[HN Gopher] Valve reveals it's the architect behind a push to br...
___________________________________________________________________
Valve reveals it's the architect behind a push to bring Windows
games to Arm
https://archive.is/AKhTr
Author : evolve2k
Score : 277 points
Date : 2025-12-02 20:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Would love to see it on MacOS X -- Steam works great on my Mac
| Mini for the games it supports, would be great to see everything
| run on it.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Are you expecting to run Windows 11 ARM version on your Mac
| Mini directly, or within Parallels?
| jitl wrote:
| You'd run FEX with WINE/Proton, no windows needed. If you did
| use a VM, I'd think it would be a Linux VM. But, Linux VM on
| macOS could already use Apple's Rosetta2 for x86_64-to-arm64
| translation.
|
| Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with
| Apple's WINE "game porting toolkit" direct with Rosetta2.
| Worth a Google.
|
| EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac
| using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frit
| yet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
| cptcobalt wrote:
| I think it's a pretty reasonable wish for more macOS + Apple
| Silicon support of games, including more native FEX & Proton
| ARM support within the steam client. (We're lucky Steam
| works, it's a better games client than the Mac App Store
| dreams to be, but that's also not saying much either.)
| stetrain wrote:
| I think they're wishing for something like the Proton/Fex
| combination for running x86 Windows games on ARM Macs, like
| they already do for Linux.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Apple Silicon has no UEFI support except as provided by
| Asahi, so that would be needed at a minimum to boot Windows
| 11 natively. Then there's the whole issue of having native
| Windows drivers for the Apple Silicon-specific hardware.
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm not sure what FEX could offer on macOS that Rosetta 2
| doesn't already, with better performance thanks to Apple
| Silicon magic.
|
| Running x86 code on ARM macOS is the most solved part of the
| stack, if anything needs work it's the API translation layers.
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| Rosetta 2 is going to be EOL'd within the next few years. A
| more permanent solution would certainly be welcome.
| contact9879 wrote:
| i'm not sure how end-of-life it will actually be because
| rosetta is used in apple/container and seems to be a large
| part of the virtualization stuff apple's built in the last
| few years
| yakaccount4 wrote:
| I would imagine they would disable the user-facing "load
| x86_64 Mach-O's seamlessly" and other loader magic, and
| keep around the core for such things.
| jsheard wrote:
| AIUI they intend to retire support for x86 macOS apps in a
| few years, but Rosetta will remain as a low-level component
| so that things like Crossover and Parallels can continue to
| work. Maybe not forever, but there's no immediate threat of
| it being EOL'ed.
|
| _> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple
| silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the
| next two major macOS releases - through macOS 27 - as a
| general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers
| complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this
| timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality
| aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that
| rely on Intel-based frameworks._
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/10/apple-to-phase-out-
| rose...
| bigyabai wrote:
| Yeah, that's not very reassuring.
|
| You guys remember when you bought a computer and could
| run the software you wanted, independent of political
| motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes
| me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my
| professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to
| provide high-quality long term support only works if
| Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings
| that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and
| other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Aren't most Mac issues now around Metal vs OpenGL and
| DirectX?
| stetrain wrote:
| Yep. I know Apple has little motivation to support such a
| project but it would be great to see them work with Valve on
| this. Having the majority of Steam games "just work" on modern
| Macs, like they do on the Steam Deck, would be fantastic.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I think it's more than "little motivation" if we're being
| honest. Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to
| create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably)
| cut them out. Their very clever approach has been a full end-
| run around the OS by using Proton, which I'm sure genuinely
| thrilled Apple... as long as Valve is only doing that to MS.
|
| Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same
| to them?
| stetrain wrote:
| Yes, that is what I was alluding to.
|
| But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for
| them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who
| might buy a Mac.
|
| Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App
| Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game
| revenue, I don't think they have that much to lose.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Especially looking at Apples recent gaming history.
|
| When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to
| macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app
| store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to
| call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam,
| etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
|
| That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can
| get their 30% cut.
|
| I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| App stores for desktop computers have pretty consistently
| failed except for Steam.
|
| I don't think I've installed anything from the App store
| on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of
| images into my Applications folder.
|
| The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My
| corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows
| store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do
| almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't
| touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss
| WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all
| sorts of things for work and just install them the way we
| did before there was Windows 8.
|
| In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the
| metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly
| even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I
| really wanted from it was the application to use my
| scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious
| that it was possible to rebuild that database because it
| got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month
| updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said
| I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring
| all the applications that I _actually_ use just so I can
| use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have
| their own installer /updater that works like a normal
| Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I
| built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the
| store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2
| works and it does.
|
| Microsoft _dreams_ that you might buy games from the
| Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If
| Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you
| know it would just force them to write off the Activision
| acquisition earlier rather than later.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Not sure if that counts, but homebrews cask is some kind
| of appstore. Yes, command line based, but I can install
| closed-source software using "brew install --cask
| <software-name>"
| alemanek wrote:
| Apples biggest weakness is games. But it has a pretty large
| install base when compared to Linux (not counting phones or
| servers here).Seems like a win/win. Apple gets to address
| their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
|
| I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for
| the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam
| Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that
| effort. Or at the very least distract from their main
| focus.
| commakozzi wrote:
| Games are not a weakness for Apple. They have all the
| gaming revenue they seem to care about with mobile. They
| just don't have proper/immediate motivation to apply that
| effort to desktop. I'm not sure i even care anymore. I'm
| a valve fanboi at this point, until Gabe leaves and they
| go corporate.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a
| large target market.
|
| I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing
| their weaknesses, _especially_ a solution as competent
| and well-funded as Steam.
|
| If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents
| them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and
| likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched?
| IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at
| Apple.
| alemanek wrote:
| That's a fair point. I don't think they care about steam
| competing on the desktop but mobile is another ballgame
| entirely.
| franczesko wrote:
| >Valve gets a large target market
|
| They don't need Apple for that. People who game already
| game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I
| wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones
| with their own at some point
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the
| same to them?
|
| apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform;
| edge cases, at best
|
| mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the
| day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and
| foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
| clhodapp wrote:
| Apple already made it, it's just that it targets developers
| rather than end users:
| https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
| concinds wrote:
| Apple leadership cares more about "games on the Mac App Store
| built for Metal on a Mac" than it cares about "games on the
| Mac". This won't change until leadership changes.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| It does not matter what Apple wants if Steam ships their
| own compatibility layer.
| concinds wrote:
| Valve is all-in on Linux and their own hardware. They
| have no reason to invest tons into a platform with an
| uncooperative vendor who culturally DGAF about gaming.
| Why run from Windows only to jump into a more hostile
| ecosystem? You can still run 32-bit x86 games on Windows
| ARM, you know.
| mft_ wrote:
| > They have no reason to invest tons into a platform
|
| Maybe not 'tons', but they've got a solid reason to
| consider some investment: additional sales from millions
| of Mac users able to access a huge library of games they
| were previously denied.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Are you looking for Crossover? It's a bit annoying to not run
| Steam natively (no cmd+H to hide, etc) but it's got a lot of
| support. Performance is decent on my M2 mini, and even cross-
| platform stuff like Baldurs Gate 3 is comparable performance to
| native.
|
| Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of
| 32bit support has good support.
| danaris wrote:
| Sadly, that's not true--for instance, I was trying to run the
| Shadowrun Returns series the other day, and while it
| launches, it will hang indefinitely when you try to actually
| start a game. (M4 Max)
|
| I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of
| Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
| hamdingers wrote:
| CodeWeavers, the developers of Crossover, also do most of the
| development on proton under contract for Valve.
|
| This is speculation but I suspect there's something in that
| contract that prevents Valve from competing with Crossover on
| MacOS.
| coldpie wrote:
| Nah, nothing like that. We explored shipping Proton for
| macOS early on, but decided it wasn't where we wanted to
| spend our time, so we removed it[1] to focus on Linux.
| There's only so many hours in the day, and supporting two
| platforms is a _lot_ more work than one.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a8412044
| 9d817...
| bertili wrote:
| Unfortunately, this will not happen. Even if they have it all
| working:
|
| Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome,
| especially because it really is. Running x86 games or
| compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that
| $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming
| laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| If apple wanted to show that they have good hardware they
| wouldn't gimp the iPad pro with iOS. They really don't care.
| wiether wrote:
| Currently, someone interested in an iPad and needing the
| power of a MB, will have to buy both.
|
| If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would
| only have to buy an iPad.
|
| And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I
| would worry that removing the iPad limitations would
| increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even
| more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news
| to me.
| commakozzi wrote:
| I used to understand/agree with this point, but over the
| past few years i've transitioned to my ipad pro for
| mobile usage and it has become my daily driver for mobile
| computing. When i need macos for anything, i typically
| will use Jump to connect and do something real quick, but
| that's rare. I'm starting to not understand why i
| wouldn't just want an ipad pro running a touch friendly
| (and i mean it would have to be VERY touch friendly)
| version of macos. again, i would have normally agreed
| with you, but that line is starting to blur for me...
| tasoeur wrote:
| The last time I can remember a collaboration between Valve and
| Apple was for the SteamVR support on macOS back in 2016. Sadly
| it fell apart a year(-ish) after that. But... one can dream!
| babypuncher wrote:
| I wonder if Apple's GPT (Game Porting Toolkit) could added to
| the macOS Steam client as a compatibility tool, like Proton is
| in the Linux client.
| chuckadams wrote:
| GPTK is mostly a bunch of developer tools for converting to
| Metal, and the closest it gets to anything like Proton is an
| "evaluation environment" that is nothing close to Proton's
| performance. Proton is mostly Wine, and Wine on macOS uses
| MoltenVK, so it's probably easier to just port Proton.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Direct3D -> Vulkan -> Metal is quite the translation layer
| sandwich, I wonder if that would have a meaningful impact
| on performance
| chuckadams wrote:
| The D3D -> VK layer actually seems to speed things up, so
| maybe we'll just end up back where we started :)
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Apple's GPTK only supports D3D12 -> Metal. In addition, it's
| ambiguous if 3rd parties can distribute the D3DMetal dylib,
| as there's no license.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Main issue is the lack of Vulkan support on macOS. Currently,
| solutions like MoltenVK have to be developed to add Vulkan
| support, which isn't as clean as just supporting it.
|
| For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK
| with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a
| lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant
| and/or stable.
| nomel wrote:
| No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering
| pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan
| support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole
| problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering,
| like all the other mainstream GPUs use.
| marmarama wrote:
| Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU
| in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one.
|
| There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already,
| used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's
| GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially
| hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its
| own reasons, but they're not really technical.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| The entire reason vulkan didn't ship with dynamic rendering
| and instead had its entire renderpass system is because it
| was to support tile based rendering.
| Terretta wrote:
| It would be neat if Valve would fund having Steam Client run on
| Apple Silicon without Rosetta 2 so arm games like Baldur's Gate
| 3 can be fully supported.
| willis936 wrote:
| Valve employed Alyssa Rosenzweig while she developed the
| graphics stack for asahi linux. That's a very simple statement
| that masks the size of the achievement and its impact on the
| world. No, we haven't entered a golden era of gaming on macs,
| but the world has been shown the way. And no, the software
| challenges are not insurmountable.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| But why? Valve is doing this because they don't want to have
| the OS vendor exert total control over them and the gaming
| industry.
|
| Apple is a terrible choice by that metric.
| baq wrote:
| This is news how exactly since the announcement of arm Steam
| Frame?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Did they at the same time announced that they had been funding
| open source ARM compatibility for over a decade? Maybe it was
| mentioned somewhere, but the article had new details for me at
| least, even if I consider myself somewhat up-to-date generally.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Agreed. I saw the Steam Frame announcement, and plan to get
| one as soon as it's available.
|
| I saw the mention of Fex then too, but absolutely nowhere,
| before now have I seen any information that they'd been
| working on this for the best part of a decade.
| kidfiji wrote:
| I think it's more revealing of how they've been playing the
| long game
| jchw wrote:
| > and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work
| through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in
| the future.
|
| Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it
| isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work
| verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton
| support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > though not all developers elect to enable it.
|
| Looking at you Rust.
|
| Edit:
|
| And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection
| supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
|
| https://areweanticheatyet.com/
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| First i thought you meant the video game Rust.
|
| Then I saw the arewe...yet url and thought you meant Rust the
| programming language
|
| Then I visited the arewe...yet link and realized it was the
| Rust game you meant after all
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I know what you mean, sometimes I google Rust specific
| things (the coding language) and get Rust the game.
| spullara wrote:
| as a person that plays rust and writes rust I feel this
| all the time
| wincy wrote:
| For awhile googling "Swift" was like that with Taylor
| Swift results instead of the programming language.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Likely a case where Google figured out which one you
| meant through the telemetry of what you clicked on and
| how you refined your search, now that personalization is
| automatic. In my case, I get four regular results, which
| are the financial standard, the programming language, the
| wikipedia page for the programming language, and an ISP;
| then I get a "top stories" block that is all about the
| singer.
|
| More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where
| either one could be valid.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| /r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly
| (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for
| /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely
| don't know how people manage to get as far as posting
| without noticing where they are.
| robrtsql wrote:
| It's probably because the "create a Reddit post" form
| doesn't require you to even visit the subreddit you are
| posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the
| subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it
| includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but
| apparently many aren't seeing that.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| "Banner blindness" applies to the rules/sidebar. The user
| sees it, notices it's not what they're looking to
| interact with, and ignores it. The same thing happens for
| modal dialogues where the user will click whatever button
| makes the message go away without bothering to read the
| message, only the button text.
| erikerikson wrote:
| It is hard to perceive that which you are not aware
| exists even with obvious evidence in your face
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's not a great explanation when there's, you know,
| rust the material.
| jsheard wrote:
| > I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
|
| It's because the Linux versions of those anti-cheats are
| significantly weaker than their Windows counterparts.
| tapoxi wrote:
| It's telling that Valve uses a user space anti-cheat (VAC)
| for Counter-Strike 2, but the competitive community
| overwhelmingly rejects that and ops to use a third-party
| Windows-only kernel mode anti-cheat (FACEIT).
| jsheard wrote:
| I think even the "Major" tournaments that are officially
| sanctioned and sponsored by Valve, though organized by
| third parties, usually run on FACEIT or similar.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Eh, some employers also have root for your work PC,
| that's different from asking to install a rootkit on your
| personal PC.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Cheating in CS2 is rampant and VAC2 seems to be just
| about useless.
|
| FACEIT is significantly more effective.
| Draiken wrote:
| I mean, people are dumb.
|
| Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're
| actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating
| so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the
| FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those
| are correct.
|
| Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but
| there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or
| later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel
| spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there
| (which is not as common as people make it to be on high
| trust factor).
|
| You think tournament organizers or pro players know the
| first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing
| just like everybody else.
| enneff wrote:
| The marketing works because online games get destroyed by
| cheats. Losing in online games can be full of "feel bad"
| moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy
| tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won
| because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit.
|
| I've seen so many players saying "look you can own my
| entire pc just please eliminate the cheating."
|
| It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing
| instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder
| for people to get into the games in the first place
| though so I don't know if developers would really want to
| go that way.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Wow, what a cool site. Just learned that Hunt: Showdown is
| supported in Linux. And it wasn't the first time I checked.
| Will love to give it a try.
| ZiiS wrote:
| It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it
| does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-
| cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of
| open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if
| you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well
| documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the
| graphics are running through easier to understand translation
| layers rather than signed blobs.
| reactordev wrote:
| These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely
| a remote control system that they can send instructions to
| look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always
| exist in online games.
|
| You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You
| can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a
| known set operation, what you can't do is prevent all
| cheating. There's device layer, driver layer, MITM,
| emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
|
| The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban
| hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side
| prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were
| indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is
| great for seeing those in action as well!)
| Goronmon wrote:
| _Cheating still exists and will always exist in online
| games._
|
| Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the
| experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you
| just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an
| option too.
| reactordev wrote:
| Other options exist but it's not an option for these
| real-time games like FPS's. I get it.
|
| If you don't need real-time packets and can deal with the
| old school architecture of pulses, there's things you can
| do on the network to ensure security.
|
| You do this too on real-time UDP it's just a bit
| trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is
| really the only options thus far.
|
| But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the
| layers of kernel integration these malware have
| developed.
| cyberax wrote:
| > But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the
| layers of kernel integration these malware have
| developed.
|
| Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that
| uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also
| purely external cheating devices that use video capture
| and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
| jsheard wrote:
| > The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to
| spy on the game state.
|
| And the SOTA anti-cheats now use IOMMU shenanigans to
| keep DMA devices from seeing the game state. The arms
| race continues.
| strbean wrote:
| You'll never stop the arms race, but requiring
| specialized hardware to cheat is as close as you'll get
| to a decisive victory against cheats.
|
| The vast majority of cheaters in most games are not
| sophisticated users. Ease of access and use is the
| biggest issue.
| plufz wrote:
| That sounds like it does prevent cheating? But maybe
| doesn't prevent ALL cheats. Or do you mean they work so
| poorly that it doesn't make any difference at all?
| reactordev wrote:
| I mean it works by _someone_ saying _look for
| DotaCheat4.exe_ and it searches for it. That's basically
| it. Also if your engine has the ability to be hooked into
| (ahem, gta) it will detect that a process has been
| attached. It may do some memory scanning if they
| implemented the allocator from the sdk. What I'm saying
| is, it's a crap shoot out there whether the devs did or
| not. Executives use it as a blanket as to not get sued.
| "We have anti-cheat". They can claim it was
| "circumvented" or whatever. They are all garbage.
| BattleEye, EasyAntiCheat, Vanguard. If you don't know,
| here LL giving a run down.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VtHlMTc8lR4&t=49s
| viraptor wrote:
| It makes cheating harder and the timeline to a cheat
| product gets longer than the iteration speed of
| anticheat. Kind of like fancy locks don't prevent break
| ins, just take longer to pick and require more
| specialised tools.
| nialv7 wrote:
| As they say, locks only stop honest people.
| babypuncher wrote:
| > These things do not prevent cheating at all.
|
| Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise
| the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.
|
| I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop
| _all_ crime so you may as well not even try "
| reactordev wrote:
| Ok, they prevent known cheats that the company has found
| online behind some subscription site run in the basement
| in Jersey. True. They do raise the bar, but they aren't
| the barrier.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They do prevent some cheating methods on Window, like
| blocking other processes from reading/writing game process
| memory.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > These things do not prevent cheating at all.
|
| I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't
| prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people
| still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.
|
| Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it
| doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in
| games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to
| play those games because of it. There is a benefit to
| making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it
| impossible.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I don't think that analogy holds because the environment
| isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.
|
| The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot
| of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now
| laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its
| logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level
| anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient,
| unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, the act of
| bypassing kernel-level anti-cheat will become
| commoditized just like every other anti-cheat prior.
| jchw wrote:
| Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting
| cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are
| familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually
| cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected
| is the challenge.
|
| Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from
| useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to
| monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really
| do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but
| usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to
| ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without
| going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the
| latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with,
| which to be fair was circa 2016, it is _still_ possible to
| work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows
| API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be
| somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of
| being much harder to detect obviously.)
|
| The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see
| most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you
| can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's
| be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant
| anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to
| detect cheats.
|
| For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But
| just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people
| from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel
| drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure
| Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for
| anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to
| support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that
| forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably
| all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a
| limited shelf life anyways.
| buildbot wrote:
| Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for
| Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's
| happening!
|
| I don't hate the lack of cheating compared to older
| Battlefield games if I am going to be honest.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for
| Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's
| happening!
|
| I'm curious, does anyone know _how_ exactly they check
| for this? How was it actually made unspoofable?
| jsheard wrote:
| They also require TPM, which I think facilitates remote
| attestation for secure boot.
| vablings wrote:
| The basic explanation is that it prevents binaries that
| are not signed by default from being loaded during the
| boot process. It only restricts the booting process in
| the uefi stage. If an executable has been modified, then
| it will not load due to secure boot. Technically there is
| nothing stopping you from modifying say winload.efi and
| signing it with your own key then adding that key to your
| bios keystore so that it will pass secure boot checks and
| still use secure boot.
|
| I think the biggest thing is that the anticheat devs are
| using Microsoft's CA to check if your efi executable was
| signed by Microsoft. If that was the case then its all
| good and you are allowed to play the game you paid money
| for.
|
| I haven't tested a self-signed secure boot for
| battlefield 6, I know some games literally do not care if
| you signed your own stuff, only if secure boot is
| actually enabled
|
| edit: Someone else confirmed they require TPM to be
| enabled too meaning yeah, they are using remote
| attestation to verify the validity of the signed binary
| kbolino wrote:
| Disclaimer: This is only an educated guess based upon
| public info. Also, it's impossible to make something
| truly unspoofable, but it isn't that hard to raise the
| bar for spoofing pretty high.
|
| There are two additional concepts built upon the TPM and
| Secure Boot that matter here, known as Trusted Boot [1,2]
| and Remote Attestation [2].
|
| Importantly, every TPM has an Endorsement Key (EK) built
| into it, which is really an asymmetric keypair, and the
| private key cannot be extracted through any normal means.
| The EK is accompanied by a certificate, which is signed
| by the hardware manufacturer and identifies the TPM
| model. The major manufacturers publish their certificate
| authorities [3].
|
| So you can get the TPM to digitally sign a difficult-to-
| forge, time-stamped statement using its EK. Providing
| this statement along with the TPM's EK certificate on
| demand attests to a remote party that the system
| currently has a valid TPM and that the boot process
| wasn't tampered with.
|
| Common spoofing techniques get defeated in various ways:
|
| - Stale attestations will fail a simple timestamp check
|
| - Forged attestations will have invalid signatures
|
| - A fake TPM will not have a valid EK certificate, or its
| EK certificate will be self-signed, or its EK certificate
| will not have a widely recognized issuer
|
| - Trusted Boot will generally expose the presence of
| obvious defeat mechanisms like virtualization and
| unsigned drivers
|
| - DMA attacks can be thwarted by an IOMMU, the
| existence/lack of which can be exposed through Trusted
| Boot data as well
|
| - If someone manages to extract an EK but shares it
| online, it will be obvious when it gets reused by
| multiple users
|
| - If someone finds a vulnerability in a TPM model and
| shares it online, the model can be blacklisted
|
| Even so, I can still think of an avenue of attack, which
| is to proxy RA requests to a different, uncompromised
| system's TPM. The tricky parts are figuring out how to
| intercept these requests on the compromised system, how
| to obtain them from the uncompromised system without
| running any suspicious software, and knowing what other
| details to spoof that might be obtained through other
| means but which would contradict the TPM's statement.
|
| [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/security/operating...
|
| [2]: https://docs.system-
| transparency.org/st-1.3.0/docs/selected-...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Modul
| e#Endors...
| lukan wrote:
| Lack of cheating in BF6?
|
| Afaik there have been wallhacks and aimbots since the
| open beta.
| buildbot wrote:
| Perhaps, I have yet to experience anything like what the
| older games had though.
|
| It might just be the game too - I do think the auto aim
| is a bit high because I feel like I make aimbot like
| shots from time to time. And depending on the mode BF6
| _wall hacks for you_ if there are players in an area
| outside of where they are supposed to be defending. I was
| pretty surprised to see a little red floating person
| overlay behind a wall.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Anticheat devs could REALLY benefit by having some data
| scientists involved.
|
| Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared)
| with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an
| automatic ban.
|
| Is it ever? No.
|
| Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would
| be able to make a great set of rules using statistical
| analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level
| beyond human.
|
| In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the
| wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game
| state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with
| limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can
| capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly)
| legitimate player data.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Tomorrow the cheats will be back with human looking
| reaction speeds and inhuman decision making that is
| indistinguishable from expert players.
| lukan wrote:
| "Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared)
| with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an
| automatic ban."
|
| Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a
| shooter, that you can spot it in game data reliable to
| apply automatic bans?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Anisotropic mouse movement?
|
| Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement
| matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some
| bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two.
|
| The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data?
|
| There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can
| be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.
| lukan wrote:
| Like another commentor mentioned, I think that only works
| for a specific cheat(engine) - as long as they don't
| adjust (and randomize more for example). If it could be
| solved with some statistics, I think it would have been
| done already. I ain't a statistician though, but if you
| feel confident, I think there is quite some money in it,
| if you find a real world solution.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| To be sure. There's at most 6 frames of data per event to
| work with at 60fps. It's an interesting problem and well
| suited to statistics.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| We used to track various timings in some of our games to
| detect cheating. Cheaters find out and change their cheat
| engines to perform within plausible human reactions.
| Which is a benefit - now the cheating isn't obvious to
| everyone, but it still happens. I don't know if you could
| sprinkle data scientist dust on the problem and come up
| with a viable cross-game solution though.
| strbean wrote:
| > Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared)
| with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an
| automatic ban.
|
| It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2
| has already implemented this type of feature, and it
| immediately got some clear false positives. There are
| many situations where high level players play in a
| predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a
| common strategy that will always look indistinguishable
| from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an
| angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you
| from.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They do prevent some cheating methods, like read/write
| memory from other userspace processes.
| struanr wrote:
| Arc Raiders is a great example of a modern and popular
| multiplayer game that works with proton. I haven't heard about
| it having a problem with cheating.
| vablings wrote:
| I think a big portion of that is the rather poorly made anti-
| tamper solution they are using called 'Theia' most cheat
| developers are too unintelligent to correctly reverse
| engineer this kind of binary obfuscation
| cuvinny wrote:
| I'm curious, what makes it poorly made if it is working? I
| don't know anything about it or the game or the state of
| cheating in the game.
| vablings wrote:
| Poor performance and not super advanced. There are better
| options on the market that have less performance impact
| and better obfuscation
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| Marvel Rivals, Age of Empires 2 DE, Path of Exile 1/2, Last
| Epoch, Fall Guys are other such examples. In fact, Marvel
| Rivals even explicitly mentioned Bazzite in one of their
| changelogs! I can't recall an instance when a major game
| name-dropped a (relatively) minor Linux distro like that.
| skizm wrote:
| Valve is the only company I'd let inject anti-cheat software
| directly into my veins if it meant I could play CS and be sure
| others were not cheating haha.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I honestly don't know why so many people say that anti-cheat
| with Proton or SteamMachines won't work. SteamOS is an
| immutable Linux - especially with their own SteamMachine they
| can enable SecureBoot and attestation that you are using the
| SteamOS verbatim efi boot file, kernel, and corret system fs
| image - all signed by Valve. Just as Battlefield 6 does on
| windows (relying on SecureBoot). That would still allow you to
| install other OSes on your SteamDeck/SteamMachine, but it would
| fail the anticheat attestation. I personally see the push in
| hardware from Valve particular so that they can support anti-
| cheat on linux.
| blibble wrote:
| kinda funny that Microsoft has tried and failed multiple times to
| make Windows on ARM work
|
| and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's
| detriment
| ZiiS wrote:
| It may have taken them a while, but it does now work fine.
| jmkni wrote:
| Define 'fine'
| Marsymars wrote:
| I run WoA on my daily work laptop and everything I run
| other than some of the junky IT-pushed apps (outlook
| extension to report phishing, etc.) are ARM64-native and
| run as expected.
| jmkni wrote:
| That's good to hear, I remember that "holy shit" moment
| when I first moved to an Apple Silicon mac, I guess
| Microsoft are getting there but in a more hap-hazard
| "we'll make eventually" sort of way
| Marsymars wrote:
| That actually makes me think of the transition to high-
| res displays - Apple had like a year of pain when they
| introduced retina displays and non-updated assets would
| look blurry, whereas MS (and third-party devs) took years
| to get Windows to the point where mostly everything looks
| right at higher scaling levels.
| jmkni wrote:
| Is a great way of looking at it
| Someone1234 wrote:
| You don't notice you're on ARM at all. Everything "Just
| Works."
|
| And you're seeing 20+ hours battery under normal workloads
| (i.e. not spec sheet "20 hours" but day-to-day). I've been
| mainlining a Windows ARM laptop for six months, and am yet
| to run into anything I couldn't do.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| It turns out the best API for gaming on Linux and gaming on ARM
| was Win32 and x86_64. Who knew?
|
| Well, compiling ARM game binaries is actually super duper easy
| and just totally fine. The issue Windows _actually_ has with
| ARM is GPU drivers for the ARM SoCs. Qualcomm graphics drivers
| are just super slow and unreliable and bad. ARM CPU w AMD GPU
| is easy mode.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Shows how a stable API will beat the hell out of bleeding-
| edge improvements every time.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think the problem is that, until recently, there was little
| impetus to actually run Windows on devices where ARM actually
| has a meaningful advantage over x86. The Windows ARM laptops
| out there today don't impress, not just because of the
| software, but because the hardware itself isn't "better enough"
| than Intel or AMD to justify the transition for most people the
| way Apple Silicon was, especially for games. That is to say
| nothing of _desktops_ , where battery life isn't even a
| concern.
|
| Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable"
| devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now,
| there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It
| also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are
| setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first"
| headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even
| said not to expect a great experience playing _Half-Life: Alyx_
| locally (a nearly 7 year old title).
|
| It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on
| efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and
| ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging
| their bets.
| philistine wrote:
| > At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip
|
| I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM
| is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam
| Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough
| with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve
| is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far
| less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The
| next Steam Deck might already switch to ARM looking at what
| they announced last week.
|
| x86 is on the way out. Not in two years, perhaps not in ten
| years. But there will come a time where the economics no
| longer make sense and no one can afford to develop
| competitive chips for the server+gamers market alone. Then
| x86 is truly dead.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I sure hope it takes a bit longer than that. It would not
| be fun having only Qualcomm chips to choose from as a CPU.
| Either that or Intel/AMD start making their own ARM chips
| babypuncher wrote:
| My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as
| some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the
| x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be
| competitive with ARM on power consumption.
|
| We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap
| considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM
| manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores.
|
| Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the Steam
| Deck conversation is the fact that AMD _graphics_
| performance is well ahead of Qualcomm, and that is
| extremely important for a gaming device. I 'm willing to
| bet that the next Steam Deck goes with another custom AMD
| chip, but the generation after that is more of a question
| mark.
|
| RISC-V is another wildcard that could end up threatening
| ARM's path to total dominance.
| jsheard wrote:
| A funny detail is that Microsoft's mostly fruitless ARM efforts
| unintentionally ended up being a boon for Valves ARM effort.
| From MSVC 2019 they started augmenting x86 binaries with
| undocumented metadata specifically to assist the Windows
| x86-on-ARM emulator, but then the FEX team figured out how that
| works and implemented the same optimizations in _their_
| emulator, greatly increasing the performance of most recent
| Windows games on ARM Linux.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Why don't they just ask Copilot to do it?
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Given how arm license is know to be less than friendly....
| Wouldn't it be preferable to explore a RISCV architecture.
|
| As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep
| that is like ARM.
| echelon wrote:
| That's a geopolitical question.
|
| ARM is Western
|
| RISC is China / Eastern
|
| Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're
| doing a magnificent job of it.
|
| Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw
| a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the
| platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows.
| Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've
| failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
|
| Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible
| momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost
| any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
|
| The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet.
| There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to
| Valve.
| xpuente wrote:
| No: RISC is open ARM is closed.
|
| I suspect that many projects--such as BOOM--have stalled as a
| consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term
| impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved,
| including stakeholders in Western countries.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| RISC-V the ISA is open; RISC-V implementations need not be.
| There's no reason to believe that any truly high-
| performance implementations will be usefully open.
| echelon wrote:
| And since China has such a lead, you'll be using their
| implementations.
|
| That's why this is geopolitical.
|
| The DoD and Five Eyes prefer ARM, where the US maintains
| a strong lead.
| xpuente wrote:
| There are also many high-performance Chinese
| implementations that are open-source (e.g., XuanTie C910,
| XiangShan, etc.).
|
| While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5
| is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source
| collaborative effort could, in the long run,
| significantly change the situation. For example, current
| versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz
| (early where at ~9).
| echelon wrote:
| Yeah, but then the US doesn't get to spy on you anymore
| ;)
|
| Stuff tends to stay open until a new leader emerges. Then
| the closed source shell appears.
|
| We've seen this with the hyperscalers and in a million
| other places.
|
| Use open to pressure and weed out incumbents and market
| leaders. Then you're free to do whatever.
|
| So we'd be replacing NSA spying with MSS spying.
| roflcopter69 wrote:
| > RISC is China / Eastern
|
| Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've
| never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading
| picture in bad faith, please consider this: -
| https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-
| risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu -
| https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-
| sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... -
| https://riscv.org/about/ -> "RISC-V International Association
| in Switzerland"
| echelon wrote:
| Sure, but that's orthogonal to geopolitics and
| intelligence.
|
| US policy makers are actively attacking RISC-V and
| dissuading its use.
|
| China has an increasingly large upper hand in the RISC-V
| ecosystem and can use that to remove Western surveillance
| and replace it with their own.
|
| https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-
| tech-c...
|
| https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/regarding-
| proposed-u...
| ZeWaka wrote:
| *RISC-V
|
| ARM is a RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruct
| ion_set_comput...
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| > RISC is China/Eastern
|
| RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. It's roughly as Western
| as West realistically gets, short of being made in Hawaii.
|
| > That's a geopolitical question
|
| Sure, but that's not actually about where RISC-V is from.
| It's that it's a purposely open platform -- so much so that
| its governing body literally moved to Switzerland.
|
| The _reason_ it 's a geopolitical question is more to do with
| what we did to their supply chains with sanctions on
| companies like Huawei and ZTE, and what COVID did to
| _everyone 's_ supply chains independently of that. Both of
| those things made it _really_ evident that some domestic
| supply chains are critical. (On both sides -- see: the CHIPS
| Act)
|
| Where RISC-V comes back in is that open source doesn't really
| have a functioning concept of export restrictions. Which
| makes it an attractive contingency plan to develop further in
| the event of sanctions happening again, since these measures
| can and have extended to chip licenses.
|
| (Edit: I'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with
| valid concerns about Huawei, raised by various other sources.
| I'm less familiar with ZTE's history, but my point in either
| case is more of a practical one.)
| cpgxiii wrote:
| No one has yet produced a RISC-V CPU or SoC with truly
| competitive CPU and GPU performance and compatibility to the
| current state of arm64 or amd64.
| o_m wrote:
| It's a catch-22: why build a RISC-V CPU if there's no
| software for it, and why write software if there's no CPU to
| run it?
| cpgxiii wrote:
| Until there's a common, well-supported, and sufficiently
| performant family of RISC-V SoCs or CPUs with support for
| existing well-supported GPUs, RISC-V support will be a
| massive pain in the ass of a moving/fragmented target.
|
| This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of
| poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is
| essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU
| support.
| moregrist wrote:
| Have we seen a commercially available high performance 64-bit
| RISCV chip at production scale yet?
|
| There's a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through
| Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see
| how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be
| redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term
| for what's not an obvious product benefit.
|
| I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a
| company like Valve dives in.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| >at production scale
|
| You can even omit that part and the result is the same:
| nothing
| ahartmetz wrote:
| >arm license is know to be less than friendly
|
| Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to
| be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't
| make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology
| they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
|
| RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations
| for the time being.
| dansalvato wrote:
| From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to
| Arm):
|
| > We don't really try to steer the market one direction or
| another; we just want to make sure that good options are always
| supported.
|
| Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware
| consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense
| they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already
| a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile
| chipset for performance and power efficiency.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Agree but I would argue RISC is catching up fast.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally
| started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but
| no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors
| for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill
| for verifying compatibility.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I'm sure those developers hate getting a larger install base
| for free.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require
| extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users
| may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that
| can result in reputational damage.
| ohdearnopls wrote:
| Then developers should fix their games and make sure the
| software they are selling actually works as advertised. End
| of discussion.
|
| I don't quite understand the logic behind your argument.
| Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only
| release games on Windows by default unless other platforms
| decide to pay up? That's ridiculous, utterly consumer-
| hostile.
| charcircuit wrote:
| They are advertising that it works on Windows. Developers
| in an ideal world shouldn't have to worry about
| unsupported configurations. I'm advocating that
| developers should only have their games judged by
| supported configurations.
|
| >Should developers only release games on Windows by
| default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
|
| Other platforms could be profitable enough that
| developers could target and support them on their own
| volition.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility
|
| How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's
| worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't
| they just avoid doing that?
| charcircuit wrote:
| They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if
| they do it because there is no other player in the space that
| would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support.
| Practically every other company with an game platform,
| Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs
| to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers
| can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for
| them to 100% opt out of being on that platform.
| blibble wrote:
| > Practically every other company with an application
| platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc
| have programs to fund bringing content to their platform.
|
| the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows
| Phone and the Epic Store
|
| both of which were runaway commercial successes
| charcircuit wrote:
| Have you ever heard of terms like "Playstation exclusive"
| before? Companies benefit from having good content on
| their platform and they typically are willing to pay for
| it.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Not since Bloodborne, I haven't. And I've heard people
| can play that game on Steam Deck now, too:
| https://youtu.be/eDHiVsr-jfM
|
| These days the only context I hear "Playstation
| exclusive" in comes from people trying to analyze how
| much money Sony lost developing Concord.
| ohdearnopls wrote:
| Your argument is illogical. If devs don't want to support
| it, they simply will not support it--as evidenced by the
| thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified,
| but either run just fine, or don't run at all with the devs
| not giving it a second thought.
|
| Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the
| developers to start supporting more platforms than just
| Microsoft's data collector _ahem_ I mean, Windows, then I'm
| all up for it. It's a win for everyone.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I never said they were forced to support, but that they
| are forced to fund such a thing for their game as opposed
| to their being an option for Valve to fund it.
| dev0p wrote:
| Why the vitriol? This is one of the rare cases where a company
| actually puts money in open source development. Of course they
| ultimately do it for business reasons but everyone benefits
| from it as a whole, so I fail to understand the issue here.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows
| games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that
| Valve was funding individual game developers to support
| valve? This would be a fool's errand, compared to the much
| more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a
| compatibility layer that would enable broad support for
| ARM.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few
| games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper
| support for ARM to make out the most performance on the
| most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve
| can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games,
| but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Does anyone know what the limfac is? The machine code produced is
| of course different on different CPU arches, but isn't this
| handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs
| worry about.
|
| The exception I see is if SIMD intrinsics.
| jitl wrote:
| This system allows playing unmodified production x86
| executables on arm64. It doesn't have anything to do with the
| developers.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| That's great, but begs the question: why not just compile the
| games for ARM?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Because this works for the enormous back catalog of games
| that already exist, many of which I bet companies no longer
| have the code or a working build system for, and for new
| games it doesn't require the developers to do anything
| because many (most?) of them wouldn't bother
|
| They may provide an option for developers to distribute a
| native ARM build (which some are already building for Quest
| titles that can be brought over to Steam Frame) but one of
| Steam's main advantages is their massive x86 games catalog
| so they certainly don't want to require that
| bigyabai wrote:
| ...because there are thousands upon thousands of games that
| will never be compiled for ARM?
|
| Just look at all the "native macOS" games from the 2010s
| that are completely unplayable on modern Macs. Then look at
| all the Windows games from the 1990s that are still
| playable today. That's why.
| Dwedit wrote:
| You need to convince all developers that all 117,881 Steam
| games need be recompiled for ARM. Hopefully they have a
| working build environment, have appropriate libraries built
| for ARM, still have the source code, and are able to do the
| testing to see if the same code works correctly on ARM.
| fulafel wrote:
| Think back to the x86 32->64 bit transition, but much
| worse, since ARM is more niche and there are more arch
| differences.
|
| You need all your 85 3rd party middlewares and dependencies
| (and transitive dependencies) to support the new
| architecture. The last 10% of which is going to be
| especially painful. And your platform native APIs. And your
| compilers. And you want to keep the codebase still working
| for the mainstream architecture so you add lots of new
| configuration combos / alternative code paths everywhere,
| and multiply your testing burden. And you will get mystery
| bugs which are hard to attribute to any single change since
| getting the game to run at all already required a zillion
| different changes around the codebase. And probably other
| stuff I didn't think of.
|
| So that's for one game. Now convince everyone who has
| published a game on Steam to take on such a project, nearly
| all of whom have ages ago moved on and probably don't have
| the original programmers on staff anymore. Of course it
| should also be profitable for the developer and publisher
| in each case (and more profitable & interesting than
| whatever else they could be doing with their time).
| lunar_rover wrote:
| So Valve won't need to convince developers to do anything
| expensive and old games will also work. Most games on Steam
| Deck aren't tested by the original developer at all.
|
| Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means
| dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in
| commercial engines.
| Karliss wrote:
| It's a chicken and egg problem. Lack of ARM PCs due to
| software support, lack of software support due to
| negligible market share.
|
| Same argument can be applied to Linux. Why not just compile
| the software for Linux. Not that the most companies
| couldn't do it, it's just not worth the hassle for 1-3% of
| userbase. Situation with Linux also demonstrates that it's
| not enough to have just the OS + few dozen games/software
| for which hardware company sponsored ports, not even
| support for 10 or 30% of software is enough. You need a
| support for 50-80% of software for people to consider
| moving. Single program is enough reason for people to
| reject the idea of moving to new platform.
|
| Only way to achieve that is when a large company takes the
| risk and invests in both, build a modern hardware and also
| builds an emulation layer to avoid the complete lack of
| software. Emulator makes the platform barely usable as
| daily driver for some users. With more users it makes sense
| for developers to port the software resulting in positive
| feedback loop. But you need to reach a minimum threshold
| for it to happen.
|
| Compilation for ARM isn't the biggest issue by itself. You
| also need to get all the vendors of third party libraries
| you use to port them first. Which in turn might depend on
| binary blobs from someone else again. Historically
| backwards compatibility has been a lot more relevant on
| windows, but that's also a big weakness for migration to
| new architecture. A lot more third party binary blobs for
| which the developers of final software don't have the
| source code maybe somewhere down the dependency tree not at
| the top. A lot more users using ancient versions of
| software. Also more likely that there developers sitting on
| old versions of Visual Studio compared macOS.
|
| If you compare the situation with how Apple silicon
| migration happened. * Releasing single macBook model with
| new CPU is much bigger fraction of mac hardware market
| share compared to releasing single Windows laptop with ARM
| cpu.
|
| * Apple had already trained both the developers and users
| to update more frequently. Want to publish in Apple
| Appstore your software need to be compiled with at least
| XCode version X, targeting SDK version Y. Plenty of other
| changes which forced most developers to rebuild their apps
| and users to update so that their Apps work without
| requiring workarounds or not stand out (Gatekeeper and code
| signing, code notarization, various UI style and guideline
| changes)
|
| * XCode unlike Visual Studio is available for free, there
| is less friction migrating to new XCode versions.
|
| * More frequent incremental macOS updates compared to major
| Windows versions.
|
| * At the time of initial launch large fraction of macOS
| software worked with the help of Rosetta, and significant
| fraction received native port over the next 1-2 years. It
| was quickly clear that all future mackBooks will be ARM.
|
| * There are developers making macOS exclusive software for
| which the selling point is that it's macOS native using
| native macOS UI frameworks and following macOS conventions.
| Such developers are a lot more likely to quickly recompile
| their software for the latest version of macOS and mac
| computers or make whatever changes necessary to fit in.
| There is almost no Windows software whose main selling
| point is that it is Windows native.
|
| * Apple users had little choice. There was maybe 1
| generation of new Intel based Apple computers in parallel
| with ARM based ones. There are no other manufactuers making
| Apple computers with x86 CPUs.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level
| than game devs worry about.
|
| But game devs (at least of a certain type) are notorious for
| thinking about low-level hardware performance right from the
| start. As a class I'm pretty sure game devs use godbolt much,
| much more than your typical developer.
| butz wrote:
| Sadly, nowadays very few, if any, game developers care about
| performance or optimizations. Look at recent headline about
| "Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB" and
| it was done by simply deduplicating assets. Gone are the days
| of finding inredible ways to use less opcodes that game would
| feel smoother.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| But ... all that duplication was being _done on purpose to
| achieve better performance_ due to low-level concerns about
| access times on legacy HDDs?
| Yokolos wrote:
| I think we can all agree that performance is often an
| afterthought to game developers, particular in bigger
| productions, but HD2 is sort of a bad example for that.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 2026 will be the year of the linux desktop
| jsiepkes wrote:
| If you ever get Linux to boot on your Snapdragon notebook...
| nosrepa wrote:
| I used to have `echo "$((( $(date +%Y) + 1 ))) will be the year
| of the linux desktop"` at the end of my .bashrc
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I'm interested in seeing Proton perform on Arm for Windows x86
| games. That sounds like a real challenge.
| nullbyte wrote:
| Yooo this is awesome, maybe we will finally get some game support
| on Macs now
| bigyabai wrote:
| Doubtful, the article is about FEX-emu and Apple has only shown
| interest in native ports of games to their platform.
|
| Plus, it looks like upstream FEX doesn't play very nice with
| Apple Silicon in the first place.
| bigwheels wrote:
| Any leads on _when_ the next generation of Steam Deck will be
| released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it
| will be more like 2026.
|
| Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo
| Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004
| (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
|
| As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS
| on _any_ hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-
| factor devices:
|
| * Lenovo Legion Go S
|
| * Asus ROG Ally
|
| But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how
| good or bad they really are.
|
| Source: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-handheld-gaming-
| devices
| rincebrain wrote:
| I would assume Steam Deck 2 isn't dropping before at least H2
| 2026, if not later, if they didn't bring it out with the
| announcement of the other devices.
| ewzimm wrote:
| Valve's only official statement as far as I know is that it
| will come when they see a significant enough hardware upgrade
| to warrant a new system. If they don't move to ARM, AMD's
| Medusa APUs are their next architecture with major upgrades,
| so I would guess that Valve would order another custom AMD
| chip but based on Medusa, which won't release until at least
| 2027. I would guess at least H2 2027 but probably early 2028
| for an AMD-based Steam Deck 2.
| rincebrain wrote:
| I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon,
| because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're
| definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I
| understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so
| they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did.
|
| Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of
| surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing
| with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance.
| Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU
| performance doesn't seem encouraging.
|
| [1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-
| adreno-...
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Valve has said they want at least double the capabilities,
| while still fitting in a similar power envelope. Unsaid is that
| it also needs to fit in the same price budget, but I tend to
| believe that's their intent. It's gonna be a while. Valve got a
| stellar deal on some somewhat unusual Zen2 APUs, orginally
| built for Magic Leap; finding a similar good deal is going to
| take time. I sort of hope Valve isnt going to put out a $1600
| Halo system (but probably would buy such a next-gen Gorgon Halo
| system). Maybe Gorgon Point is good enough for them, in which
| case yeah 2026H2 is reasonable.
|
| Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over?
| There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really
| really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
| bigwheels wrote:
| Sorry, good catch - yes, I meant 2026 or 2027!
| garciansmith wrote:
| It won't be for a while, since Valve is releasing the Steam
| Machine next year and has commented that they are waiting until
| they can build a Steam Deck successor that is significantly
| better than the original.[1] My guess is 2027.
|
| 1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-
| deck...
| Perz1val wrote:
| No earlier than 2027, it's valve you're talking about, they
| don't need to rush
| kraftman wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Valve don't want to sell
| hardware, they want to sell games. They only make hardware as
| flagships for new markets, then they want other hardware
| manufacturers to take over.
|
| the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is
| heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam
| deck
| wincy wrote:
| They definitely are working on it. They announced the steam
| machine, steam controller, and the valve frame (standalone vr
| headset with seamless screen sharing from a PC), and in their
| reveal video the first thing they rather coyly say is "we'd
| love to share information about our next Steam deck, but
| that's for another day!" and announce a bunch of other cool
| stuff.
| commakozzi wrote:
| Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you
| get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as
| close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming
| hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam
| Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with
| that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I
| see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the game.
| WithinReason wrote:
| MLID says 2028+: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Srvv_Zd_k4c
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| If you're considering getting an alternative handheld, a better
| OS would be either Bazzite or CachyOS Handheld edition. SteamOS
| is not bad, but it uses an older kernel+graphics stack which
| doesn't make it very ideal for running on recent hardware.
| Plus, dedicated gaming distros like Bazzite have additional
| hardware support (like thirdparty game controllers) which may
| not be supported in SteamOS.
|
| Currently, AMD Strix Halo based handhelds are the most powerful
| portable gaming devices out there, with the top three being the
| GPD Win 5, the OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex, and the AYANEO Next 2.
| Of these three, the GPD Win 5 has already started shipping.
| Problem is they're stupid expensive.
|
| Personally, I will wait until I can run FSR4 natively on these
| portables, because FSR makes a pretty significant QoL
| improvement on these handhelds.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I was also delighted to see Steam has an effort underway for
| Android on Linux, allegedly a fork of Waydroid, that they are
| working on. Tentatively delighted because it's unclear if this
| really will be open source, but hopefully!
| https://steamdb.info/app/3029110/info/
| https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valves-version-of-andr...
|
| I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for
| the options here to expand and improve. I want to say much as
| Proton has accelerated things, but man, I am pretty lost now
| tracking which projects Proton encompasses and the history of
| where Valve backed/helped these efforts.
|
| I still really want to believe it's collaborative. That good work
| is going to flow upstream, to collaborated Valve + crowd spaces.
| adverbly wrote:
| Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
|
| The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even
| want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They
| are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
| drannex wrote:
| To be fair, without the HL3 memes, would Valve ever become as
| massive as they are now without them constantly teasing and
| playing into it?
|
| (answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one
| of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st
| century).
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2
| and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits.
|
| it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new
| hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.
|
| there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing;
| CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably
| made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever
| would.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Valve had near-total dominance over PC gaming distribution
| before HL3 even became a meme.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been
| working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with
| their new hardware in 2026.
| aloisdg wrote:
| Imagine HL3, Portal 3 et L4D3 but all linux only. oh my
| pphysch wrote:
| A killer app is a great way to sell a "console". Windows
| port can come later.
| seaal wrote:
| Doubt it, considering Deadlock still only has Windows
| builds a year into alpha.
|
| https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/depots/
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are
| reason _not_ to move (if thinking about a new pc).
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Why would you need a new PC to swap operating systems?
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases
| are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
|
| Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is
| less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux
| environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11
| environment?
| bee_rider wrote:
| They are assuming you'd build a new machine for Linux, I
| think.
|
| OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there
| are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be
| perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.
| LorenDB wrote:
| Orange Box 2. Then in another few decades we'd get Orange
| Box: Alyx.
| blibble wrote:
| this would be basically what they did with steam
| codeflo wrote:
| Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they
| did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or
| is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be
| unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.
| jsheard wrote:
| Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in
| development.
|
| https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-
| dev...
| llbbdd wrote:
| Maybe they finished it...
| Krutonium wrote:
| They also said there was nothing coming for SteamDeck in
| terms of better hardware about a week before they
| launched the OLED.
| jsheard wrote:
| Did they? AFAICT what they actually said was not to
| expect a _faster_ Steam Deck any time soon, which was
| true, because the OLED version had basically the same
| performance as the original and in the two years since
| they still haven 't released anything faster.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-
| deck...
| WithinReason wrote:
| OLED has the same HW as the LCD, with only very minor
| differences
| nemomarx wrote:
| Seems unlikely with the steam machine coming? I haven't
| heard any sign of it specifically being frame only
| strbean wrote:
| From interviews with the Alyx devs, it really sounded like
| the only reason they didn't call it HL3 was fear of not
| living up to the name.
|
| Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take
| someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to
| lead the HL3 project."
|
| That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell
| someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| _pretty_ sure they don 't have a totally flat org
| structure anymore but I might be wrong
| hamdingers wrote:
| They decided to make it a prequel for fear of not living
| up to the name, the decision was made much earlier. If
| you're at all familiar with the contents of Alyx and the
| Half-Life franchise it wouldn't have made any sense to
| call it HL3.
| strbean wrote:
| Ah, haven't gotten the chance to play it yet. But the
| same implication - we'll need someone at Valve with a big
| enough ego to take up the mantle.
| brain_staple wrote:
| I don't think that's how the people at Valve think. These
| people usually have lifetime dreams to work at Valve well
| before they do because they admired those early games so
| much, which if you know the story were held up to very
| high standards internally and repeatedly. They spent
| their lives being hyper critical of their own craft and
| admire Valve because they don't a release subpar product
| as a rule. So collectively they'll have a LOT of
| collective ego tied up in whatever that product is, but
| it's not like "I own this", that would be highly
| anathema.
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| I believe for the next Half-Life, latest rumors indicate it
| is actually back to 2D. During the press event last month,
| they were also pretty clear that no VR game is currently in
| development at Valve.
|
| A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a
| theater sized screen is nice enough.
| LorenDB wrote:
| Some rumors from ~1yr ago indicated they were looking
| into making it an asymmetric co-op game where one player
| would be Gordon Freeman on PC and one would be Alyx in
| VR. Of course, they could have dropped that by now.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I'm sure they've tried making it hybrid, aka VR optional.
| I'm curious if they'd be able to make it work. If not, I
| don't expect a VR only HL game again.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yes, I too have dabbled in that strongest of drugs called
| hopium.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under
| him valve is such a consumer focused company
| embedding-shape wrote:
| When I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself
| "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with
| the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself
| thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and
| the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in
| positions of power today.
|
| I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass
| on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices
| themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have
| surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve.
| Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I
| feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination
| with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers
| can do the job.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Just musing along with you here but I think it's really
| hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least
| halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe.
| But there will be other companies that end up with a
| similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best
| we can.
|
| I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core
| business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and
| encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on
| your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect.
| There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming
| a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project
| into a closed source for-profit product.
| jerojero wrote:
| well we don't know exactly how involved Gabe Newell is
| with the actual running of the company now a days or how
| do they going about their governance.
|
| From what I see it seems like the culture of the company
| is shared between the leadership roles so it might be
| possible for the company to continue doing as it has been
| doing after Gabe.
|
| I think the people at valve are smart and they understand
| their business and the company very well and that this
| issue is being taken seriously too.
|
| Good governance exists, it's just that for most companies
| there's not really an interest in having that because it
| gets in the way of personal interests of people that are
| already entrenched in power.
| amlib wrote:
| Maybe that's why he stays most of the time away from valve?
| It's his way of training the company into functioning
| without him, only intervening occasionally when necessary.
| ebbi wrote:
| I think as long as Valve remains a private company, they
| can continue Gabe's way of doing things. It's when it's a
| public company will the leader have the pressure of
| satisfying shareholder returns as opposed to doing what is
| right and what got them a loyal base of customers in the
| first place.
| erikerikson wrote:
| And Valve has been deeply rewarded as a result. The stance
| that you must abuse customers to maximize economic success
| will be looked back upon as the stupidity it is.
| ecshafer wrote:
| From what Ive read his son is pretty actively involved day to
| day already at valve.
| hamdingers wrote:
| He lives on a yacht and fills his days diving and doing
| marine research. I'm pretty sure Valve is mostly running
| itself.
| levocardia wrote:
| Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where
| the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing
| something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly
| doing something evil"
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah
| there's legit ethical concerns there.
|
| But _overall_ Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty
| towards the consumer than other major companies in their
| space, by a long shot.
| asacrowflies wrote:
| They even seem to be on of the rare companies that
| recognized the issues of this and massively pulled
| themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have
| major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine
| if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam
| market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full
| face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious
| avhception wrote:
| We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good
| here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take
| Valve over any of the other players in their market all
| day every day without even thinking twice. EDIT: You're
| absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.
| haunter wrote:
| >They even seem to be on of the rare companies that
| recognized the issues of this and massively pulled
| themselves BACK from these dark patterns
|
| ??? They didn't
|
| All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and
| running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at
| all
| nialv7 wrote:
| Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone
| in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in
| 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher
| now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is
| similar).
|
| Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there
| is nothing to criticize them about :/
|
| [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-
| gaming/valve-mak...
|
| [1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review
| jimbob45 wrote:
| To be fair, they may have just wrecked the CS lootbox
| economy permanently.
| ceedan wrote:
| They need to keep wrecking it. Skins should just be fixed
| cost items.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Disagreed. Games like Fortnite and League of Legends went
| down this road and ended up at even more unfathomable
| $500 microtransactions. The only issue with skin trading
| is that people will take it more seriously than it is,
| which is a problem with all cosmetic systems.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Nah. Digital items should be transferable, similar to
| physical gacha like Pokemon cards.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| It was getting out of control when tiktok "investment
| guides" were instructing people who don't even play the
| game to start buying CS skins to make a profit.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| There's an argument that loot boxes that give you
| cosmetics just aren't that big of a deal, at least if
| we're talking about adults.
|
| Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card
| games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly
| more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do
| gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
|
| There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why
| are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a
| game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a
| clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually
| _good_ explanation for it that makes it sound
| justifiable.
|
| edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on
| cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core
| gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the
| average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of
| consumers.
|
| It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being
| monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the
| game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money
| even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of
| goodwill from me.
| saghm wrote:
| > There's always this question when Valve comes up of,
| "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics
| in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"
| It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an
| actually good explanation for it that makes it sound
| justifiable.
|
| The closest I've heard to something compelling is that
| the digital goods aren't the same as actual physical
| goods, and that somehow that makes it worse, but I still
| don't find it particularly compelling; I've heard people
| (often lovingly) refer to trading cards as "cardboard
| crack" explicitly to joke about how ridiculous it is to
| be paying for stuff that's essentially just ink and
| paper.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I always interpreted that as cosmetics are OK because it
| doesn't make the game unfair. You can't buy advancement
| in the game that way.
|
| Subsidizing the game's devel/ops cost isn't a bad thing.
| Especially if it's optional and doesn't change the game.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I'd guess that there's markedly different margins on
| lootboxes versus running the entire steam store.
|
| I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of
| _profits_ , I'd guess they're something like 10% or more,
| assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular
| steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still
| absurd, for what it's worth).
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Because a billion dollars is still a billion dollars.
| gishh wrote:
| Valve selling skins is just so trivial relative to
| dopamine-inducing doom-scrolling, social media in
| general, the toxicity of the news cycle, I can keep
| going.
|
| It would be super democrat-american to address valves
| loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.
|
| We need a government priority Jira board of things that
| need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the
| backlog.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| The major reason is they are a private company with good
| business. The don't have a need to keep adding to
| shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to
| generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the
| shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who
| they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is
| just to attract shareholders
| nish__ wrote:
| Exactly. Going public is like leaving your baby to be
| raised by wolves.
| usefulcat wrote:
| It's definitely more than just private ownership. In fact
| I'd say that's the least part of it.
|
| Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were
| bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Private ownership is a necessary, but not sufficient,
| condition to have a business which has a healthy
| relationship with its customers. You also need the owners
| to be people of reasonably good character who understand
| that the best way to run a business is a win-win approach
| on both sides, not people who see nothing wrong with
| extracting maximum profit from the business no matter
| whom it hurts. The PE horror stories you hear are cases
| where the owners are in the latter group.
| blargey wrote:
| If you want to be specific that general idea could be
| elaborated as "private ownership by people that only need
| the C-suite salary, instead of needing a C-suite _plus_ a
| fat % RoI on the company 's entire valuation because
| that's how much they just put down as a sunk cost."
|
| In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any
| prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to
| an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| Let's be honest about this current situation.
|
| Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not
| charity.
|
| Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access
| (tougher time for anti-cheat)
|
| Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately:
| discouraging users to install from binary
|
| They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is
| responding with proton & SteamOS
| eecc wrote:
| Why is it though. Just release a SteamOS with Secure Boot
| enabled and you're done. It's really simple
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Your argument doesn't make any sense. What does this have
| to do with supporting Arm chips? It's not like AMD and
| Intel are waging a war against Valve. If anything Steam
| helps them by strengthening the PC gaming market, leading
| to higher CPU/GPU sales.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Slowly getting their stuff independent of wintel gives a
| lot of flexibility. And the big gaming market's on phones
| / tablets. A steam controller could find itself paired to
| an iPad running steam in a year or two.
| squigz wrote:
| > Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access
| (tougher time for anti-cheat)
|
| Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-
| billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop
| anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put
| on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in
| part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?
|
| > Encouraging users to use the app store, or more
| accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
|
| Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting
| they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?
|
| > They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is
| responding with proton & SteamOS
|
| You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which
| are actually more of a threat!
| lallysingh wrote:
| Microsoft's a competitor. And they have a reputation for
| being the first ally to stab you in the back (e.g. SGI /
| DirectX). You don't want to depend or trust them when
| they like the market you're in.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| They're doing things that are simultaneously good for
| business and good for consumers.
|
| That contrasts against the companies doing things that
| are good for business (at least short term) and bad for
| consumers.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's more a property of the community than of the company.
| If the community were differently inclined then the comments
| would be about how Valve is making money by addicting
| children to gambling and so on and so forth.
| txdv wrote:
| "We will make linux a viable gaming before we increment that
| number to 3!"
|
| But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my
| machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I
| can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie
| games).
| YmiYugy wrote:
| I have plenty of complaints about them. The highly addictive
| gambling mechanics in their games, the extortionate cut
| afforded them by their dominant market position or the very
| rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to
| startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource
| hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and
| a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas). But they do
| make some very nice open source contributions.
| eggsome wrote:
| Ads can be disabled in the settings.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Not an excuse.
|
| It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask
| you to stop.
| spockz wrote:
| I don't mind the ads. They are actually about games and I
| may like some of them. If they start selling ad space for
| others that would be terrible.
| torginus wrote:
| If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can
| generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free
| and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even
| police this.
|
| The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows
| their cut is worth it.
| sershe wrote:
| They are merely trying to commoditize their complement
| https://gwern.net/complement
|
| Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside
| your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app
| (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-
| not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level
| most of the time). That part will never become "community"
| oriented.
| preisschild wrote:
| Steam Games can definitely be DRM free too. Its the
| developer/publishers choice.
| sershe wrote:
| Can you actually download these games like one can with
| GOG? As far as I can tell, even indie games require steam
| to run.
|
| DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has
| their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at
| least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that
| I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account
| for some random reason?
| blibble wrote:
| yes
|
| I copied FTL, and Into The Breach out of my steam
| directory to another machine
|
| and they work fine
| craftkiller wrote:
| That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support
| Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks
| to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to
| listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks
| because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite:
| Linux is outperforming Windows[0].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q
| tencentshill wrote:
| They sold the Deck hardware at a loss, so I hope you've
| bought several full-price games to play on it since.
| foresto wrote:
| Has that been confirmed? Got a link?
| tombert wrote:
| I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems
| like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps
| getting better and better with every release.
|
| I don't know for sure, but I suspect a _lot_ of the work is
| spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries.
| This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have
| true Windows compatibility.
|
| Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don't bother even
| checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will
| likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is
| so consistently good that it's not worth the small effort to
| check ProtonDB.
|
| I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine.
| This isn't a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it's
| a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have
| even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows
| entirely.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| If its for your parents, then why not switch them to
| OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has
| excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much
| better than LibreOffice).
| tombert wrote:
| Oh it's not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting
| them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse.
|
| If it doesn't say Microsoft Office on there, they will
| say it's worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.
|
| In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use
| of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible
| OnlyOffice is for that.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every
| non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does
| seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing
| almost all the effort on the project.
| tombert wrote:
| I haven't been able to get MSOffice working, but I didn't
| have much issue getting Toon Boom Animate to work. Which
| apps give you trouble?
| txdv wrote:
| > knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it
| can't play games"
|
| they still do it because you can't play all the multiplayer
| games with kernel level anticheats
| stavros wrote:
| I wonder when games will start supporting Linux natively,
| especially after the Steam Machine is released.
| tombert wrote:
| I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a
| lot of good for the FOSS world, but let's not make the same
| mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.
|
| All it takes is new management to change the policies to make
| the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people
| made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much
| of the internet to avoid.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company
| that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business
| model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad
| in a way that most non-ad companies are not.
|
| No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally
| structures around making a profit. But providing goods and
| services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive
| or evil.
| tombert wrote:
| Oh I don't disagree with anything you said there. It's
| perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for
| profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in
| which to do so isn't inherently bad.
|
| That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that
| _are_ kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games.
| Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty
| anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves
| Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite
| the fact that Steam _is_ DRM.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > like Apple: a well-liked company that has an obvious and
| not inherently exploitive business model.
|
| Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from
| every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the
| entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering
| Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough
| they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no
| company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only
| thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an
| exploitive company
| tombert wrote:
| More than a little irritating that the only real
| contenders for smartphones is either Google or Apple, two
| companies with more-than-a-little dubious business
| practices.
|
| I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to
| fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had
| been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had
| the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the
| Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the
| duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.
|
| Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm
| sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought
| one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The
| network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my
| bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever
| get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning
| I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with
| me everywhere anyway.
|
| I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration
| should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably
| be different companies.
| torginus wrote:
| I honestly can't remember the last time I brought
| something through the App Store - my lifetime total money
| spent there is probably less than $500
| sershe wrote:
| Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given
| these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative
| game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple,
| Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust
| enforcement
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-
| prof...
|
| Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this
| should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic
| position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for
| gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at
| monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)
| ZeWaka wrote:
| lock-in?
|
| there's no lock-in in any of the contracts
| adverbly wrote:
| I mean you're completely correct.
|
| But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their
| behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their
| behavior.
|
| So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the
| bad.
| tombert wrote:
| I just wonder if it's an inherent symptom of massive
| success. I'm not talking Valve level of success, but more
| like Google and Apple and Microsoft levels. Eventually
| every company has downturns in the market, and whether or
| not it's fair the investors/board of directors will think
| it's because of the current strategy, and they'll engage in
| terrible rent-seeking behavior.
|
| I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get
| bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be
| able to strangle the market more and more because everyone
| loves them, and then when most of the serious competition
| has been squelched, they'll change strategies.
|
| To be clear, I _like_ Valve in their current state. Steam
| is great, the Tenfoot /SteamOS software is great at
| converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is
| arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in
| no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not
| naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they
| continue to be the same company.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Valve already owns the market. There is nothing left to
| strangle. Every attempt to break through has been a
| failure and none of those failures can be attributed to
| an anti-competitive action taken by Valve. They could
| have engaged in rent seeking a long time ago if they
| wanted to. They are managing their market position well
| by not abusing their customers or giving customers a
| reason to complain to lawmakers.
|
| Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to
| gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already
| botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via
| substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly
| that nobody even knew they tried.
| Insanity wrote:
| I always took the HL3 memes more as a good-faith joke. Like
| it's part of gaming culture more than a serious jab at them.
|
| I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)
| Perz1val wrote:
| Can someone tell me how much more power efficient is ARM
| actually? Like under load when gaming, not in a phone that sleeps
| most of the time. I've heard both claims, that it's still a huge
| difference and that for new AMD Zen it's basically the same.
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's workload-dependent. On-paper, ARM is more power-efficient
| at idle and simple ops, but slows down dramatically when trying
| to translate/compose SIMD instructions.
| fulafel wrote:
| The instruction set has marginal impact. But many power
| efficient chips happen to be using the ARM instruction set
| today.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think that's still _highly_ debatable. Intel and AMD
| _claim_ the instruction set makes no difference... but of
| course they would. And if that 's really the case where are
| the power efficient x86 chips?
|
| Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each
| other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact"
| would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences
| smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. And there's no
| way the ISA makes 20% difference.
|
| But today I'd say "marginal impact" is less than 5% which is
| way more debatable.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > And if that's really the case where are the power
| efficient x86 chips?
|
| Where are the power _inefficient_ x86 chips? If you
| normalize for production process and put the chips under
| synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar
| ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for
| wide SIMD /vector workloads, but more efficient at idle.
|
| AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash
| cows aren't in manufacturing mobile chipsets, and neither
| of them have sweetheart deals on ARM IP with Softbank like
| Apple does. For the markets they address, it's not unlikely
| that ARM would be both unprofitable and more power-hungry.
| Havoc wrote:
| Now we just need qualcomm to sort out their linux snapdragon
| support
| ant6n wrote:
| I find it kinda ironic that they phase out 32bit at the same
| time. I'd guess it would be easier to emulate 32but x86, although
| the difference perhaps goes away with a JIT.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Hypothetically, if Valve made a strong push to make SteamOS
| compatible with all Windows programs, not just games, could they
| make a serious run at knocking down Windows?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And why would they care? Not even Microsoft really cares about
| Windows licensing for consumers and businesses are never going
| to use computers running fake Windows.
|
| There is no real business case.
| sznio wrote:
| >businesses are never going to use computers running fake
| Windows.
|
| why not? If it's cheaper and compatible, why not?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That's not how Big Enterprise works. "No one ever got fired
| for buying Microsoft". Can you imagine the reputational
| risk of whoever decided that when something goes wrong? No
| one is going to trust a gaming company when it comes to
| their entire IT infrastructure.
|
| Besides businesses have an all in one contract with
| Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL
| Server, Office, a certain number of seats for MSDN for
| their developers, Azure DevOps (separate from Azure - it's
| the modern equivalent of Team Foundation Server), and the
| list goes on. They don't care about saving a couple of
| dollars on Windows license.
| randyrand wrote:
| Here's an idea, charge money for it?
|
| I'm sure there are lots of businesses that dislike Microsoft
| and the freemium model they're using.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users
| as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_
| and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has
| been working on this since.
|
| Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8
|
| Context?
| qwerpy wrote:
| Back when iOS and iPad were eating Microsoft's lunch in
| mobile, Microsoft freaked out and released Windows 8 with
| that new tiles UI framework ("desktop and tablet are going to
| converge so we need to dumb down the interface") and the
| Windows Store that was supposed to be their response to the
| App Store. Microsoft wanted all future Windows software to be
| released through the App Store. Of course, this was an
| existential threat to Valve/Steam, so Valve vociferously
| pushed back.
|
| The Windows Store and its apps were so bad that Microsoft
| eventually scaled back their ambitions, but Valve has not
| forgotten.
| aeonik wrote:
| Gabe Newell: "I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone
| in the PC space."
|
| 2012: https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-i-think-
| windows-8-is-a-c...
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| He made some critical comments to the media about the Windows
| app store and Microsoft's position of trying to turn Windows
| in to an iOS type situation with everything locked down.
| Remember that Microsoft had just released Windows RT and
| later Windows 10 S which could only run apps from the Windows
| app store.
|
| This could have pushed Steam out of the market if it had
| succeeded. Valve then spent the next decade building up Linux
| gaming almost from scratch to reduce their dependance on
| Microsoft.
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