote:
| People buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, generally.
| It's actually baffling how other AAA game studios release games
| at full price in a buggy state, then are heavily discounted
| months later with enough patches for them to finally be
| playable. I don't like how Nintendo games rarely get decent
| discounts but I understand why they're preserving the image
| that their games are worth the price.
|
| This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good
| amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty
| comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
| globnomulous wrote:
| I wonder whether this kind of discounting is healthy.
|
| It's surely healthy for Valve's bottom line, but it introduces
| an element of unpredictability into pricing, creating an
| inconsistent reinforcement regimen, which is the kind that most
| effectively reinforces a behavior (namely the purchase of
| games).
|
| Discounting also debases the perceived value of something,
| which, in addition, I suspect, to reducing the joy of ownership
| and use, should further encourage consumption.
|
| I find myself more and more bored of video games, and I wonder
| whether this is partly because Steam and Humble Bundle's
| discounting practices have ruined the experience of acquisition
| and ownership, reducing it to a kind of gluttony and buffer-
| style gorging.
|
| I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of
| maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer
| players.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's a trickle down effect for sure. Where indies suffer the
| most. You have games getting away with $70 price tags, but
| your indie game you spent 2+ years on better no cost more
| than 15-20 a pop and better have a 50% launch discount. You
| really can't sustain yourself even as a true solo dev in
| western countries (let alone if you need to commission/hire
| an artist/composer).
|
| And when I say "sustain in western countries" I'm talking the
| bog bottom line of "us federal minimum wage", coming down to
| approx. $15k/year. That's 1000 copies of a $15 game that is
| probably upped to 1800 copies after valve and other's cuts.
| Even that paltry marker is hard just becsuse the market is so
| saturated (and not in a good way).
|
| It's only gonna get worse as a generation that is raised on
| mobile games and game pass settle in. The idea of spending
| money upfront from a game may be lost entirely.
|
| >I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job
| of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to
| offer players.
|
| That was indeed an explicit strategy of Nintendo. Keep a
| premium brand and a price thst reflects that. Sales are rare
| to maintain this idea of an evergreen title that is always
| selling.
| 827a wrote:
| Yeah; the Steam Deck still runs a Zen 2 chip, while handhelds
| like the Ally X are on Zen 4. We'll likely start seeing some
| handheld PCs begin upgrading to Zen 5/Strix Point this year,
| and IMO that may be the point where these devices start
| actually being able to replace desktop gaming PCs for some
| gamers.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAu7L1hezJA
| paradite wrote:
| I might be missing the point of the author, but what's the
| difference between Steam Deck and a normal Windows gaming laptop
| in terms of software freedom?
|
| Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you
| can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2).
|
| I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to
| installing and running your own software. And all of them have
| some sort of security measures that prevent you from running
| arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it
| with some flags.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of "Software
| freedom". It refers more to the process and transparency of the
| software than to the choice. That said, the Steam Deck is just
| a handheld PC. And Valve gives instructions on how to install
| Windows on it should you want to do that.
| https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA...
|
| Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-
| source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The
| Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization
| to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix
| standard userspace environment).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
|
| Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS
| is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of
| their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The
| development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that
| uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed
| with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it
| easier to handle the morass of driver development. They
| upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually
| open source forks of things like Proton
| (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a
| popular one).
| jerf wrote:
| I'd also call out that Valve is probably running the biggest
| managed Linux install base in the world now. They manage the
| OS and update it. If you really want to get in there and root
| the thing, you can; you can install other OSes including
| Windows if you want, it's open, it just defaults to managed.
|
| And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS
| image and the default image ships with the Flatpak
| market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and
| managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are
| managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the
| box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot
| of freedom, and the fences are just advisory.
|
| I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a
| decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux
| desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| You're knocking on Apple's door with that idea. Man, I'd
| love to see it.
| wishfish wrote:
| There's an interesting comparison to ChromeOS here.
| Thinking about managed Linux desktops for consumers.
| SteamOS would possibly be a good, more private alternative
| in the near future if Steam ever released the OS for wide
| use outside of handhelds. Could imagine people buying
| SteamOS laptops for grandparents or kids as an alternative
| to ChromeOS or even iPads.
| lawn wrote:
| You can install Windows on the Steam Deck if you want.
|
| But calling Windows more free than Linux because you can
| virtualize Linux is a noteworthy statement alright.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's the exact argument people make on the Steam deck vs
| Nintendo. "but you can emulate switch games!"
| lawn wrote:
| You can virtiualize Windows on Linux too while you can't
| play Steam Deck games on Switch, so they're not comparable.
| butlike wrote:
| It always briefly crosses my mind for a second when I install
| older games that package some ancient C++ redistributable with
| the installer.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being
| consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales
| environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for
| users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It
| doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your
| games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you
| expect them to in other apps, back buttons work. You can pop open
| multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your
| kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that
| literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the
| Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend
| more time looking at things there than playing.
|
| GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've
| received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've
| bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible
| apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be
| sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed
| exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam
| because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the
| store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game
| which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in
| the app!
|
| Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post
| sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah,
| repeat customers.
|
| EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad
| that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot
| is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it.
| If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of
| games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in
| the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find
| something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not
| in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
| sylens wrote:
| > I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA
| and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the
| terrible apps.
|
| I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU
| last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam
| version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to
| open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Do something more useful with your money like lighting it on
| a bonfire. That flop of a game isn't even worth pirating,
| that's why it came for free.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| The sticky thing that keeps me in the steam platform is the
| software itself: notably, Steam Workshop. I normally source my
| games DRM free but after some experience trying to manage mods
| of heavily modded games like Rimworld I have come to discover
| that the value add of package management via Workshop for the
| exact same price is 100% worth it. Even though I trade DRM for
| it.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Yeah, GoG is my other go-to for games. I'm not a big fan of
| DRM, but I'm OK with DRM that respects me. Valve has never
| abused the DRM or let it get in my way. I can play offline, I
| can use multiple computers, I can share games with my family
| on their computers. All things considered it's pretty
| respectful of the reality of how people want to experience
| and share their content.
| butlike wrote:
| GOG fixed Diablo 1 AND the janky expansion for modern
| computers, so they're alright in my book.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is how I feel as well. I typically buy games on GOG if
| they have it, but if they don't I don't really sweat buying
| it on Steam as they are straightforward about what I'm
| getting. In the case of several games that I really like, I
| bought it on both!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| FWIW RimWorld on steam is DRM free. You can copy it and
| launch it without steam.
| atrus wrote:
| Yeah, people complain about steam DRM, but it's not even
| enforced. Games have to choose to enable steam drm. I'm not
| going to begrudge Valve for having an optional tool.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| yeah valve are scummy on loot boxes, but their steam service is
| top notch. And they're right, since not only they compete with
| publishers or f2p live service games, they also compete with
| pirated service, which can be highly reliable, and free.
|
| Steam is more convenient, reliable, and affordable, so no
| wonder they can compete with piracy
| butlike wrote:
| I just wish the platforms weren't beholden to the publishers.
| To a certain extent, pulling a game from Steam is like pulling
| it off the shelves at big box stores, but the difference is the
| games CAN'T find their way to resale shops; they're gone
| forever.
|
| Story time: I was pretty upset when my original copy of GTA:
| Vice City was intentionally broken, then the "Definitive
| Edition" was released a short time later. Especially in the
| case of GTAIII, they removed the top-down camera so it's not a
| 1:1 flat upgrade. I find it quaint and fun to try and beat that
| game using the top-down camera of GTA1 and 2, so was rather
| disappointed.
| j1elo wrote:
| That's why lots of us are worried about when something happens
| to Gabe, and some black suited C level raven is promoted as CEO
| and starts asking questions like "why don't we push for the
| latest expansion packs? why don't we gate features behind
| subscriptions?" and all that anti-consumer shit that breaks
| with the original spirit of so many products.
| dtech wrote:
| That's unlikely to happen with Valve's ownership structure
| benterix wrote:
| He can sell his share at any moment.
| toxicunderGroov wrote:
| If he has enough, and his kids will have enough he does
| not strike me as a guy that wants more for the sake of
| amassing it, and risk the loss of actual legacy.
| dividefuel wrote:
| He's also in his 60s. What happens to the company when he
| passes away?
| piyuv wrote:
| Lets enjoy the moment while it lasts...
| explorigin wrote:
| RIP Minecraft after Notch.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, it's hard to imagine a person (that I don't
| personally know) who I more want to ensure a very, very long
| and productive life than GabeN. He has done more for us
| Linux/open source people than nearly anyone else I can think
| of besides maybe the Linux kernel team, Red Hat, and Arch,
| Debian and other bigtime contributors.
| Shacklz wrote:
| Steam really is a blessing for gaming. It just works.
|
| The absolute trash that especially ubisoft tries to push on its
| users made me hold off on buying some of their games. It's just
| _that_ bad.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad
| that if you use the back button on your mouse while a
| screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until
| you close it.
|
| That's more a critiques to how software development happens
| today. Its a consequence of decoupling the product ownership
| from the developer, who only implements what's required
| according to the ticket/feature requested by the PO.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that passing full ownership of the
| software to the developers they've hired to be effectively code
| monkeys would work. And neither do I think that the approach of
| having the developers be the owners of the software "scales"
| (teams like that will always be small and have very little
| space for Jr. positions).
|
| It's very illuminating if you look at the average developer
| salary at valve, they're just approaching software development
| differently then Amazon and Epic (and rest of the industry for
| that matter)
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Many of the consumer friendly decisions were a direct result of
| lost lawsuits.
|
| Valve also has unleashed the scum that is lootboxes, paid
| battle passes, paid leveling, nft store (technically not nft,
| but 90% of one).
| Cpoll wrote:
| Crates were in TF2 (and in some MMOs before that), but I
| think you can more readily blame Overwatch for that one. And
| paid levelling was a KMMO staple long before. But I can't
| argue about the DotA2 battle passes, or the expensive
| hats/stat-track weapons.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| While I _know_ that Steam has DRM, it 's never been as onerous
| as other types of DRM.
|
| I also know that Steam DRM isn't that hard to bypass. Generally
| just some patched DLLs. But I've never had a real need to
| bypass it. Steam lets you play offline with no connection. My
| games are, to a first approximation, _mine_ and Valve doesn 't
| need to be informed every minute I'm playing if I so choose.
|
| Gabe's premise is right on. We pirate from Netflix and Epic
| because it's orders of magnitude easier than playing by the
| rules. I buy from Steam because it's easier than piracy.
|
| As a rule, I don't pirate steam games. If it's something I'm
| interested in, it's probably worth my money. I _do_ pirate from
| EA and others because the Sims 4 is _not_ worth $500 in any
| universe. I pirate shows and movies because it 's too much time
| and money to even figure out who has what I want this week.
|
| You beat pirates by making your service more attractive than
| piracy. Steam is a better experience than free, and a better
| experience than all the other paid options. This is how you
| win.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment._
|
| Eh.. It seems very common for Steam users to have libraries of
| thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep
| discounts during sales. The way Steam operates does a great job
| of instilling Fear Of Missing Out, and getting people to buy
| things they never end up using.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| > very common for Steam users to have libraries of thousands
| of purchased games, 99% unplayed
|
| source?
| SXX wrote:
| I not sure about these numbers, but here is article on this
| topic:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/is-the-total-value-
| of...
| Cpoll wrote:
| Some quick googling:
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/is-the-total-value-
| of...
|
| Anecdotally, myself and most of my friends are in this
| boat, with very large "piles of shame." Humble Bundles tend
| to contribute greatly to this.
| lupusreal wrote:
| It's true for nearly all of my gamer friends, and is the
| subject of memes in gamer social circles generally.
|
| https://i.imgflip.com/7uzmif.jpg
|
| https://memes.ucoz.com/_nw/86/80233222.png
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F
| 5...
|
| https://i.imgflip.com/2fcexh.jpg
|
| Search for "steam library memes" and you'll find lots of
| these. Very scientific, I know.
| SXX wrote:
| It's not like this is Steam fault. You can always return
| games you played under 2 hours no questions asked. Some
| people just like to buy stuff they dont need or hoard random
| things, but it's as old as humanity itself
|
| At leastrented digital games on Steam account dont contribute
| to global warming, waste problems and dont use tons of
| electicity to mint some tokens.
|
| I guess only major issue Steam really have to solve is
| ability to inherit these digital purchases if owner has died.
| Their license agreement dont have proper procedure for that.
| vel0city wrote:
| > You can always return games you played under 2 hours no
| questions asked.
|
| Within 14 days.
| SXX wrote:
| 14 days is pretty much standard cool off window for lots
| of services.
|
| If you havent played game at all most likely Steam will
| just accept return in much wider return window especially
| if there some new sale has started making game much
| cheaper or something.
|
| Also if for some reason game was compatible with your
| platform (Linux, Mac) there are cases where Valve
| refunded money years after due to developers breaking
| compatibility.
|
| PS: Yeah in the beginning Valve was certainly forced into
| implementing return policy by authorities, but today
| their return policy is one of the best of all software
| distribution platforms.
| vel0city wrote:
| I don't disagree it's generous compared to alternatives
| and nice it's written into a standard, but it's not the
| "always" alluded to in the above poster's comment. There
| are limits other than just play time.
| debugnik wrote:
| > If you havent played game at all most likely Steam will
| just accept return in much wider return window
|
| I believe late refund requests are forwarded to the
| publisher for them to judge.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| > ability to inherit these digital purchases
|
| They have the (much improved) Family Sharing now, which
| does combat that somewhat. Still not a proper solution.
| lupusreal wrote:
| When I was a kid, this pattern of over-purchasing video
| games was very rare. When you had to go to the store and
| buy a game, it was very uncommon for people to buy a ton of
| games and then never get around to playing most of them.
| Even when the stores had discount bins, people would
| usually buy just a handful at a time and then play them
| until boredom (or frustration) before going back to the
| store. The one exception I can think of is when buying
| those CDs that came packed with dozens of old games from
| years ago, e.g. shovelware, when you hardly even knew what
| you were getting when you got the CD.
|
| Also today, with gaming consoles, Nintendo's platforms, and
| similar, I don't think the pattern of buying lots of games
| and then never playing most of them happens very often.
|
| What I'm saying is this pattern has something to do with
| the way Steam is structured, it's not an intrinsic property
| of game consumers which occurs with any kind of games
| store.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| > thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at
| steep discounts during sales
|
| This is more of a Humble Bundle thing than a Steam issue.
| vel0city wrote:
| > I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I
| plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic
| is just so terrible.
|
| Epic is so terrible, I'll pay them twice for the same game!
|
| And we wonder why the game industry is in such a shit shape...
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I know that some portion of profits from the game, even on
| Steam, will go to them because they funded and published it.
| But after the exclusivity expires I'd expect Remedy
| Entertainment will probably have the standard 70/30 split
| with valve and whatever Epic see from that sale will be a
| smaller percentage. I love Remedy and how they practice their
| craft and art.
|
| Economic semantics aside, yes. I hate Epic so much I'll pay
| them again not to have to use it any longer.
| vel0city wrote:
| Paying them for their tactics aren't going to change their
| decisions, only reinforce them.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Well. It's literally the only game on epic I've paid for.
| And I'll be giving their competition equal dollars. So
| game theory wise it's a wash. They haven't earned me as a
| repeat customer and I do what I can to avoid them.
| zenorogue wrote:
| For Epic, I am using Heroic Games Launcher, I believe it is
| much better than the official Epic app.
| hinkley wrote:
| If I could copy one feature from Steam to the Apple Store it
| would be seasonal sales. And bundle prices. If I could copy two
| features from Steam to the Apple Store...
|
| My friend had to go through huge gyrations to offer a discount
| for upgrades on a productivity app. Your choices seem to mostly
| be either never get paid again by old customers or
| over/undercharge people.
|
| On Steam you can sort it out with a bundle discount.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Steam also did the legwork to adapt to other countries'
| cultures, means and payment systems.
|
| They do regional pricing, including systems which make it
| difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you
| absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do
| local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers
| are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in
| physical stores, and pay for them with cash.
|
| Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially
| Apple's.
| brainzap wrote:
| steamdeck verified is a lie, I bought a steamdeck and tested 20
| games. Lots of problems.
| outcoldman wrote:
| What kills Deck for me are the game launchers.
| have_faith wrote:
| For me it was the lack of portability (it's a chunky beast),
| I just wasn't taking it anywhere because it takes up so much
| space in your bag. By comparison the switch with it's
| disconnecting controllers fits in my electronics bag along
| with a bunch of plugs, chargers and cables and hardly takes
| up any room, and weighs a decent amount less. Looking forward
| to a slimmer and narrower V2 though, if it ever materialises.
| keyringlight wrote:
| My feeling is that deck v2 will only happen around the time
| of next generation consoles (PS6, etc) so they can piggy-
| back off the AMD APU made for it again. Getting a chip as a
| slight variation on a mass-market product is going to be a
| lot easier
| Etheryte wrote:
| I don't own one, so mostly just curious, what are some more
| prominent examples of this?
| groovybits wrote:
| Steam Deck owner since launch here -- I wouldn't say the
| Verified status is a lie, but there have been instances where
| games have received Verified badge status at launch, but
| performed poorly on Deck.
|
| Some popular examples of this;
|
| 1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community
| unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around
| Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on
| Deck.
|
| 2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but
| performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was
| recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to
| change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.
|
| Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too
| vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about
| graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good
| default settings". What does that actually look like when you
| play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when
| evaluating those settings?
|
| Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge
| is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in
| evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve
| and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given
| any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-
| user.
|
| I think the Verification process is a good first cut at
| standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But
| it can definitely be improved.
|
| 1: https://www.steamdeck.com/verified
| nerdjon wrote:
| They really need to do much better about how they communicate
| this to users.
|
| Developers are unable to opt out of the system and Valve will
| just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a
| developer.
|
| Valve needs to set proper expectations of who to be mad at when
| a game breaks on the Steam Deck if the developer themselves
| never pledged support.
|
| Most users don't understand what an OS really is or how a game
| works on the Steam Deck (SteamOS) instead of Windows.
| groovybits wrote:
| > Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero
| input from a developer.
|
| This is a big claim, is there evidence for this? I'm an end-
| user, not a developer, but there are plenty of games in
| Unknown status. I would assume that should be the default,
| not Verified.
|
| I can see an argument that Valve has incentive to have
| flagship games get that Verified badge, but there is also
| precedence for them downgrading popular games after launch.
| For example, Spider-Man 2 recently went from Verified to
| Playable (rightfully so, in my opinion).
| barnabee wrote:
| I have a pretty big Steam library and have had no issues with
| any "verified" game and very few issues even with those that
| are just marked "playable".
|
| What problems have you seen?
| dezzadk wrote:
| this is what happens when you ship experimental software as
| "stable" on a handheld system. could have told you in advance.
| expect game-breaking crashes and bugs sooner or later the more
| you use it.
| accurrent wrote:
| I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a
| commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be
| locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work
| in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller).
| I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than
| bundle the crapware that is windows.
| LightHugger wrote:
| > Some people have criticized that their company culture of
| libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important
| values including equity and inclusion.
|
| To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so
| it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of
| anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking
| care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as
| well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they
| discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some
| misguided quotas.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| It's crazy that, according to people like you, we've always
| been doing merit-based hiring and still the computer workforce
| is disproportionately white and male. Nothing fishy there at
| all.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared
| tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the
| workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in
| exposing tech to potential other audiences.
|
| But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole)
| and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe
| dreams as of now.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| There are factors that affect the education pipeline as
| well. Representation can make it appear as if some groups
| aren't welcome. Read about the Scully effect to see how
| simple representation (in fiction no less!) changed the
| number of women who grew up watching the X-Files who chose
| a field of science. Harassment during education has caused
| candidates to change majors. I've seen this one happen IRL
| to a friend. She ended up pursuing her software dev career
| independently of a college degree because the environment
| was so toxic.
|
| The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help
| with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
| smotched wrote:
| do you find it fishy 88% of the nursing workforce is female?
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I don't want to get into this on this discussion
| because...well. video games. But consider the following: The
| organization and customers benefits from meritocratic hiring of
| the best candidates. But individual hiring managers have biases
| either for specific people (nepotism) or against groups of
| people (bigotry). Those individuals would be acting against the
| best interests of the company and customers whether they act
| consciously or not. A responsible company would adapt hiring
| processes to remove that kind of bias otherwise everyone
| suffers. The company suffers due to lower efficiency and blind
| spots in their points of view. Customers suffer due to worse
| output by the company. Some individual candidates suffer by
| being denied opportunities based on attributes they have no
| control over (gender, race, physical appearance) instead of the
| merits of their education, experience, and talents.
|
| There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them
| all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least
| not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to
| the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for
| most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was
| and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
| butlike wrote:
| The flat structure deadlocks projects and adds downward
| pressure to not take on ambitious ones (Half-Life 3?) as it
| requires massive-scale politicking.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Sounds like you're operating off of old knowledge from the
| Half-Life Alyx developer's commentary. They specifically
| changed their internal processes because of those issues.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| If only gaben could live forever... It'll be a dark day for
| gaming when he's gone and valve gets bought out by MS or goes
| public.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| It will be. The best case might be valve turns into some form
| of co-op, it might keep some of that culture going.
| jerf wrote:
| I have a first-gen Switch, still in active rotation. My kids are
| asking me why we don't hack it. My answer has been, what does a
| hacked Switch do that my Steam Deck doesn't already do, without
| hacking? I mean, if you're going to sail the seven seas and yo-
| ho-ho, not that I've been encouraging that, the answer isn't even
| "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too! And
| at least we can't accidentally hook the Switch up to the network
| and get it banned if it isn't hacked.
| butlike wrote:
| Could be a fun family project to hack the Switch
| haunter wrote:
| >the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck
| does that better too
|
| What about motion control games like Switch Sports?
| jerf wrote:
| I don't have any personal experience running Switch games on
| the Steam Deck, but I do have experience trying to use the
| Switch Pro controllers. I think they may work fine for some
| people now, but I have never been able to have them have a
| stable wireless connection. But when the connection _was_
| established, the accelerometers worked fine. (I gave up and
| just bought some XBox controllers.)
|
| I'm sure the emulators accept the Steam Deck's own
| accelerometer inputs for when you're in a non-detached mode,
| and tilting the screen to aim.
|
| The super-mega-motion control games might not work, but part
| of what I mean by "works better" is that the Steam Deck can
| generally emulate with more power than the Switch itself,
| e.g., you can get a Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom
| setup with a better framerate than the switch itself, so,
| depends on what you want more. I don't have a lot of motion
| control games.
| ferbivore wrote:
| Is this really the case? Every video I've seen about Switch
| emulation on the Deck shows stutter, low framerates, audio
| glitches, etc. in most games.
|
| For ToTK in particular, this video suggests it'll barely
| hit ~30FPS on the Deck under Yuzu:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afetsBdQFyc
|
| Whereas on a modded Switch you can run it at ~60FPS:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Z6W_AUNY0
|
| There are other more recent videos backing this up and
| showing that the game has far more frequent stutters than
| on the Switch.
|
| Anyway, the point is, I wouldn't dismiss sticking a picofly
| into your Switch as pointless. Even if you have no desire
| to inflict some Meta-style "fair use" on videogame
| publishers, it's still worth doing for perks like sys-clk,
| RetroArch, sm64nx and 2s2h.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| While not a Switch, I use Wiimotes with motion accelerometer
| + gyro (MotionPlus) with my Steam Deck & Dolphin just fine.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Local multiplayer on steam is borderline unusable.
|
| A software engineer can (temporarily) get it working after
| hours of diagnosis.
|
| Compare that to the switch.
| jerf wrote:
| "Local multiplayer on Steam" has no referent, because Steam
| does not do local multiplayer at all. It's all up to the
| game. I've played plenty of games that way, Steam and the
| Steam Deck add no particular problem with it.
|
| While I wouldn't pin this on Steam _qua_ Steam as a program,
| it _is_ a fair complaint about the ecosystem. I have some
| games that are as flexible as the Switch about being docked.
| I have some games that can be docked but can 't handle any
| resolution changes. I have some games you just plain can't
| switch. I have some games that you can switch from using the
| physical Steam Deck controls to an Xbox controller
| seamlessly, complete with the in-game hint graphics changing
| to match the controller in use. I have some games that have
| to be restarted to pick up a new controller. At least a few
| months ago I had one particular combination of games that if
| I played them in sequence would somehow permanently render
| XBox controllers non-functional until I rebooted the Steam
| Deck, though that is certainly an exception.
|
| The Switch does handle the Switch-ing in the Switch name
| better than the Steam Deck, and it is a structural advantage
| that Valve will have a hard time addressing in a practical
| way. That said, my family does use the Steam Deck as a _de
| facto_ Switch 1.5, as a thing that is used fairly evenly
| between "docked" and "in hand", and it is functional enough
| to work, even if it is undeniably not as slick.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Hmm, the headline here is quite different to the post.
| craftkiller wrote:
| I purchased a steam deck when they first came out specifically to
| financially support Valve's Linux efforts and I haven't regretted
| that purchase for a second. In the past year I had a couple of
| days where my laptop was not working. I got out my steam deck,
| plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing
| happened (after installing some software of course, like emacs).
| I've re-purchased games that I own on consoles just to get the PC
| versions to de-couple my games from hardware, so now I'll be able
| to run Flower on powerful beasts, portable handhelds, and
| computers that haven't been invented yet whereas before it was
| stuck on a loud aging ps3.
|
| My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games.
| I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing
| machine just to be able to run their software when I already have
| a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead
| to more e-waste and wasted closet space.
|
| Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed
| adult, I _want_ to give you money for your games. Release your
| games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with
| more e-waste.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got
| back to work like nothing happened_
|
| Same here, I already had a keyboard and mouse plugged into it
| and it served excellently until the replacement part for my
| daily driver arrived.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| You know this already but the reason nintendo doesnt release
| their games on other systems is so you have to buy the system.
|
| I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it
| if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I
| should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo
| device if they released their games on other system. So they
| likely never will.
|
| It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a
| game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or
| android.
| tormeh wrote:
| You also probably know this, but they don't really care about
| the console per se. What you buying the console means is that
| Nintendo gets to stand on the bridge between your console and
| game developers and demand 30% or whatever it is.
|
| Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the
| first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
| thih9 wrote:
| How good is platform support - can I install e.g. Diablo 3 and
| have the thumbsticks control the character and not a virtual
| mouse? Or would I need to remap the input myself?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| It varies by game - if the devs created a default control
| scheme, the Deck will load that by default and you're good to
| go. (The green check mark means that Valve verified this
| behavior, as well as other things.) And if not, the Deck UI
| makes it pretty easy to create your own mappings and share
| them, or download "community layouts".
|
| You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big
| picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the
| same UI which the Deck uses.
| thih9 wrote:
| I was going to check that and I realized i can't find diablo
| 3 on steam. I know I could install it myself through some
| other online store. Still, I wish there were cartridges that
| "just worked"; consoles (including today's Nintendo) got that
| part right IMO.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Steam's Input system is great, and many people will launch non-
| Steam games through Steam specifically for the controller
| mapping. Any game with controller support (console) works
| flawlessly with the Deck, or any PC using a controller. I don't
| think I've come across a game that doesn't work out of the box.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| It's one of the best devices I've ever bought.
|
| I've used it for all sorts of stuff from gaming on flights, to
| local multiplayer, to controlling a robot car, to watching
| YouTube with adblocking, etc.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| > According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified
| Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered
| playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games
| that can be run on Linux in some way.
|
| Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't
| reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With
| desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on
| any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| That's an editorialized title ("The Steam Deck is software-
| freedom friendly") and subtly different than what the article
| actually states. I don't think Steam Deck was made particularly
| software-freedom friendly. I do think that it managed to not be
| software-freedom unfriendly, and that's because unlike other
| vendors Valve did not care to make it so. It's a subtle, yet non-
| negligible difference that leads to different outcomes.
| dezzadk wrote:
| > The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn't because of
| it's great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have
| better battery life. It's not because of its great performance. I
| don't usually play AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
|
| First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people
| who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games,
| they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
|
| Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or
| Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam.
| What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack
| compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from
| a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
|
| Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project
| before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the
| limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to
| forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and
| disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades.
|
| Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming
| the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see
| the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being
| cancelled more than ever.
|
| Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts
| me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would
| try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing
| myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds.
| Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
|
| Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have
| zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated
| Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with
| control maps, settings before playing.
|
| My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I
| want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining
| another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my
| time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
|
| Native Linux ports matters!
| bigyabai wrote:
| > the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit
| to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine
| has put in over several decades
|
| You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back
| then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve
| and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK,
| without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux
| at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would
| not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
|
| There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments
| reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing
| required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's
| importance.
|
| > Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is
| becoming the norm..
|
| Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd
| much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native
| ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
|
| > to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing
| myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
|
| I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power
| consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that
| modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for
| shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs
| nowadays too.
| dezzadk wrote:
| >There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments
| reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing
| required to get games running, and I think you've oversold
| it's importance.
|
| Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because
| Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I
| sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming
| to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around the Steamdeck
| community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old
| project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're
| exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't use Brave, I'm pretty clued-in to Eich's personal
| dysfunctions. Contextually, this is more like you saying
| that Chrome users are ignoring the real innovations that
| Google leverages like KHTML. It's certainly an important
| element of the program, but it's also one of the oldest,
| least-complex and easiest to replace. The heritage Chrome
| owes to KHTML is basically nothing at this point, the same
| really goes for Proton too if you've seen what the repo
| looks like today.
|
| I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as
| technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and
| complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to
| get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-
| shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a
| monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest
| struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the
| performance deficit still persists:
| https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-
| in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...
|
| > You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to
| shine on a fork
|
| Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a
| "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not
| really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or
| Proton users.
| Fwirt wrote:
| The selling point of a Steam Deck is that it is a PC console. One
| of the problems with the PC gaming market is that even though in
| theory all PCs are "compatible", the reality for game developers
| is very different. Different PCs have subtly (or not so subtly)
| incompatible software and hardware, and it's up to OS developers
| to try to maintain some semblance of compatibility, and game
| developers to ensure that their product runs on as many
| configurations as possible.
|
| The problem is that there is a large market segment that would
| enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than
| on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another
| "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long
| history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his
| Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop
| that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying
| another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't
| currently access doesn't make sense.
|
| The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience
| for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and
| software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can
| play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which
| games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for
| controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam
| Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't
| have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping
| controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues
| just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form
| factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game
| Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be
| docked and played like a regular console. The same combination
| that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
|
| People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane
| hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in
| disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to
| a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At
| present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
| benoror wrote:
| > I had no issues installing Epic Games
|
| Except Fortnite =(
| skeptrune wrote:
| I don't think a product being freedom friendly is going to make
| it a success in and of itself, but seeing one always makes me
| smile and that's a win in my book.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-03 23:02 UTC)