[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 : 911 points
Date : 2025-12-02 20:33 UTC (2 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.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I remember
| way less cross-platform software than we have now, and
| way worse working WINE. No, there was never time when we
| could run whatever software we want on a machine of our
| choice.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > I remember way less cross-platform software than we
| have now
|
| Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer
| apps than ever support macOS as a native target.
| Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more
| fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew
| over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about
| it.
|
| Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform
| efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010,
| depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native
| Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA
| compute drivers _work_ but Apple refuses to sign them.
| The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is
| gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is
| petty politicking.
| 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>"
| int_19h wrote:
| It's a package manager. On Windows, winget serves the
| same function.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Everyone wants their 30% cut into gaming. It's not worth
| battling a trillion dollar company on this case.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Sure. And Valve want their own 30% cut.
|
| It does suck if you just want to play games on hardware
| you own that can handle said games.
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Mobile overlapping consoles in revenue and Apple had a
| good way years of taking a 30% cut on top. They are
| indeed behind fine with sticking as a middleman for
| gambling simulators that make billions.
| 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
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| This is really the endgame, I think. A modern smartphone
| with a controller attached is effectively the same as a
| Steam Deck or Switch 2, just with a different OS. Apple
| has been pushing higher-end games on phones lately (this
| year has seen iOS versions of Hitman 3, Sniper Elite 4,
| and Subnautica), and reports are that the new pro phones
| run them well (the limiting factor being thermal load).
|
| A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling
| -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck
| something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a
| Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.
| 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.
| N_Lens wrote:
| It may work out all the same because Apple's attempts such
| as with Game Porting Toolkit and Metal, boost Valve's
| attempts with Proton and we may see a convergence where
| Valve is able to make a majority of Steam games work on Mac
| without Apple explicitly wanting it.
| viktorcode wrote:
| > Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to
| create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably)
| cut them out.
|
| Current MS' approach is to not do exclusives and sell all
| their games on every platform available except Apple's
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'm one of those Mac users and I just got myself a Deck
| last year instead of replacing the PS4 with a PS5. Mac
| for work, console for play.
| concinds wrote:
| Also, I'll let everyone in on an open secret.
|
| Apple's real goal isn't even the 30% from the Mac App
| Store. Their vision is to build a library of games that
| run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and potentially Apple TV and
| Vision. You can connect a controller to all these
| devices, so any game would work (without clunky touch
| controls). That's why they're pushing Metal and will
| never adopt Vulkan. They want to make their ecosystem as
| strong as possible against competing ecosystems.
|
| It's also why they've been pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst,
| why they don't care for web apps, why the Mac and iPad
| have gotten closer (they want each device just be a form
| factor that lets you access the same apps and files,
| though I expect they'll always keep the Mac as open as it
| is now), and why they made all their platforms adopt one
| design language. They probably ported Preview to
| iOS/iPad, and Home and Clock to the Mac, because they
| went through the Springboard/LaunchPad and asked
| themselves: "which of these apps could we bring to every
| OS?".
|
| It's also why Google is dropping ChromeOS and switching
| everything to Android. One platform, one app ecosystem.
| They did it only to keep up with Apple. The
| tablet/desktop-ish side of their ecosystem lags far
| behind.
|
| And it's why Valve is going all-in on Linux. Kickstarting
| an alternative ecosystem.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I don't think Valve has anything to gain from reinforcing
| Apple's walled garden.
| justin66 wrote:
| Honest question, did Apple _ever_ care about games on the
| Mac as a real priority?
| N_Lens wrote:
| Steve Jobs certainly didn't. I hope it changes because so
| many coders (Who are also gamers) now use Macbooks or Mac
| Minis as their development platform.
| protocolture wrote:
| I remember a friend of mine, gloating about how he could
| play Unreal Tournament on Mac, and I looked at it, and
| man did it ever run natively. But I could see a lot
| rendering wrong and a lot of stutters.
|
| I think the pentium compatibility stuff in the powermac
| was also supposed to attract gamers, but I recall not
| being able to progress past the installer for Mechwarrior
| 2 Mercenaries, which would have been _the_ game that made
| me change my mind. Ran the installer tho, which was
| something.
| 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...
| trueno wrote:
| wtf take my money expand your team!!!
| coldpie wrote:
| That's what CrossOver is for :)
| N_Lens wrote:
| Some crossover games perform better than the native ports. I
| play Path of Exile on Mac using the Windows client with a
| translation layer, and it plays better than the native
| release.
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| No. For best performance, you have to batch your
| calls/memory access patterns with TBDR in mind. Dropping
| in a Steam PC game (indy, AA/AAA) game render pipeline,
| _specifically optimized for Nvidia /AMD/Intel_, to a TBDR
| GPU, is going to give poor performance. That's _the
| context of this discussion_. Round pegs DO fit into
| square holes, you just have to make sure the hole is
| bigger than would normally be necessary. ;)
|
| Steam frame is more for _streaming_ PCVR than _running
| existing PCVR games natively_.
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| I'm aware it supports tile based rendering. I put it in
| quotes because support doesn't mean performance. Good
| TBDR performance requires the developer/engine have the
| _concept_ of TBDR in mind. 99.9% of the PC games out
| there do /did _NOT_ have TBDR in mind.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| This isn't an "issue" so much as a feature. Apple had some
| vulkan support until move to the full A1 architecture had
| them only make Metal a first class citizen to the GPU.
| Concurrently happening was a pretty nasty breakup of Apple
| with the Khronos group.
|
| This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.
| duped wrote:
| It's an issue for me, a Mac owner. All the games I want to
| play have buggy graphics on Mac. I have a PC just for
| playing with my friends.
|
| Apples decisions are often wrong when it comes to third
| party software.
| fireant wrote:
| LunarG is working on first party Vulkan driver for MacOS
| https://www.lunarg.com/lunarg-achieves-
| vulkan-1-3-conformanc.... My understanding is performance is
| worse than MoltenVK at this point, but it's getting there.
| viktorcode wrote:
| It's Android where you need Vulkan. Overwhelming majority of
| PC games that can run on Vulkan can also support Metal due to
| the engine they use.
|
| The real barrier is DX games.
| 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.
| trueno wrote:
| bummed she left for intel she was next level. asahi lina
| commented after she left that there's currently no one doing
| graphics work anymore on asahi. projects kinda got some
| uncertainty to it now
| _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.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| It'll never happen for a whole bunch of reasons, but a phone
| with Apple's hardware, Valve's OS, and Nintendo's game
| library would be amazing.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| You can get 2/3rds of that with a steam deck.
| 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.
| rollcat wrote:
| You are an average person. A program you're using
| crashes.
|
| The only non-generic word you see in the crash message is
| "SQLite".
|
| You look it up, find SQLite, and you bother the
| developers for help.
|
| The problem is as old as labels.
| 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.
| stalfie wrote:
| To me the "web of trust" element frankly seems like the
| only viable solution. And in fact, its almost here
| already: https://playsafeid.com/
|
| I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike
| using facial recognition technology to allow for
| permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95%
| of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the
| approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres,
| and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially
| implement when you can guarantee that one account = one
| person.
| 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.
| raydev wrote:
| The honest people are a larger group than the dishonest
| people.
|
| And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded
| and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats
| get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are
| priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the
| lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant
| portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness
| or self-preservation. Only a select few are _truly_
| committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their
| accounts on the line.
|
| Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there
| are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western
| countries).
| retsibsi wrote:
| They are wrong, though. Locks also stop people who would
| happily commit an opportunistic theft but who lack the
| necessary tools or skills, people who would trespass if
| they could retain some plausible deniability ("oops, I
| didn't see the signs" vs. "oops, I didn't realise I
| wasn't supposed to cut that padlock"), and so on.
| 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.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| > the environment isn't actively in an arms race against
| seatbelts.
|
| I would beg to differ. In the US at least, there does
| seem to be a hidden arms race between safety features and
| the environment (in the form of car size growth)
| raydev wrote:
| No. The same way piracy has been diminished in the
| mainstream by years of lawsuits and jailtime against the
| loudest most available sources, the strongest anti-cheats
| have suppressed the easiest and cheapest paths to
| cheating on AAA games. Piracy hasn't gone away, but the
| number of people doing it peaked last decade.
|
| Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating
| completely, they just need to capture enough cheating
| (and ban unpredictably) that average people are mostly
| discouraged. As long as cheat-creators have to scurry
| around in secrecy and guard their implementations until
| the implementation is caught, the "good" cheats will
| never be a commodity on mainstream well-funded games with
| good anti-cheat.
|
| Cheat-creators have to do the hard hacking and put their
| livelihoods on the line, they make kids pay up for that.
| reactordev wrote:
| Piracy didn't go anywhere, it got corporate sponsorship.
|
| Having _some_ anti-cheat is better than no anti-cheat but
| my point is it's not a shield. It's a cheese grater.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| That's easy to say. But they do prevent some cheating.
| Don't believe me? Consider the simplest case: No anti-cheat
| whatsoever. You can just hook into the rendering engine and
| draw walls at 50% transparency. That's the worst case. Now,
| we add minimal anti-cheat that convolutes the binary with
| lots of extra jumps and loops at runtime. Now, someone
| needs to spend time figuring out the pattern. That effort
| isn't free. Now, people have to pay for cheats. Guess what?
| Visa doesn't want to handle payment processing for your
| hacks & cheats business. So now you're using sketchy
| payment processors based out of a third-world country.
| Guess what else? People will create fake hacks & cheats
| websites that use those same payment processors, and will
| just take people's money and never deliver the cheats. You
| get to try to differentiate yourself from literal scammers,
| how are you going to do that? You can't put the Visa logo
| on your website. Because you're legit, and you don't want
| to get sued. Then, the anti-cheat adds heuristic detection
| for cheat processes. The anti-cheat company BUYS the cheats
| and reverse-engineers them and improves the heuristics.
| then the game company makes everyone sign up with a phone
| number, and permabans that phone number when they're caught
| cheating. Now some gamers don't want to risk getting
| banned. Saying that these factors simply don't exist or are
| insignificant is certainly one of the opinions of all time.
| jorl17 wrote:
| 100% agree. This is exactly the kind of big picture
| thinking that so many people often seem to miss. I did
| too, when I was young and thought the world was just
| filled with black and white, good vs evil dichotomies
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| > You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw
| walls at 50% transparency
|
| A properly designed game should not send the position of
| ennemies out of view
| dontlaugh wrote:
| That is not always possible for genres with fast gameplay
| like most shooters. It's quite common for player movement
| to be able to put an enemy in view before the light
| could've round-tripped from the server.
|
| This is generally the anti-cheat problem. Certain genres
| have gameplay that cannot be implemented without trusting
| the client at least some of the time.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is correct, the correct amount of over-sharing by
| the server is non-zero, because otherwise you give a HUGE
| advantage for slight ping differences.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It's even worse, the lowest theoretical latency possible
| based on speed of light alone is not low enough for the
| speed of movement in many shooters, if the server hid all
| immediately invisible information.
| DrammBA wrote:
| What do you do with footsteps and other positional audio?
| On multiplayer shooter games that's very vital
| information to let you know an enemy is somewhere behind
| a wall but cheaters can use it to draw visual markers to
| pinpoint the enemy player.
| anvuong wrote:
| I don't know why you brought up VAC as an example. It is a
| horrible AC, so bad so that an entire service (FaceIT) was
| built to capitalize on that.
|
| VAC is still a laughing joke in CS2, literally unplayable
| when you reached 15k+. Riot Vanguard is extremely invasive,
| but it's leaps and bounds a head of VAC.
|
| And Valve's banning waves long after the fact doesn't
| improve the players experience at all. CS2 is F2P, alts are
| easy to get, cheating happens in alost every single high-
| ranked game, players experience is shit.
| treyd wrote:
| > CS2 is F2P
|
| Not anymore for the competitive gamemodes. This was
| reversed a while ago.
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| I remember reading that Microsoft is trying to crack down
| on kernel level anti-cheats. Just like anti-virus, they
| mess with the operating system on a deep level,
| redirecting/intercepting API calls, sometimes on
| undocumented and unstable internal APIs.
|
| Not only does this present a huge security risk, it can
| break existing software and the OS itself. These anti-
| cheats tend not to be written by people intimately
| familiar with Windows kernel development, and they cause
| regressions in existing software which the users then
| blame on Windows.
|
| That's why Microsoft did Windows Defender and tried to
| kill off 3rd party anti-virus.
| varenc wrote:
| Apple has gone a similar way with effectively killing
| kernel extensions for the same reasons. In theory all the
| kernel extensions use cases have been replaced with
| "System Extensions" but of course not the same.
| Andrex wrote:
| If I remember right, it played a role in the Crowdstrike
| failures. So yeah wouldn't surprise me MS is hoping to
| get rid of it.
| 71bw wrote:
| Please provide source if you manage to find it as I'm
| deeply interested in said article.
| 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.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Good! Thats actually one of the goals. Reduce the
| advantage cheaters can gain to within human bounds. They
| can cheat to feel like a good player, but not a god.
| 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.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Even randomisation would cause their aim to be
| statistically different to a normal players aim over
| time.
| dchftcs wrote:
| Throwing in ML jargon and going straight to modelling
| before understanding the problem reduces your credibility
| as a data scientist in front of engineers and
| stakeholders.
|
| As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting
| good features and data. In this case one difficulty is
| measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with.
|
| In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if
| someone is around the corner and start shooting when they
| come close. For far away targets, lots of people camp at
| specifc spots and often shoot without directly sighting
| someone if they anticipate someone crossing - the hit
| rate may be low but it's a low cost thing to do. Then you
| have people not hiding too well and showing a toe. Or
| someone pinpointing the position of an enemy based on
| information from another player. So the question is, what
| is the starting point for you to measure the reaction?
|
| Now let's say you successfully measured the reaction time
| and applied a threshold of 80ms. Bot runners will adapt
| and sandbag their reaction time, or introduce motions to
| make it harder to measure mouse movements, and the value
| of your model now is less than the electricity needed to
| run it.
|
| So with your proposal to solve the reaction time problem
| with KL divergence. Congratulations, you just solved a
| trivial statistics problem to create very little business
| value.
| Xss3 wrote:
| More like congrats, you just made every cheater far less
| effective by forcing them to play nearer to human limits.
|
| You arent eliminating cheaters, that's impossible, you
| are limiting their impact.
| Akronymus wrote:
| If cheaters play indistingushable from normal people, the
| seems like mission accomplished.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Yep
| dchftcs wrote:
| Cheaters don't have to play like normal people to avoid
| detection. They just have to make it expensive to police
| them. For example, the game developer may be afraid of a
| even a 10% false positive ban rate, and as a result won't
| ban anyone except perhaps a small number of clean-cut
| cases.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Most cheaters are playing well outside of human limits
| and doing huge amounts of damage to the legitimate player
| experience. A 10% safety margin beyond human play sounds
| reasonable. A world where cheaters can only play 10%
| better than humans is a far better world than the one we
| are in at the moment.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback, you're right - armchair
| speculation _is_ different than actual data science.
| Without actual data to examine, we 're left with the
| latter and that can still be a fun exercise even if it
| doesn't solve any business problem. We're here to
| chitchat and converse after all.
| weberer wrote:
| >Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a
| shooter
|
| A human can't really, which is why you need to bring in
| ML. Feed it enough game states of legit players vs known
| cheaters, and it will be able to find patterns.
| lukan wrote:
| And what happens to that pattern, when the cheat engine
| adjusts? What happens to the enraged players that got
| wrongly banned for cheating?
| Xss3 wrote:
| If anyone is wrongly banned the system is too sensitive.
| Let it capture data for a month before banning someone.
| Ensure the confidence is crazy high.
| Xss3 wrote:
| There is no need for ML. Games arent the real world.
|
| A suitable game engine would have knowledge of when a
| shadow, player, grenade, noise, or other reactable event
| occurs for a given client.
|
| Especially if games arent processed in real time but
| processed later based on a likelihood of cheating drawn
| from other stats.
| 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.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Thats a win. Preventing cheaters gaining superhuman
| advantage significantly reduces their impact.
| 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.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| There's well analyzed video of a pro player streaming who
| got temporarily banned for something like this. It might
| not even have been pre-fire, but post-fire at a different
| enemy retreating at the same position
|
| https://youtu.be/SFyVRdRcilQ
| Xss3 wrote:
| Valve need to tweak the model so that it requires a
| higher confidence level before a ban, and to reduce false
| positives in their data capture methods. This is a
| mistake but doesnt kill the idea.
| Xss3 wrote:
| You mustve missed the part where i spoke of consistency?
|
| Ive played at the pro level. Nobody prefires with perfect
| robotic consistency.
|
| I dont care if it takes 50 matches of data for the
| statistical model to call it inhuman.
|
| Valve has enough data that they could easily make the
| threshold for a ban something like '10x more consistent
| at pre-firing than any pro has ever been' with a high
| confidence borne over many engagements in many matches.
| danaris wrote:
| > Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency.
|
| Then all you need to do to fool this anticheat is to add
| some randomness to the cheat.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Then youve immediately made the cheater worse than the
| best players to blend in with them. Mission accomplished,
| cheater nerfed significantly. You wont even know theyre
| doing it.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They do prevent some cheating methods, like read/write
| memory from other userspace processes.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Motivated cheaters will just hook into PCI directly.
| Cheating is just part of pc gaming.
| 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
| dralley wrote:
| I mean the performance of the game otherwise is pretty
| decent. Frankly better than average.
| vablings wrote:
| Could be better without Theia but yeah the developers
| have done a really good job with ARC Raiders
| 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.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Maybe they'll secretely fund an open source project to emulate
| only the windows kernel calls that Anti Cheats use.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| As a former cheat developer, I think it is impossible since
| it is digging into some specific stuff of Windows. For
| example, some anti-cheat uses PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine
| and PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine to strip process handle
| permission, and those thing can't be well emulated, there is
| simply nothing in the Linux kernel nor in the Wine server to
| facilitate those yet. What about having a database of games
| and anticheat that does that, and what if the anticheat also
| have a whitelist for some apps to "inject" itself into the
| game process? Those are also needed to be handled and dealt
| with.
|
| Plus, there are some really simple side channel exploits that
| your whitelisted app have vulns that you can grab a full-
| access handle to your anticheat protected game, rendering
| those kernel level protection useless, despite it also means
| external cheat and not full blown internal cheat, since
| interal cheat carrys way more risk, but also way more
| rewardings, such as fine-level game modification, or even
| that some 0days are found on the game network stack so maybe
| there is a buffer overflow or double-free, making sending
| malicious payload to other players and doing RCEs possible.
| (It is still possible to do internal cheat injection from
| external cheat, using techniques such as manual
| mapping/reflective DLL injecction, that effectively
| replicates PE loading mechanism, and then you hijack some
| execution routine at some point to call your injected-
| allocated code, either through creating a new thread,
| hijacking existing thread context, APC callback hijack or
| even exception vector register hijacking, and in general,
| hijack any kinds of control flow, but anticheat software
| actively look for those "illegal" stuff in memory and
| triggers red flag and bans you immediately)
|
| From what I've seen over the years, the biggest problem for
| anticheat in Linux is that there is too much liberty and
| freedom, but the anticheat/antivirus is an antithesis to
| liberty and freedom. This is because anticheat wants to use
| strong protection mechanism borrowed from antivirus technique
| to provide a fair gaming experience, at the cost of lowering
| framerates and increasing processing power, and sometimes
| BSOD.
|
| And I know it is very cliche at this point, but I always love
| to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up
| essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety,
| deserve neither liberty nor safety". I therefore only keep
| Windows to play games lately, and switched to a new laptop,
| installed CachyOS on it, and transfered all my development
| stuff over to the laptop. You can basically say I have my
| main PC at home as a more "free" xbox.
|
| Speaking of xbox, they have even more strict control over the
| games, that one of the anticheat technique, HVCI (hypervisor-
| protected code integrity) or VBS, is straight out of the tech
| from xbox, that it uses Hyper-V to isolate game process and
| main OS, making xbox impossible to jailbreak. In Windows it
| prevents some degree of DMA attack by leveragng IOMMU and
| encrypting the memory content beforehand to makd sure it is
| not visible to external devices over the PCIe bus.
|
| That said, in other words, it is ultimately all about the
| tradeoff between freedom and control.
|
| A similar concept, trusted computing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
| Andrex wrote:
| Online cheaters are first against the wall when I become
| dictator...
| jagermo wrote:
| companies will go where the money is. If Valve enables, say EA,
| to have their yearly franchise and in-game-stores on mobile
| devices, they will find a way.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think if Linux gaming becomes popular someone may come up
| with a solution where you run a native linux kernel-mode
| anticheat. That somehow connects to the wine-hosted game.
|
| I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's what I think will
| happen.
| 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
| philistine wrote:
| There are rumours Intel might be the fab for the base M7
| chip from Apple. That's the future.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
| 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.
| philistine 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.
|
| It's a distinction without a difference. x86 is not
| currently competitive in anything smaller than a laptop.
| Even in a laptop, the only reason it hasn't eaten the
| market is Microsoft is uninterested and Apple doesn't
| tell the Joker where it gets its wonderful toys.
|
| Market forces are at play here, exactly like they were in
| the 90s with Intel's massive gains. ARM is making money
| hand over fist while x86 is getting squeezed. There will
| come a time where it won't make economic sense to invest
| in x86, technical merits be damned.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is only one of many factors, but I know that high
| performance instruction decoding doesn't scale nearly as
| well on x86-64 due to the variable width instructions as
| it does on ARM. Any reasonable performance OoO core needs
| to read multilpe instructions ahead in order for the
| other OoO tricks to work. x86-64 is typically limited to
| about 5 instructions, and the complexity and power
| required to do that does not scale linearly since x86-64
| instructions can be anywhere from 1 byte to 15 bytes
| making it very hard to guess where to start reading the
| second instruction before the first has been decoded. Arm
| cores have at most 2 widths to deal with and with ARV v8
| I think there is only one leading to cores like M1
| firestorm that can read 8 instructions ahead in a single
| cycle. Intel's E cores are able to read 3 instructions at
| two different addresses (6 total, just not sequential)
| that can help the core look at predicted branches but
| doesn't help as much in fast optimized code with fewer
| branches.
|
| so at the low end of performance where mobile gaming sits
| you really need an OoO core in order to be able to keep
| up, but ARM really has a big leg up for that use-case
| because of the instruction encoding.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions
|
| Intel Lion-cove decodes 8 instructions per cycle and can
| retire 12. Intel Skymont's triple decoder can even do 9
| instructions per cycle and that's without a cache.
|
| AMD's Zen 5 on the other hand has a 6K cache for
| instruction decoding allowing for 8 instructions per
| cycle, but still only a 4-wide decoder for each hyper-
| thread.
|
| And yet AMD is still ahead of intel in both performance
| and performance-per-watt. So maybe this whole instruction
| decode thing is not as important as people are saying.
| danaris wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It doesn't matter if there's an inherent, fundamental
| flaw in the ISA, if _Intel_ can 't, for whatever
| reason(s), develop an x86 chip that actually beats ARM on
| performance per watt in a broadly-applicable way.
| 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?
| saghm wrote:
| The key difference is that Valve isn't trying to make _Windows_
| work, just desktop gaming, which I 'd imagine is a large part
| of why Microsoft's efforts failed. As much as Linux desktops
| haven't particularly had much polish over the years, there's
| still an advantage to taking something bare bones and trying to
| flesh it out in a way that's works well compared to taking
| something that's already pretty bloated and then trying to
| retrofit it into something new.
| N_Lens wrote:
| It's mostly because Microsoft have lost focus & interest in the
| desktop OS market and have shifted priorities to cloud service
| (Azure). Right now Microsoft is a sleeping giant that doesn't
| see the writing on the wall regarding Valve's efforts.
| sylens wrote:
| Oh I think they see it, the problem is that they can't
| execute anymore. They are pivoting in the same direction but
| nobody wants to use the XBox Store on Windows and nobody
| trusts Game Pass anymore.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| They can't even make Explorer work. They're pathetic.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean by this. My wife's HP laptop
| has an ARM processor with Windows and it.. just works? Like
| everything works. The computer is super fast, quiet, great
| battery usage, ultrathin and even scary affordable for what you
| get. All software works. I've not found x64 programs to run
| noticeably worse, at least not the ones we use, and plenty
| programs have an ARM build.
|
| As a Windows user you don't even need to know that it's an ARM
| computer. Just use it like you'd use any other Windows
| computer.
|
| Don't just say stuff, man. This is not Twitter. Try to at least
| figure out whether you're vaguely directionally correct before
| writing snarky comments.
| xd1936 wrote:
| I think they meant that by most metrics, Windows on ARM has
| not yet had a market impact. Not that the product doesn't
| work.
|
| That being said, the mindshare well of "Windows on ARM" was
| poisoned by Windows RT, then later the objectively terrible
| performance of Windows 10 on ARM at launch.
| 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.)
| lmm wrote:
| > RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley.
|
| That doesn't matter any more than, IDK, the first maid
| cafes being American. China is where RISC-V is getting
| adopted, they're the ones who are running with it.
| 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.
| avianlyric wrote:
| It's not even close. Samsung alone ships around 400 million
| phones a year, that's 400 million ARM devices a year from a
| single manufacturer. The number of total consumer ARM
| devices sold each year is in the billions.
|
| RISC-V _total_ total estimated _market_ value is only
| around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V
| chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to
| increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM
| volumes, and even then it'll be half a decade for RISC-V
| devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-
| use devices, given there's many billions of ARM devices out
| there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.
| esskay wrote:
| RISCV is at least a decade, if not two from being useful enough
| for mainstream adoption. Neither the hardware or software is
| anywhere close to being ready.
| 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.
| avianlyric wrote:
| I don't think anyone can seriously hold up the PC gaming
| platform as a paragon of "supported configurations". The
| stupid number of tiny things that can cause a PC game to
| fail on a supposedly "supported configuration" is beyond
| ludicrous. To the point where I've personally given up
| running Windows completely because it's less reliable at
| actual running the game I care about than Proton is.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >End of discussion.
|
| And that's why Linux market share is a tiny drop in the
| pool. Devs have enough on their plates and being forced
| to do support for an attitude like this isn't in their
| budget.
|
| >Are you advocating pro-monopoly?
|
| Quite the contrary, I'd love for Valve to be taken down a
| notch.
|
| > Should developers only release games on Windows by
| default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
|
| If they want to be profitable, yes. If gamers really
| cared, they had 20, 30 years to put their money where
| their mouths were. Reality is often disappointing,
| though.
|
| My future endeavors actually want to have a Linux-first
| development stack. To make a properly Native linux game,
| not this sham of compatibility not-emulation layers. But
| I know that will take some adjustment and me not using
| the two most popular game engines to help. I'm definitely
| not doing this because I hope to maximize revenue. I
| simply am tired of being trapped in the confines of
| billionaires who have actively made my society worse. But
| that stand has an opportunity cost, one a business like
| Valve won't truly make.
| tomovo wrote:
| I don't think that's the end of the discussion. Let's try
| to talk separately about developers and publishers. I'm
| sure game developers would love to spend time making the
| game run on everything. But publishers work with a budget
| and schedule and have to consider the returns. If the
| potential new customers bring more support load and bad
| reviews, it's not worth it. That, I think, is the end of
| the discussion for the publisher.
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Real shame, you should try Ghosts of Yotei. It's good.
|
| Astro Bot is a personal favorite too. That one would be
| tricky to get the true experience on in terms of PC
| platform.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I probably will play them, once they're ported to PC and
| sold for $10 like TLoU and Death Stranding were. I
| haven't even played Tsushima yet.
|
| Neither one of them is a system-seller though. I don't
| think anyone feels FOMO because they missed the Day 1
| release of Gran Turismo, or didn't play Astro Bot with
| 7.1 Surround and HD haptics. Bloodborne was a magnum
| opus, Persona 5 had people lining up outside Best Buy to
| reserve a copy. The PS5 exclusive library is down right
| impoverished by comparison, to say nothing of the PC
| exclusives it lacks.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't really know if the concept of "system seller" is
| a thing anymore. Or at least, all those titles belong to
| Nintendo now. Sony's only had Gran Turismo and then made
| up for it with a consistent stream of first party titles.
| Not Nintendo level, but competitive. Xbox has 2 series
| and utterly bungled one of them. If you're not a racing
| sim fan, you're looking at the forest instead of the
| trees.
|
| All those true "seller" series were always 3rd party and
| they've all pretty much abandoned console deals mid Gen
| 8. Bloodborne was truly the lasst of its kind.
|
| The real "system seller" for the ps5 is a bunch of
| Japanese games that will never really be on Xbox and
| can't run on switch. So that depends on your taste.
| Japan's mostly come around on PC though, so it's not
| truly "exclusive" outside of the shaky optimization.
| 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.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| They aren't forced to fund anything. They have the option
| for an additional value add, that's all.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Valve is known for never funding games which is why my
| original comment expressed surprise. Of course they
| aren't forced to fund content on their platform, but I
| had thought they had changed their strategy.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The clsoest thing to funding we ever got was Activision
| getting Valve to lower the cut for big publishers so they
| could get onto Steam.
|
| Otherwise, I can't remember the last time they funded a
| game they didn't make themselves. Maybe in the very early
| Steam days, but that's long past.
| diath wrote:
| It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a
| developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source
| drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs.
| stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions,
| X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied
| support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa,
| PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.
| avianlyric wrote:
| What has that got to do with Valve providing a
| compatibility layer so devs can broadly ignore all that
| nonsense and just target Proton?
| mhast wrote:
| It is typically neither free nor open to develop on
| consoles. As in, you pay to access developer tools.
|
| iOS and Android less so (even if there is a one time charge
| for Android and a yearly charge on Apple). OTOH I have not
| heard of them usually reaching out to more than a handful
| of devs for promotion purposes.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You pay, but you get actual support from console makers.
| They kind of need to given how closed off it is
| otherwise. The competition also means larger profile
| studios (indie and AAA) will usually get some good deals
| to work with.
|
| The one time model from Apple/Android really is just a
| tax that gets you nothing but access in comparison. It's
| a full advert model where the biggest players throw
| millions at Apple/Android for visibility.
|
| Valve's somewhere in the middle of the two. No "p2w"
| adverts but it's not doing too much to draw devs (except
| reducing the tax for AAA devs). It doesn't need to. A lot
| of its community models are "we're having a party, you
| bring the food and drinks".
| 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.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| But is the disadvantage worth the relatively high
| overhead of specifically adding arm support? I doubt
| that. It is better game devs focus on what they're better
| at - x86 - while valve and open source devs focus on what
| they're better at, than trying to split funds across
| competing solutions to the problem.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The solutions have distant tradeoffs. When you want to
| run the latest PC games on mobile hardware using a
| battery, every cycle matters. Using translation layers
| for x86 will never be as good as as a native port.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Yeah. Also, software written for a wide gamut of hardware
| configs, even those under the same CPU ISA, will always
| be slower than software written for a unique hardware
| stack and only shipped for that hardware. Does it follow
| that all software should be written for specific
| hardware? I think not, because the performance overhead
| you take on allows saving on massive economic costs. It
| just isn't realistic to use development resources in that
| way. Even if devs are better at making ports for their
| games than fex, that takes precious time and money away
| from making the game, adding features, polishing, etc. It
| is much more realistic and sensible to focus on the
| comparative advantage than the absolute advantage [1].
|
| [1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/compar
| ativead...
| avianlyric wrote:
| But why would Valve do that, Steam is a game market
| place, that happens to provide a really powerful
| comparability layer to allow you to run many windows
| games on not windows. It's not a platform in any
| meaningful sense. The Steam deck is a platform, and the
| Steam frame, and if they can get existing games running
| on them, without involving the original devs what's the
| problem? Dev get a new market to sell their games into,
| Stream gets a new market to extend their store front
| onto, how is that not a clear win-win?
|
| Also Valve does fund plenty of games, such as all of the
| first party games you might have heard of, like Half
| Life, and its long tail of sequels and spin offs.
| danbolt wrote:
| The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the
| rendering lead muttered " _ew, no! we don't have time to figure
| that out!_ " and that was the end of the conversation.
|
| A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the
| binary's been compatible with Linux ever since.
| 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?
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, there was no actual low-level
| optimization being done. In fact, it appears they did not
| even think to benchmark before committing to 130gb of
| bloat. Further good news: the change in
| the file size will result in minimal changes to load
| times - seconds at most. "Wait a minute," I hear you ask
| - "didn't you just tell us all that you duplicate data
| because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times
| worse?". I am pleased to say that our worst case
| projections did not come to pass. These loading time
| projections were based on industry data - comparing the
| loading times between SSD and HDD users where data
| duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a
| 5x difference was reported between instances that used
| duplication and those that did not. We were being very
| conservative and doubled that projection again to account
| for unknown unknowns.
|
| This reads to me as "we did a google search about HDD
| loading times and built our game's infrastructure around
| some random Reddit post without reasoning about or
| benchmarking our own codebase at any point, ever".
| 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
| whazor wrote:
| Linux desktop is getting better every year, meanwhile Windows
| and arguably MacOS are getting worse every year.
| sipjca wrote:
| this is true, but linux desktop is still fragmented hell
| and will be for at least a few more years
| 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-...
| dralley wrote:
| AMD has an ARM chip in the works, and there's nothing
| about RDNA which makes it unsuitable for use alongside
| ARM.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Does ARM support PCIe, by the way? Or has no one combined
| ARM with a dGPU because it's ridiculous to combine a low-
| voltage CPU with a space heater from Nvidia?
| MayeulC wrote:
| The PCI bus has nothing to do with the instruction set.
| Usually it is just a block a designer can add to a chip,
| and connect to an internal bus like AXI, give or take a
| few other adjustments on the chip. You can have PCIe
| buses without proper CPUs, even: it's quite common to
| find them paired with FPGAs.
|
| For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few
| generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks
| it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug
| external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-
| raspberry-pi5/ (random link).
|
| Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power
| efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller,
| buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the
| Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure
| that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU
| designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.
| omikun wrote:
| The X2 [1] is suppose to be more competitive now.
|
| [1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/qualcomms-
| snapdragon-x2-elite
| 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.
| esskay wrote:
| Valves moving into hardware more than ever right now, not
| moving away from it. They've already sand multiple times a
| deck 2 is on the cards, but only when theres enough of a
| hardware bump to make it make sense as a product. Slapping a
| tiny bit newer cpu in there and calling it a Steam Deck 2
| isn't what Valve are about.
| 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.
| saghm wrote:
| > Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what
| you get and for what it can do
|
| I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where
| the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the
| Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as
| far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you
| literally can just use the system however you want as a
| desktop OS as a bonus...
| 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.
| saghm wrote:
| FWIW it's fairly straightforward to set up FSR4 with Proton-
| GE nowadays, assuming you're comfortable with editing one
| config file or manually specifying an env var for the
| game[1]. I'm not sure if using an alternate version of Proton
| would be considered "native" though, or if you mean for the
| default version of proton (or for Linux builds of games
| specifically), but setting it up is a fairly straightforward
| process even for people who might prefer not to use the
| terminal if you use something like ProtonUp to manage the
| installation for you. I imagine that the process for using a
| custom Proton isn't much different on Bazzite and CachyOS,
| although I'm not sure whether it would be something commonly
| done on CachyOS given that they have their own Proton
| distribution.
|
| [1]: I don't think there's a way to link to it directly, but
| `PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1` (or a specific different version if
| you'd like) is documented in the README in this table:
| https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-
| custom#modifica...
| saghm wrote:
| I recently bought a Legion Go S because the primary way I game
| nowadays is streaming from my desktop to a handheld, and the
| higher quality display (1900x1200 resolution with 120 Hz over
| the 1280x800 and 90 Hz on the Steam Deck OLED) seemed
| worthwhile given that my desktop can easily provide enough
| throughput to play with relatively high graphics settings. It
| came with SteamOS preinstalled, and from a software
| perspective, everything does seem pretty close to identical.
| The only things I've slightly missed from the Steam Deck are
| slight hardware nits with the Legion Go S; the placement of the
| equivalent of the two SteamOS-specific buttons (not sure
| exactly how to refer to them, but they're labeled "Steam" and
| "..." on the Deck) just above the Start and Select buttons
| while looking and feeling the same mixes me up sometimes in a
| way that never happened on the Deck, and I miss having four
| unmapped buttons on the back of the device that I can set up
| however I like in games rather than only two. I also tend to
| prefer having symmetrical thumbsticks higher up on the device
| rather than having one high and one low; I've noticed that my
| hands aren't quite as comfortable when using the D-pad for
| extended amounts of time, which is unfortunate given my
| preference for it when playing stuff like emulated GBA games
| (incidentally one of the few things I tend to do locally
| instead of streaming; the low power profile setting already is
| an easy battery life win when streaming, and in practice it
| make the battery life when GBA emulation also much more
| tolerable, along with keeping the fans much quieter without
| seeming to impact performance of the emulation, given that even
| with this setting the fast-forward function can go far faster
| than I'd ever need it to).
| 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.
| N_Lens wrote:
| Wow this is exciting news!
| 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.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| In a narrow sense, it did move along the story point at
| the end of HL2 (I won't explain how because there's no
| way to do so without massive spoilers). But yeah, it
| would be weird to call in HL3 just because of that.
| 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.
| jack1243star wrote:
| Calling Half-Life 2D somehow feels right and wrong at the
| same time but I get what you mean.
| petabyt wrote:
| Leaks disproved this in 2023. HLX is a single player non-vr
| PC game.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yes, I too have dabbled in that strongest of drugs called
| hopium.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| These rumors come from Tyler McVicker who regularly gets
| things wrong and makes stuff up in order to get clicks on
| youtube. I have no idea why anyone still takes him seriously
| in 2025.
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| That doesn't mean he isn't still making the important
| decisions.
| 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.
| Qwertious wrote:
| That doesn't mean they should be reliable speculation
| vehicles. AFAIK Valve hasn't interfered with the gifting
| of digital items, only sales.
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Very few people have a problem with just paying for
| cosmetics in a game. The main issue here is that it's
| gambling for cosmetics, rather than straightforwardly
| purchasing specific items.
| thesnide wrote:
| indeed. and the fact that it can be resold at will makes
| it much worse as you just created an gambling ecosystem
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Most people do have an issue with it, because every game
| that's replaced loot boxes with discrete cosmetics
| purchases has to then massively increase the price of
| them. For 20 bucks in Overwatch 1, you got (afaik) 10
| loot boxes which all had 4 random items. In Overwatch 2
| 20 bucks barely gets you single good skin.
|
| It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my
| experience, having been part of communities of both types
| of games.
| johnnyanmac 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?"
|
| Aren't people upset about both? The whole "gamble for
| features" is pretty much why the mobile market and
| console market are divorced in audiences (or at least,
| community).
|
| People are "more" upset about Valve here because this is
| in the console space. They've long dismissed the mobile
| scene as lost.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Aren't people upset about both?
|
| I'm sure a few people are, but typically no. People are
| aware that trading card games can be a monetary black
| hole, but Magic and similar games usually don't take the
| same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot
| boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper.
|
| > They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
|
| I'm not talking about the mobile market. Are you not
| aware that Magic the Gathering is a physical card game?
| (though it does have some digital implementations too)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Oh you're talking about trading card games? I thought we
| were comparing to the gacha/lootbox market.
|
| I think the simplest fact is that most people online
| don't think about offline product. Out of sight, out of
| mind. It's also an interesting market where WotC and Co.
| Actively try to avoid the resellers market. They don't
| want any risk in valuing individual cards themselves, so
| they stick to boosters.
|
| For digital stuff, you are inherently the market itself.
| So it's hard divorce yourself when you are the one who
| implemented trading and controlling rarities and drops.
| goosejuice wrote:
| > usually don't take the same heat for the business model
| that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're
| actually worse on paper.
|
| This is a weird claim. TCG/CCG is far worse than Valve's
| loot boxes. It's not even close. MTG Arena is huge btw,
| it's not a footnote.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Their point was that WotC doesn't get the same flak that
| Value does when MtG is worse, by far, than cosmetic loot
| boxes.
| goosejuice wrote:
| Yes, I'm calling that questionable. Says who? TCGs have
| entire formats designed in opposition to the high cost
| random booster shit. I think that's pretty good evidence
| that there's high negative sentiment.
|
| Valve is simply larger and took legal heat for people
| misusing the API.
| dataflow 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?"
|
| Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the
| first time I'm hearing about it.
|
| > 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.
|
| I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the
| way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance
| that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it
| is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're
| statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the
| other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case
| for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the
| price you might sell your item for; the market is the one
| responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not
| saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots
| of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling
| -- I'm just saying it's not _gambling_ , and so it makes
| sense that people react to it differently.
|
| For items that you _can 't_ trade (like where the
| platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling
| in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from
| the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption
| value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not
| gambling.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'm using "gambling" the same way it's typically used in
| these discussions. If you'd like to convince the rest of
| the internet that it should only apply to more
| traditional things like Poker or slots, where the house
| has some edge, be my guest.
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you IPO but the founders still have more than half the
| voting rights, you can fully ignore the public in all
| your decision making and there is nothing the other
| shareholders can do.
| consp wrote:
| Can't they sue you out of control? Fiduciary duty and
| all?
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you employed your cousin on a huge wage, probably yes.
|
| But if you're just running the company 'badly' (in the
| shareholders eyes), probably no.
| triceratops wrote:
| Fiduciary duty means "put the shareholders' interests
| above yours". Not "make the shareholders more and more
| money no matter what".
| triceratops wrote:
| Only kind of. The most obvious examples are big tech
| companies such as Meta or Alphabet. But they pay their
| employees in RSUs. If the stock price falls employees
| make less money and can be lured away.
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Could also consider: employee ownership and public
| ownership
|
| People complain about the latter because they have higher
| expectations because the institution is supposed to serve
| them and often has all the diseases of true scale without
| being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry
| skates by because people assume it's out to screw them
| and they can cherry pick.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You hypothesis then is that there is not a _single_
| public company that has a healthy relationship with its
| company? Not one, in the entire global public space?
|
| When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it
| at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they
| contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it
| that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate
| going public was doomed to unhealthy customer relations
| from birth?
|
| The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish
| public equity as a concept as a customer protection
| mechanism?
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| > Not one, in the entire global public space?
|
| It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all
| companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully
| expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any
| time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some
| companies that are more likely to find a mutually
| beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA,
| sometimes Apple. But I don't trust any of those companies
| to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn't be
| the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any
| of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to
| be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or
| Verizon.
| tomrod wrote:
| Fortune 500 companies are particularly neurotic example
| of 'all' companies.
| kilna wrote:
| Sure, but very modestly due to scale, not core
| institutional morals. Go to your average small business
| with 10 or so people and ask the staff how they are
| treated and paid, and you'll get an answer not much
| different than the level of employee satisfaction for
| Fortune 500 companies. Look a their customer reviews...
| are small restaurants for instance an order of magnitude
| different that megacorp chains? In an economy with
| regulatory capture and highly unequal distribution of
| wealth, the wealthy set the tone across the board.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Costco is public, according to wikipedia.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| That is a good point. I wonder how they have managed not
| to succumb to the pressure to squeeze their users more.
| Miraste wrote:
| It's not instant (well, sometimes it is), more of a slow
| but inexorable push down a hill. Some public companies
| are farther along the path than others, but if the
| company continues to exist and profit it's inevitable.
| For example, there are no S&P 500 companies with healthy
| customer relationships.
| nicoburns wrote:
| From what I can see, it's often when the founder loses
| control of the company (either voluntarily (e.g.
| retirement) or not) and it falls to the board
| (representing the shareholders) to appoint the CEO. At
| that point it's at best a toss up whether they'll appoint
| someone who actually intends to create value or someone
| who intends to extract value.
|
| > The obvious next thing we in society should do is
| abolish public equity as a concept as a customer
| protection mechanism?
|
| Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are
| lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing
| to protect society from the negative externalities it
| causes. For example:
|
| - Mandating worker representation on company boards. So
| shareholders still have some power, but less.
|
| - Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more
| tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller
| companies which generally have less problematic
| externalities.
| noirscape wrote:
| It's not _impossible_ to run a publicly owned company in
| the US that isn 't insanely hostile towards it's
| customers or employees... it's just really damn difficult
| because of bad legal precedent.
|
| Dodge v. Ford is basically the source of all these
| headaches; the Dodge Brothers owned shares in Ford. Ford
| refused to pay the dividends he had to pay to the Dodge
| Brothers, suspecting that they'd use the dividends to
| start their own car company (he wasn't wrong about that
| part). The Dodge Brothers sued Ford, upon which Fords
| defense for not paying out dividends was "I'm investing
| it in my employees" (an obvious lie, it was very
| blatantly about not wanting to pay out). The judge sided
| with the Dodge Brothers and the legal opinion included a
| remark that the primary purpose of a director is to
| produce profit to the shareholders.
|
| That's basically become US business doctrine ever since,
| being twisted into the job of the director being to
| _maximize_ profits to the shareholders. It 's slightly
| bunk doctrine as far as I know; the actual precedent
| would mostly translate to "the shareholders can fire the
| directors if they think they don't do a good job" (since
| it can be argued that as long as any solid justification
| exists, producing profit for the shareholders can be
| assumed[0]; Dodge v. Ford was largely Ford refusing to
| follow his contracts with money that Dodge knew Ford had
| in the bank), but nobody in the upper areas of management
| wants to risk facing lawsuits from shareholders arguing
| that they made decisions that go against shareholder
| supremacy[1]. And so, the threats of legal consequences
| morph into the worst form of corporate ghoulishness
| that's so pervasive across every publicly traded company
| in the US. It's why short-term decision making dominates
| long-term planning for pretty much every public company.
|
| [0]: This is called the "business judgement rule", where
| courts will broadly defer the judgement on if a business
| is ran competently or not to the executives of that
| business.
|
| [1]: Tragically, just because it's bunk legal theory,
| doesn't change that the potential and disastrous
| consequences of lawsuits in the US are a very real thing.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| It is not broadly believed in corporate governance
| circles that there is a legal requirement to maximize
| shareholder value. Nor will you find court judgements
| that require it.
|
| If anything Milton Friedman is more responsible for this
| idea that shareholder maximizing is the corporate goal.
| That is an efficient market argument though not a legal
| one and he framed it long after the dodge suit. He needed
| to frame that argument because so many firms were _not_
| doing that.
|
| But just because a Chicago school economist says
| something about governance doesn't mean it's broadly
| applicable in the same way an Austrian economists
| opinions about inflation aren't iron rules about monetary
| policy.
| tomrod wrote:
| Theory of abundance, you could classify your approach as.
| Rather than artificial scarcity to exercise market power.
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Furthermore, PE ownership generally means (a) achieving
| ROI as quickly as possible (including by dismantling the
| company and/or mortgaging its assets), (b) installing
| leadership who has no ties to the business, and (c)
| cutting costs to the bone.
|
| It's not just functionally equivalent to an IPO... it's
| an IPO if all the buying new shareholders were
| sociopaths.
|
| (Yes, there are the PE companies who run businesses
| better like Berkshire, but that's far from the most
| common type of PE)
| groby_b wrote:
| The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment
| vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making
| games as their calling.
|
| No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but
| he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional
| level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop,
| he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
|
| Passion matters.
| nottorp wrote:
| But does he have a plan for when he retires?
|
| Is it good enough or should we be monitoring his health
| and hoard torrents of our steam collection just in case?
| Macha wrote:
| This is the problem of governance by "the good king", and
| no, there isn't a clear succession plan, so things will
| probably get worse in a post-gaben world
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of this reasoning when in the same
| breath: Epic is also a private company but has its share
| of stuff.
|
| It's done some good stuff for the industry and even
| contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is
| still business.
| cromka wrote:
| I think the point was about publicly traded companies
| becoming inevitably evil due to shareholder expectations,
| not about private companies being inherently ethical.
| wilg wrote:
| This is a pretty serious problem, since we would like
| lots of companies to participate in public markets so
| that regular people can gain some of the upside and so
| there is transparency and increased oversight.
| bfg_9k wrote:
| I find it so weird that you say public companies being
| 'evil' (which is to turn a profit) is a problem, yet you
| also say you'd like for companies to exist on the public
| market so that the public can access some of the upside.
| wilg wrote:
| I didn't say that?
| quitit wrote:
| Attributing it to private company behaviour really
| minimises what Valve chooses to do. Per your counter
| example: Epic Games has been having a very public
| meltdown this week regarding Steam's inclusion of Gen-AI
| labelling - here we have two private companies, with two
| very different priorities.
|
| It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled
| with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking
| kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1) Epic
| also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds,
| going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in
| retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
|
| Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal
| communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and
| implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve
| the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches
| to optimise it.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2022/12/...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't really get it myself. I personally don't give
| Steam credit for weakly saying 'hey you need to label
| something'. Let me know when really enforce it. Heck, let
| me know when they at least add a filter. That's when you
| can really impact the behaviour (or prove consumers
| really don't care).
|
| But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of
| evil.
| quitit wrote:
| Yeah we also need to get out of the dichotomous thinking
| that companies are either all good or all bad.
|
| Companies will do things that represent their interests,
| sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or
| the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things
| where they believe the profitability will outweigh the
| blowback.*
|
| It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly
| loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal
| one.
|
| *The Epic example is useful because their actions
| represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
| komali2 wrote:
| Valve's employee handbook: https://assets.sbnation.com/as
| sets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_Lo...
|
| They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven
| organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the
| consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a
| veto to ship Steam with half life 2.
|
| It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate
| similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved
| in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles
| of money.
| palata wrote:
| > And they make oodles of money.
|
| I see it the other way round: they can do all that
| _because_ they print money.
|
| Not that it's necessarily a bad thing: maybe they stay
| relevant because they are doing that.
| bloqs wrote:
| this is widely known (been discussed on here many times)
| that the employee handbook was marketing apparatus and
| doesnt reflect how the business actually works day to
| day, and never did
| komali2 wrote:
| Really? It aligns with what I've been watching employees
| say in various interviews, such as the recent half life
| anniversary series of interviews. Would love to read more
| if you could point me in the right direction.
| quitit wrote:
| >We have reached a point where the shareholders are a
| companies real customers and that is who they all try to
| attract.
|
| We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no
| profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their
| entire business runs on investment and they're posturing
| themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can
| keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors
| (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).
| ghurtado wrote:
| That's not unique to AI though. That's very common for
| tech startups.
|
| If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it
| works.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Ponzi schemes work* too.
|
| *At a specific point in time and for certain investors
| positron26 wrote:
| Please just talk about capital and leverage like an
| adult. Do you expect a CFO and their team to look at the
| math and say, "Well, we figured out that we can speed up
| adoption and bring forward billions of dollars of revenue
| by spending fewer billions from capital injection and
| debt deals this year" and then not do it?
| tomrod wrote:
| Adults tell jokes too, especially gallows humor, and to
| great effect.
|
| Ergo I propose grandparent commentator inject more humor
| in their clear understanding of leverage and debt to
| widen your, my, and their audiences' understanding
| regarding debt and leverage beyond your proposed metaphor
| of the toddler CFO failing the marshmallow challenge.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| [Slaps roof of barge]
|
| You can fit zo many tulips in this bad boy
| positron26 wrote:
| What doesn't work are the predictions of Uber's collapse,
| of which there were many, cheered on by a great deal who
| still gather here looking for the next things to see
| through.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| I am personally betting on Uber's collapse for the
| obvious reason: it won't compete with robotaxis and AV
| companies would rather have customers on their own apps
| rather than Uber's platform.
|
| Just unsure about the timing
| palata wrote:
| > Just unsure about the timing
|
| Right after we get nuclear fusion and a million people on
| Mars.
| peppersghost93 wrote:
| Uber actually has a service that's worth paying for. I
| can't say I feel the same about most AI slop factories.
| quitit wrote:
| While AI is an example, it's an extreme one - the
| uniqueness here is that the AI companies have very large
| spend commitments that exceed expected cash generation,
| even under presumption of no faults and very strong
| revenue assumptions because infrastructure costs outpace
| revenue by a significant margin.(1)
|
| This differs quite a bit from a typical venture-backed or
| boot-strapped entity, which has a realistic pathway to
| profitability.
|
| https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/hsbc-warns-openai-
| coul...
| wqaatwt wrote:
| But isn't Valve extremely profitable compared to pretty
| much non private company in the industry?
|
| They have few employees and massive revenue.
| Qwertious wrote:
| They're the #1 most profitable _per employee_. There are
| plenty of companies more profitable than Valve, but they
| have more employees. Valve could hire more employees.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yes, I meat profit margin which is what public investors
| care about (in addition to growth).
|
| And IIRC Valve and EA had almost exactly the same revenue
| figures last year, yet EA had 10x more employees.
|
| On paper it would seem extremely appealing to public
| investors.
| aydyn wrote:
| Private or public, they are making stacks hand over fist.
| Why cant other companies learn that being good to your
| customers is a winning strategy?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Because it's not, all other things equal.
|
| Valve can be Valve because HL + Steam, in the same way
| that Google ~2010 could not be evil because search + ad
| revenue.
|
| The difference is that Google IPO'd and took market
| capital, and Valve didn't.
|
| Once public investors are onboard, you maximize profits
| or face lawsuits.
| aydyn wrote:
| But thats the point, Valve IS maximizing profits. If they
| treated their customers like Epic does, do you think
| people would still be using Valve when Epic is generally
| a bit cheaper?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The entire point of this thread is that there are many
| things that Valve could do to increase its profits over
| the short, intermediate, and long terms... that it
| doesn't (presumably because that's not the kind of
| company it wants to be).
|
| As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a
| third party game and made several millions of dollars
| with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that
| bad HL").
|
| In more realistic terms, they could have built
| proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are
| funding a lot of development, apparently) to give
| themselves a unique advantage.
|
| If they were a publicly traded company, they probably
| would be doing all these things.
| aydyn wrote:
| I don't see a problem with the first, if they want to
| outsource HL3 go ahead. Consumers can decide if they want
| to buy it when it releases, that's just normal economics.
|
| As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet
| Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these
| anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable,
| why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute
| numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing
| at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers
| despite giving away hundreds of games.
|
| Developing open source emulation is essential to their
| success - no developer would build and verify for Steam
| OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available
| on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer
| is what makes them successful.
| happymellon wrote:
| > So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were
| actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
|
| Because it is "common wisdom" even if the wisdom is short
| sighted and doesn't always amount to increased profits.
|
| See Netflix removing the ability to cast, because fuck
| you. How much of the current growth is borne out of that
| crackdown on people using all their profiles they pay
| for?
|
| There currently isn't a "good guy" so they can keep
| turning those screws and force some extra growth. Being
| anti-consumer would be beneficial for Valve because they
| are currently the only good guys.
| vjk800 wrote:
| > So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were
| actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
|
| Because there's a huge network effect in play here and
| Valve was first in the market.
| aydyn wrote:
| That doesnt explain their surge in growth only in recent
| years, its not like gaming is new. No, its all the new
| features they are offering and goodwill they have
| engendered.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| One of the characteristic of network effects is that you
| see growth, simply by virtue of being the first/biggest.
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a
| corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it
| _should_ be a good thing; being publicly owned _should_
| mean that your corporation has turned from a private
| business venture into effectively public infrastructure
| that 's impossible to boycott and depended on to some
| extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements
| should be (and are) public and transparent, and the
| company should be able to be externally steered via
| regular elections in a manner that benefits the public
| and not just its founders.
|
| The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term,
| majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to
| the customers or employees of the business, but first the
| founders, and then parties who are merely interested in
| rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the
| solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights
| from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling
| the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps,
| allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k)
| index funds?)
|
| (There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet,
| which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow
| shareholders to vote on anything.)
| mcny wrote:
| > (There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet,
| which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow
| shareholders to vote on anything.)
|
| You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes
| per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook
| and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
| tomrod wrote:
| And, famously, Berkshire Hathaway
| avadodin wrote:
| Share classes can be very varied(such as preferred shares
| that get what's left after bond debt is paid off on
| bankruptcy) but generally what he's proposing(a coop-
| style one-head-one-vote class) is not common. Not sure if
| it's legal for US corporations or not(I could swear it is
| but in any case it's exceedingly rare). The usual
| principle is one-share-one-vote.
| taftster wrote:
| Yes, exactly. It's kind of a wink-wink nudge-nudge at
| this point. A company citing "public good" under the
| guise of "shareholder value" is not actually supporting
| the public good at all.
|
| Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or
| communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's
| in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe
| in an ism, he should believe in himself.
|
| But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect
| the greater good just as much as a public company. The
| rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just
| there to support that transfer of wealth.
| lvass wrote:
| >On paper it should be a good thing
|
| Not really. Most people have terribly low time
| preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when
| you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed
| explanation). Public company ownership is much better
| because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but
| still susceptible to much of the same management
| problems, specially in a society that already favors
| lower time preference by other means.
| avadodin wrote:
| I do not deeply disagree with your statement but I do not
| see the two as exclusive.
|
| I think distributed public ownership placed in a
| corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to
| harvest residual good decisions from a
| citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a
| single decision derived from some other issue a majority
| of citizens favor.
|
| Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of
| voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track
| record.
| guelo wrote:
| fwiw, Hoppe has become a darling of the extremist
| authoritarian "alt-right" (curtis yarvin, etc) but has
| been rejected by more mainstrean thinkers including most
| libertarian factions.
| faidit wrote:
| The wealthiest 10% of Americans own like 90% of stocks,
| and the top 1% own 50%. While the poorest 50% of the
| population own about 1% of the stock market.
|
| So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be
| confusing because it can also mean state control) just
| means it's open for the elite to invest in.
| nish__ wrote:
| It's amazing to me how many people don't get this.
| Gormo wrote:
| Well, considering that it doesn't seem to be an accurate
| statement, it shouldn't be so amazing that people don't
| "get" it.
|
| By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded
| firms are "institutional investors", but those are
| themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing
| mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks'
| 401(k) plans and pensions.
| nish__ wrote:
| What? "Doesn't seem to be an accurate statement"? What
| part? Those numbers are actually conservative. According
| to Yahoo Finance[0], it's actually 93% of the stock
| market is owned by the wealthiest 10% of American
| households. And the bottom 50% of Americans own ~1%. You
| "seem" to be mistaken and you're talking out of your ass.
|
| [0]
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-
| own-9...
| Gormo wrote:
| The article you're citing doesn't link to its sources,
| but seems to be talking about _direct_ stock ownership by
| _households_ , and not explicitly stating how it's
| accounting for investment funds.
| nish__ wrote:
| I think it's accounting for indirect ownership as well.
| That would be very misleading and irresponsible reporting
| if it weren't.
| twoodfin wrote:
| "Just"? As if there aren't pension funds and 401(k)s and
| IRAs serving >100 million Americans via investment in
| public companies?
|
| "Open for the elite" how?
| tapland wrote:
| :)
|
| You still don't have a say and the investor is also the
| customer. How is it democracy or keeping companies to
| being good for society.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Have you considered the possibility that 401ks and
| pension funds etc are included in those numbers?
|
| Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't
| have enough money to matter.
|
| The richest people are so much richer than everyone else
| that there's no comparison. You could grab a million
| average people off the street and all of you combined
| probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about
| that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other
| people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small
| country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more
| of them.
|
| Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
| breppp wrote:
| Not sure what does that mean. Americans poor and wealthy
| are in the top 10% of the world wealthiest and own a huge
| part of the world stock value accordingly.
|
| That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across
| everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
| tapland wrote:
| So it's more like the top 0.001% who have the voting
| majority in this wonderful democratic system we all have
| our life savings dumped into.
|
| What was your attempted point? Or did you not understand
| the issue that was brought up?
| throwaway68108 wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? Why would I want someone who can't
| even manage their own money to manage my life savings? If
| anything I'd expect a company where the decisions are in
| the hands of 99% John Smiths and 1% Warren Buffets to be
| even more short sighted, *especially* when it comes to
| splurging on dividends.
| rmunn wrote:
| Could you link to how that measurement was taken? Because
| I very much want to know whether it counts things like
| mutual funds, or whether it only measures direct
| ownership of stocks. E.g. I have a bunch (though not all)
| of my retirement savings in an index fund that owns
| partial shares of the top 500 US companies (as listed by
| Standard & Poor's). So depending on how that S&P 500 fund
| is measured in those statistics, I either own shares in
| the top 500 companies, or I'm counted as not owning any
| shares. The latter would produce a very misleading
| statistic, because I am very much not the only person who
| invests in the stock market via mutual funds.
|
| So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge
| the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the
| info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so
| wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none
| of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would
| likely be in the top 50%).
| jampekka wrote:
| These figures seem to include ownership of mutual funds.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01122
| safety1st wrote:
| "The major reason is they are a private company with good
| business..."
|
| This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a
| really low information meme that's racing around the
| Internet right now. If you want a contemporary
| counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not
| publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are
| abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're
| gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know
| all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided
| to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out
| in discovery at the moment.
|
| The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the
| moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing
| stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by
| Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term
| competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses
| both private and public work for your dollar. The US
| economy has been characterized by a decrease in
| competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now
| which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer
| practices.
| jszymborski wrote:
| > ...they're family owned
|
| Well that's your problem there.
|
| I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the
| good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable
| approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Companies doing things for the common good because they
| feel threatened by competiton is the whole idea behind
| Capitalism.
| palata wrote:
| Except when Capitalism has favoured monopolies for
| decades and is actually closer to Feodalism.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Monopolies need to be restricted by regulations. In micro
| economics there is a term marginal cost, and economy of
| scale. In the software as a service era, the cost of
| serving one extra customer is minimal, so it make
| economic sense for such companies to grow infinitely.
| This is why our current system do not work. As the best
| strategy is to become as big as possible and capture the
| entire market.
| safety1st wrote:
| There is a bit of a debate about what to call the
| American economic system these days, but I think we
| should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one
| that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah
| baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of
| Nations.
|
| It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the
| most successful fascist regimes - the best term for
| modern American economics might be "democratic fascist."
| There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy
| intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses,
| but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to
| the ruling party. This is not much different from how
| Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy.
| Basically have your system revolve around private
| ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually
| make very centralized decisions and execute them through
| a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with.
| The uniquely American flavor is that there are two
| parties which do this instead of one (but three would be
| unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits
| you signal loyalty to without being executed.
| simonh wrote:
| On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type
| you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well
| regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian
| oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU
| country; Russia.
| palata wrote:
| Very insightful, thanks for that comment!
|
| I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US
| (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a
| "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as
| big (I guess partly due to regulations).
|
| And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say,
| Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get
| help from their authoritarian system (through the
| government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US
| monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western
| world, right?
| xethos wrote:
| > The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the
| moment
|
| Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is
| greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally
| viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
|
| Are they doing good things for Linux? Abso _lutely_. As a
| long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where
| we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit
| because Microsoft is abusive.
| palata wrote:
| > But the general populaton only gives a shit because
| Microsoft is abusive.
|
| I hear that for every major Windows release. And after 6
| months everybody is fine with it.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It seems different this time. Windows is worse and Linux
| is better than at previous defenestration opportunities.
| philip-b wrote:
| >The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the
| moment
|
| Ok, but this "at the moment" has lasted at least since
| 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a
| pretty great company delivering value and not being
| annoying.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not that being private _guarantees_ that the company
| will behave well. But it does make it _possible_.
| emilecantin wrote:
| I think there should perhaps be a law that any
| corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable
| VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the
| employees. Everybody with an employment contract with
| this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less;
| whether they're the janitor or the CEO.
|
| Employees of a company are the ones who are the most
| affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that
| they have a say.
| bravoetch wrote:
| How much is a vote worth in dollars? Because there would
| be a market for those votes, not just a spot market for
| dollars or internal market using vacation days, it would
| be reflected in salary and benefits and company policy
| etc.
| echoangle wrote:
| Couldn't you just make the voting anonymous to make sure
| that buying votes isn't possible? Why wouldn't I just
| take your money and still vote however I like?
| chongli wrote:
| A law like this just means getting full time employment
| becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of
| people working for a company will be non-voting
| contractors without benefits. The existing employees
| would even vote for changes that make full time hiring
| more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own
| votes.
| emilecantin wrote:
| It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous
| enforcement of employee classification. I know there
| would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there
| are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't
| want to make my comment too long.
|
| Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between
| the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
| chongli wrote:
| I think you'll find that won't actually work in practice.
| Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but
| actually employees of a different company who contracts
| the work out as a whole.
|
| For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of
| its workers but the packages it delivers are for other
| companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you
| force all businesses to employ their own couriers then
| UPS can't even exist as a company and small businesses
| that depend on courier services would simply be unable to
| function at all.
| dboreham wrote:
| It's a common pattern. If you're in their service area
| compare both the food served by, and the employment
| practices of In-n-out Burger (private) vs McDonald's
| (public).
| talideon wrote:
| You can at least in part blame Milton Friedman for this
| mess. His reframing of ficudiary duty as profit
| maximisation in his "shareholder theory" has done a
| tremendous amount of damage. The wariness of people when
| it comes to public companies is a direct consequence of
| this.
| flaminHotSpeedo wrote:
| My understanding of the contemporary argument against
| publicly traded companies, though I'm not completely
| convinced of them personally, are that the fiduciary
| obligations inevitably drive those bad behaviors, and/or
| that shareholders often demand short term returns at the
| expense of long term value.
|
| As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be
| important to expand voters' influence over the company in
| addition to voting changes like you described. I don't
| know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be
| able to influence or directly decide much lower level
| business decisions than they currently do
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >and the company should be able to be externally steered
| via regular elections in a manner that benefits the
| public and not just its founders.
|
| Why would anyone believe that this means an organization
| is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany
| we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of
| the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family
| owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd
| rather trust a company whose leaders have their family
| name and reputation staked on it for the next three
| generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the
| public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is
| responsible.
|
| If you want to see what happens under public ownership
| visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally
| steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered
| by a handful of people with names and addresses.
| Xixi wrote:
| There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership
| [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk,
| Bosch or Patagonia.
|
| LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a
| company's control stays with long-term stewards
| (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation)
| while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold
| for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission
| permanently."
|
| The key, if I understand properly, is that these company
| cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no
| "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also
| probably not a good way for founders to maximize their
| net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership
| nikanj wrote:
| This model, unfortunately, often leads to a "well, we
| might as well spend the extra profits on executive
| benefits"-issue. Whenever you have money without
| oversight, you always face a moral hazard.
|
| If the company makes a profit and there aren't
| shareholders there to keep the stewards in check,
| excesses can and do develop.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I get the first point, but having shareholders doesn't
| solve that in any way. Shareholders would just give
| themselves payouts instead of letting the execs take
| everything as bonuses. And unlike the execs, whose
| bonuses could be limited by charter and who could be
| chosen on the basis of trust, shareholders are "whoever
| has the most money to throw around", so there's no
| mechanism to align them with company values.
|
| So it's not perfect, but it sure as hell beats having
| shareholders.
| xp84 wrote:
| > Shareholders would just give themselves payouts
|
| Precisely, in the form of the #1 trend of public
| companies, stock buybacks! I've seen aggressive buybacks
| take a company with a ton of money in the bank and a
| profitable business and drive it right to Chapter 7
| bankruptcy in just a few short years.
| Xixi wrote:
| Steward-ownership is a philosophy more than an actual
| structure, my understanding is that each such company is
| in practice structured somewhat differently.
|
| This article explains roughly how Patagonia is
| structured: https://medium.com/@purpose_network/the-
| patagonia-structure-...
|
| For Patagonia a trust owns 100% of the voting rights,
| while a charity collects 100% of the dividends. I don't
| doubt that there are ways the structure could be
| subverted, but it's a far cry from "money without
| oversight".
|
| Do you have examples of Steward-owned companies that
| ended up with "well, we might as well spend the extra
| profits on executive benefits"-issues?
|
| (I personally think Steam should go in that direction,
| otherwise I'm afraid enshittification is unavoidable once
| Gabe Newell is no longer at the helm)
| dahauns wrote:
| Huh, fascinating. The Patagonia structure is actually
| strikingly similar to the Bosch model - non-profit owning
| the shares, but no voting rights, trust having voting
| rights but no shares - just taking it to the logical 100%
| conclusion without the residual influence of the Bosch
| family (having retained a few percent in both).
|
| The model has worked well for many decades for a 100
| billion$ revenue company like Bosch, good to see others
| taking a cue from them.
|
| (Also goes to show that even constructs like these are
| not safe from corporate fuckups - see the emissions
| scandal...)
| bux93 wrote:
| It's not as if public companies don't overspend on
| executive compensation. I think one CEO recently asked
| for a trillion dollar compensation package?
| simonh wrote:
| I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion
| dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars.
|
| I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on
| fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently,
| but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could
| make it happen.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The thing is, the compensation is only based on it
| happening, not on him making it happen. "I make you 8
| trillion dollars" rests on a strong assumption that it
| all comes from the CEO.
|
| This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the
| spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much
| credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won't just
| be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other
| employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but
| comparing compensation, I don't think it's proportionally
| smaller.
| panick21_ wrote:
| One of the issues with founders is that they get really
| into one specific idea and sink the company, rather then
| to switch strategy.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| As opposed to shareholders, who ravenously seek to
| maximize short term profits and sink the company.
| arcfour wrote:
| That's why there are no publicly-traded companies more
| than a decade or two old. Oh, wait...
| delecti wrote:
| The comment you replied to was just pointing out that,
| like how a founder-held company can get stuck pursuing
| the founder's obsession, a stock market held company can
| also single-mindedly pursue quarterly gains to the
| detriment of long-term health.
|
| There are old companies in either model.
| arcfour wrote:
| It didn't say _can_. It stated it rather definitively,
| which I wanted to point out the absurdity of.
| 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.
| Miraste wrote:
| We're too far into the grip of monopolies for that. Apple
| would never let a full version of Steam run on iPads.
| Google wouldn't either.
|
| I think more ARM Valve hardware is likely.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| The only play I see here is a legitimate Valve console to
| take on XBOX and Sony. Plus Arm on a Steam Deck would
| improve the battery life considerably (assuming they are
| able to integrate with some powerful GPU solution).
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| yes. it aligns, for now. But only for now. all those
| FAANG's had the same status too, once upon a time.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Valve predates Google by two years (at least per the
| wiki), and was started by Microsoft employees who didn't
| particularly like Microsoft's operation. Hoping Valve has
| a long future ahead of them :)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, and they shifted from being a gamik studio to a
| middleman. The signs are already there, but greed arrives
| all the same.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Valve has had all the triggers and opportunities to
| change for the worse and it didn't. Short of Gabe Newell
| not controlling it anymore, I don't see what would ruin
| it now.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You can argue they did, depending on what you value. If
| you loved valve as a premier developer discovering unique
| experiences and narratives, thars been gone for 14 years
| now. If you valued not having your software locked down
| to middlemen or preferred physical media, Valved killed
| those off in the PC market. If you are a dev and wanted
| to set your own prices, Valve is current under litigation
| for price parties.
|
| Its not all sunshine and windows.
|
| >Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I
|
| In the same way Bill Gates did not force you to use
| Internet Explorer, yes. Both are free applications with
| alternatives. Let's not forget our history.
| account42 wrote:
| > Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore
|
| That's only a matter of time, and probably not a very
| long time.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Sure, Valve may turn bad after Gaben. It is also possible
| that he thought of something for the long term that will
| prevent enshittification. Some companies have managed.
| energy123 wrote:
| Sure but it's just being morally lucky. They found
| themself in a situation where there was temporary and
| situational alignment, why give them any credit for that?
| They didn't create that situation.
|
| It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing
| Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever
| become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to
| closed source quicker than you can blink, because the
| reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the
| public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do
| good.
| harrall wrote:
| I strongly disagree with this approach in life.
|
| I am "morally lucky" because every decision I make is to
| ensure I can always be morally lucky, 10 years later. I
| take certain kinds of jobs in certain kinds of
| industries.
|
| It's my same approach to reducing stress or getting
| things done. I never get a parking ticket not because I'm
| amazing -- it's because I know if I have to go out later
| and move my car, I'll forget, so I'll just park right the
| first time. 10 years later and no parking tickets and no
| stress -- if someone tells me "oh you're just lucky," I
| can only chuckle.
| energy123 wrote:
| I don't see it as an "approach", I see it as a
| description. If the FSR upscaler becomes better than
| DLSS, then my description leads to the prediction that
| AMD will make FSR closed source. The prevailing camp that
| says AMD are exercising their moral compass will predict
| that AMD will keep FSR open source. We'll see who has a
| description that aligns with reality if that day comes.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Sure but it's just being morally lucky.
|
| No, it's not. They're choosing the path that builds user
| trust and positive sentiment for long term success,
| rather than choosing to fleece their customers and not
| worry about whether people hate it.
|
| Other corporations in a similar spot for games and game
| platforms _could_ choose to make the same type of
| choices, but they 'd rather boost next quarter's profits,
| even if that means pissing off their userbase with
| consumer-hostile policies.
|
| No one forced Valve to have a great form of family
| sharing. No one forced them to have generous policies
| around generating Steam keys. No one forced them to
| invent remote play together. They do these things because
| they're nice features that are useful for players and
| make people stay engaged on Steam, and more positively
| inclined towards Valve.
| Lutger wrote:
| Why not give them credit for that? There is no moral rule
| that to be virtuous, it has to be self-sacrificial. If
| you narrow a commendable course of action to some sort of
| ascetic vision of martyrdom and self-punishment, then yes
| everybody and everything is evil.
|
| So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances
| will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They
| have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the
| bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight
| and their culture will push them to stay the course on
| the long term, where other companies will do the reverse.
| Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone
| faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive,
| including the worst imaginable?
|
| Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the
| business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts
| of decisions based on values and visions that are more
| than just economical, especially companies not beholden
| to shareholders that only care about short-term profits.
| Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and
| often done from some kind of cultural bias.
| WD-42 wrote:
| I don't see it. Stricter kernel access is pressure on
| game devs, not Valve. And I don't see MS booting steam
| off windows any time soon.
|
| It's more about Valve having complete control over the
| stack and being able to vertically integrate, something
| they will never have with windows, especially as it
| continues to enshittify
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I still put them in the same box as Apple until they fix
| the price parity and/or adjust their cut. Even Apple is
| finally having their hand forced there.
|
| They are relatively better, but we still need to keep
| monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to
| remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the
| rampant greed these days.
| LtWorf wrote:
| The difference is that you aren't forced to buy a game
| from steam.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You're not forced to buy an Iphone. You also weren't
| forced back in the day to use Internet explorer.
|
| We should remember our history so we aren't doomed to
| repeat it.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You are forced to have a phone and there's only 2 bad
| choices.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Technically 3. Not much different from the Desktop
| situation. Just replace Microsoft with Google because
| Microsoft had the grace to bow out early.
|
| Similar to desktop, I choose the middle ground between
| true freedom and walled garden. At least you Can de-
| googlefy 95% of Android. More than you can de-microsoft
| Windows.
| LtWorf wrote:
| 3?
| account42 wrote:
| Depends on the game - some are not available anywhere
| else.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Even there, didn't they recently make some changes to the
| CS go skins ecosystem to devalue much of the aftermarket
| sales.
| enedil wrote:
| Don't forget GoG which is an alternative game store with a
| strong anti-DRM stance (all the games there are DRM free).
| 5d41402abc4b wrote:
| Steam makes installing windows games easy. With GoG i
| would need to setup wine myself.
| M95D wrote:
| ^ The essence of why we're doomed.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Because Steam gives customers useful features that are
| good? GoG should also directly support Linux.
| M95D wrote:
| > GoG should also directly support Linux.
|
| GOG is an online shop. It shouldn't support anything but
| browsers, bank cards and download managers.
| M95D wrote:
| > Because Steam gives customers useful features that are
| good?
|
| No, because users are lazy enough to not support the
| better option.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| GOG has a strong anti-DRM stance, but unfortunately not
| all of the games GOG sells are truly DRM-free if you
| consider things like online services and online service
| requirements and live patching/live service. Often
| considered the worst offender is Sony published games
| with some of the worst root kit anti-cheat installs still
| bundled in the GOG edition, with mandatory online "data
| collection" for the game to run, even for single player
| games.
|
| GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file
| for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values
| on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up
| offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection
| terms and installing the rootkit.
|
| I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd
| love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone
| can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from
| major publishers having "required" online services. It's
| a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term
| archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony
| will ever unlock the game or open source the service at
| the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to
| prefer to just leave those games unplayable).
| anilakar wrote:
| When you're skimming 30 % off worldwide PC game purchases
| you can afford to do that.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > gambling/loot box [...] legit ethical concerns
|
| I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and
| attention pathways/systems are under full assault from
| every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and
| people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?
|
| Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in
| alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch.
| It's like going to the store page itself and complaining
| they're telling you about products they sell.
|
| Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other
| game client I know of offers that.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to
| think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts
| brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying
| to read or watch something.
|
| On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing
| as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because
| I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not
| advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It
| would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with
| game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
| the_af wrote:
| They are ads for games in a store that sells games,
| right?
|
| I'm very anti-ad, but if there's one situation where I
| don't have a beef with it, it's the Steam app.
| int_19h wrote:
| They are also surprisingly effective because they often
| show things that I might actually buy (especially when
| it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for
| it).
| account42 wrote:
| No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher
| to play your games. If the store was completely separate
| then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in
| the store there.
| the_af wrote:
| You can easily disable the pop-up ads.
| jama211 wrote:
| Not a fair comparison. I CHOSE to download and use steam
| when there are many alternatives. I enjoy their store
| page. Everything is consensual here.
|
| They don't force themselves onto your machines mate.
| 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.
| SSLy wrote:
| There was news couple of seasons back that they've capped
| key generation to some function of on-steam sales.
| abtinf wrote:
| > pretty poorly optimized website
|
| What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much
| always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that
| increase information density. It is one of the last
| remnants of the web from the good old days.
| tpxl wrote:
| The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at
| least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC
| stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver
| on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when)
| which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch.
| This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still
| present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.
| abtinf wrote:
| > shows pop up ads on startup
|
| Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in
| the store.
| Nition wrote:
| Settings -> Interface -> "Notify me about additions or
| changes..." to disable it, by the way.
| boxed wrote:
| > The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games
|
| Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by
| Valve?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Incentives happen to be aligned on this part. That's all.
| ralusek wrote:
| It genuinely makes me see the value in private companies.
| Public companies _must_ grow. They 're accountable to so many
| different interests. Private companies can be happy sitting
| at whatever profit level they want. They can take time to
| tinker on something that they care about. If it doesn't pay
| off, that's fine.
|
| I think I would say it this way: private companies can be
| good or bad, but public companies _must_ ultimately become
| bad.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Its scary that nowdays a company is simply doing "good
| business" and it is so unusual that its worth praise.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I strongly feel it's because Valve is not a publicly traded
| company where they'll eventually give up their values to meet
| Wall Street analyst quarterly targets.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| This is because it's still majority owned by the original
| founder(s).
| romanovcode wrote:
| It's kind of scary that in a way future of gaming is in the
| hands of one man (who is getting old btw).
|
| When Gabe is gone I cringe thinking MS will do everything
| in their power to buy Valve and turn it to complete shit
| couple years later.
| niek_pas wrote:
| This really makes me wonder if publicly traded companies
| are just a bad idea.
| bluescrn wrote:
| It's an interesting case study. They're essentially another
| 'App Store middleman' raking in a huge 30% cut for selling
| games digitally. But they do enough really good stuff to keep
| both gamers and developers generally very happy.
| js8 wrote:
| People are mostly perfectly happy with authoritarianism as
| long as their lives are improving.
| jama211 wrote:
| This doesn't apply because valve doesn't have a monopoly.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The difference between Valve and the other app stores with
| an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is
| that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.
|
| To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets
| real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never
| really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain
| anything interesting if you're not playing one or two
| popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large
| companies build their own launchers.
|
| With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam
| hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve
| makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic
| works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG
| would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need
| some kind of integration capability.
|
| So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered
| supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough
| that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their
| Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make
| mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as
| well.
| 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
| preisschild wrote:
| > Can you actually download these games like one can with
| GOG?
|
| To download and update Steam games you obviously need
| Steam, but once DRM free games are downloaded you can
| keep playing them without Steam.
|
| Heck, we even shared some drm-free games someone bought
| in my friends-group over a personal torrent among us, so
| we could play coop with each other to test the game out
| before we bought it ourselves.
| 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.
| cromka wrote:
| There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in
| a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into
| your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended
| to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was
| discussed here just this past week.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, Winboat, I might be part of that conversation
| you're referring to.
|
| I haven't ruled that out yet. I am planning on trying to
| convince them on this next time they ask me for tech
| support.
| cromka wrote:
| If you do it would be interesting to hear if/how well
| they adapted to it. Might do same thing myself with my
| father.
| tombert wrote:
| I wouldn't hold my breath. I've been trying to get them
| to switch for the better part of a year, and even Windows
| Update completely bricking my mom's computer [1] (look at
| my post history if you want more details on that) wasn't
| enough to convince them. I'm not sure what else could
| happen outside of Bill Gates personally leaving a flaming
| bag of dog manure on their porch.
|
| [1] I'll say it again; if anyone here works on Windows
| Update, please consider getting out of the software game
| and maybe consider a job in the exciting world of
| janitorial or food service, because you are exceedingly
| bad at the whole "software thing" and you should be
| ashamed of yourself and how much damage you have cost the
| entire world with your utterly incompetent software.
| thesnide wrote:
| lsw :)
| 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?
| password4321 wrote:
| CodeWeavers sells app support:
| https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
| 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
| Zetaphor wrote:
| Let them have their rootkits, good riddens
| stavros wrote:
| I wonder when games will start supporting Linux natively,
| especially after the Steam Machine is released.
| bsder wrote:
| It would be better for Linux to gain native support for
| some of the Windows and DirectX 12 APIs.
|
| Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows
| devs more than halfway.
| stavros wrote:
| What benefit would that have over the current situation,
| with Wine?
| Master_Odin wrote:
| Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to
| target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click
| build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely
| had more issues with games with native Linux builds than
| Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to
| use Proton over native to get better performance.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run
| worse than the Windows versions of those same games through
| Wine/Proton, I hope never.
|
| Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for
| everyone. Developers need to Just(tm) not use a few
| footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch
| anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything,
| while consumers get a game on that works just as well on
| Linux as on Windows.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes but the Proton team needs to do work for basically
| each game to iron out the quirks, no?
| Telaneo wrote:
| Not if you as a developer don't touch the footguns. Avoid
| those, and your game works fine with no problems, no
| intervention from Proton or Wine needed.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh that's very interesting. Given the large compatibility
| tables I see, I thought Proton had to cater to almost a
| majority of games.
| Telaneo wrote:
| It's the Pareto principle doing its thing. 80% of games
| were fixable by not a whole lot of fixes to Wine (I mean,
| it's still a lot of work, but once the work is done, you
| don't need to redo it for 1500 other games), while the
| remaining 20% are out there doing weird stuff and needs
| manual fixes of some kind.
|
| If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and
| everything works as it should. With developers noticing
| SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity
| checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80%
| starts growing to 90%.
|
| Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable
| though, which pulls the percentage down again.
| andoando wrote:
| https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
|
| Of the top 1000 games it seems 77% are playable. 40% of
| it needing "some tinkering" but I dont know what that
| means
| stavros wrote:
| Hmm, that hasn't been my experience, basically 100% of
| the games I've tried have worked. Maybe it's because I
| don't play AAA titles.
| account42 wrote:
| This is extremely shortsighted.
| Telaneo wrote:
| I fail to see why? It was pretty short sighted of
| developers to build Linux verions of their games back
| when they did, since most either perform poorly today, or
| just crash on more modern versions. I don't expect those
| games to get fixed any time soon. Far from it, I expect
| Linux versions to degrade as more and more of their
| dependencies change and Linux changes over time. I don't
| expect the situation to be different for native Linux ges
| made today.
|
| Wine meanwhile works perfectly with 80+% of games, and
| those 20% that don't are all newer stuff or stuff that's
| never going to get a Linux version short of the Linux
| desktop actually getting of the ground.
| 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.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so
| that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked.
|
| You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in,
| you can then just copy the game files and run them
| anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because
| it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick
| that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG
| anyway.
| account42 wrote:
| That kind of logic is exactly how morals get eroded and
| all bad practices get excused with "it's just business".
| Telaneo wrote:
| Blame the bosses for wanting DRM rather than Valve for
| making it a default. Blame lawmakers for not regulating
| DRM out of existence. Valve's playing the game while
| still being the most consumer friendly option on most
| fronts, and a solid second place in everything else.
| Credit where credit's due.
|
| If Steam didn't have nominal DRM, I'd imagine they
| wouldn't have been able to grow to the point they're at
| now, and we'd instead have many stores each with their
| own exclusives, but most of them have worse terms than
| Steam. That world is worse than the one we have now.
|
| And if you really care, there's always GOG, or the skull
| and crossbones.
| 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
| Rohansi wrote:
| You also need to include (digital) purchases made inside
| of apps because Apple also takes a 30% cut there. That is
| likely the bigger amount because it includes all of the
| in-app microtransactions for games.
| account42 wrote:
| > Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30%
| from every business that's not them.
|
| Exactly, and the same goes for Steam.
| 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
| nemomarx wrote:
| One wonders why other, well funded games stores can't
| compete on features and sales pricing with steam?
|
| Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth
| it to me to switch over because they lack steam input,
| good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory
| systems to trade items...
| tombert wrote:
| I use Heroic Launcher to play Epic Game Store games in
| the SteamOS interface in my Jovian box. I'm able to use
| the custom controller stuff with it without much problem,
| but it doesn't fix the other problems.
|
| You need friends for a lack of friend systems to matter
| :)
| LtWorf wrote:
| They also don't support having a space character in your
| password.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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
|
| So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of
| having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of
| using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.
|
| Apple's app store is a good example here--their
| stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to
| really cross the line into illegal product tying to me.
| Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam
| is... um... you might at best point to actions they
| _haven 't_ taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game
| stores have failed because they've not really
| demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect
| Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for
| consumers.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Valve is not a monopoly/part of a duopoply/oligopoly.
| They're also not behaving like knobheads. It's the
| combination of monopolistic practices and causing harm to
| consumers that should invoke antitrust enforcement.
|
| There are plenty of other stores to get games from.
| They're just consistently worse than Steam.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Does Valve engage in a lot of unfair or anticompetitive
| behavior? If you were to apply some anti-trust
| enforcement what would you actually do? Split off their
| game studio (that makes like one game a decade) from
| Steam?
|
| They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and
| services directly related to that shop.
|
| Like, when people say "split up Google" or "split up
| Amazon" I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things
| that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses,
| under one umbrella--Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if
| browsers and operating systems didn't have a market price
| of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don't see it...
| dleslie wrote:
| There is no lock-in. It is normal to have accounts on
| multiple storefronts, and have multiple storefronts
| installed on your gaming PC; one can access multiple
| digital libraries on the same PC!
|
| Steam wins because it provides a superior product for the
| end-user, not because of lock-in. Games purchased through
| Steam can be vetted with user reviews, supported with
| user-created guides and steam input configurations,
| streamed across devices, shared with family members, and
| even modded; all within the Steam experience.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| You complelty ignore the foxcon problem?
|
| Google makes money with ads and at least takes this
| serious.
|
| Apple just exploits.
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| GOG has managed to do pretty well in their own way.
| Nowhere near as popular as Steam, obviously, but they
| hold their own, and they've managed to do it without DRM.
| Humble Bundle has also managed to do something as well
| (though admittedly that's largely through selling Steam
| keys).
|
| I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve
| hasn't abused their status _yet_ , and maybe they never
| will, but all it takes is a change in management for that
| to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to
| squelch, they still might just decide they want more
| money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
|
| For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and
| it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start
| charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to
| pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games,
| and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to
| all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've
| spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years,
| I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about
| it and take out my credit card and just pay it.
|
| Stuff like this has already happened with other companies
| (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).
|
| I'm not saying that it _will_ happen, but at this point
| Steam has so much of the market and so many people have
| their entire game collections on there that I don 't
| think we should discount the possibility that it _could_
| happen.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
| Zetaphor wrote:
| I think an important differentiator is that of all the
| companies you just listed, Valve is the only private
| company. That seems to explain a lot of this.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Valve is not building all this Linux Compatibility out of the
| goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to avoid being
| shutdown by Microsoft, who effectively had a monopoly on the
| OS people used to play games.
|
| It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and
| built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games.
| They know this.
|
| If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are
| solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion
| project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on
| OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
| tombert wrote:
| Sure, none of that is untrue, but they could still engage
| in rent seeking behavior. They could start requiring
| subscription fees for stuff that previously didn't require
| it (like start capping download speeds unless you're part
| of "Steam+" or something), or blacklist any distro that
| isn't SteamOS, or make it difficult or impossible to
| install games from third-party stores (like GOG) on Steam
| Decks or their upcoming Steam Boxes.
|
| I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly
| likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be
| mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in
| the tech world loved Google.
| Gormo wrote:
| A "company" is just an organizational model employed by
| people to pursue the intentions that those people have. It
| goes without saying that large endeavors involving many
| people will have a mixture of good and bad intentions.
|
| Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the
| potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to
| being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more
| than a little bit pointless.
| tombert wrote:
| I didn't say you would oppose all organized endeavors. I
| said we shouldn't worship companies.
| Gormo wrote:
| Well, no one is literally _worshiping_ companies, so I
| interpreted this as a hyperbolic way of saying that
| people shouldn 't _express approval_ for activities done
| by companies.
|
| But companies themselves are just organizational
| paradigms used by people to pursue human intentions, and
| the reason you offered as to why we shouldn't "worship
| companies" was based on the possibility of people acting
| on bad intentions within those organizational paradigms.
|
| But the possibility of people acting on bad intentions is
| present in all contexts of human activity, regardless of
| what organizational paradigm people are using to
| coordinate their activities.
|
| So if "worship" resolves to "express approval for", and
| "companies" resolves to "organized human activity", based
| on a failure modality that's always present in all cases,
| then you _are_ actually saying that people should not
| express approval for organized human activity.
| tombert wrote:
| It's fine to express approval for something a corporation
| does, but I think you are wrong when you say people don't
| worship companies. The cult of Apple is very real.
|
| I mostly meant "let's look at this stuff with a healthy
| amount of cynicism". This isn't to say we can't like the
| good things.
| 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" :)
| wengo314 wrote:
| maybe instead of HL3 they will deliver linux on the desktop for
| the masses.
|
| because that's the foreseeable trajectory at this point
| vjk800 wrote:
| Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has
| almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive
| profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on
| projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual
| business.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| >The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore.
|
| It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games
| and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to
| dethrone Duke Nukem Forever.
|
| There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for
| Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic
| game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up.
| I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to
| why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen
| to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion
| to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from
| releasing an another new entry in the series that uses
| revolutionary new technology or whatever.
| uniq7 wrote:
| I prefer not to have HL3 rather than a half-baked one, or a
| very short episode.
|
| They have only one chance of publishing HL3, and I hope put
| in it the same love and care they put in 1 and 2.
|
| I'd be very disappointed if they just released it just for
| the sake of releasing it.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| They could publish Episode 3 and then publish Half-Life 3
| afterwards. I never understood why people keep insisting
| they can release only one game. It's not like they don't
| have average or mediocre titles in the series anyway (Blue
| Shift and Episode 1 are examples of this).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| They claim they will only release when the game has
| something innovative to offer.
|
| But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What
| innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve
| releasing virtual card games today?
|
| Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start
| nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now,
| they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge
| impact.
|
| Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE
| commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native
| Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that _had_
| been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so,
| since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.
| dmos62 wrote:
| So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux?
| Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of
| released for vs playable on?
| Gormo wrote:
| > So it became more straightforward to release games on
| Linux? Sounds like a positive.
|
| No, not really. Many of the common game engines already
| support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already
| makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building
| for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for
| Linux even in cases where doing so is already as
| straightforward and low-effort as could be.
|
| > Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs
| playable on?
|
| Yes. Most of these games were already _playable on_ Linux
| under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part
| of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux
| usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few
| years, and there 's a large library of native Linux games
| out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to
| build native Linux ports by making that Windows
| compatibility "just work".
|
| The result is now that there are more games where Linux
| compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer --
| but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to
| configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit
| less performant than they might otherwise be.
|
| It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is
| more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game
| with a native Linux build might distribute that build
| through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-
| Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can
| usually still be played under Wine in the traditional
| fashion, but that represents a regression away from native
| Linux support.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholder value to
| maximize.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore.
|
| And people have forgotten that they existed. I mean it is 18
| years since the orange box.
| 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.
| N_Lens wrote:
| You seem to have conflated SIMD and emulation in the context
| of performance. ARM has it's own SIMD instructions and
| doesn't take a performance hit when executing those.
| Translating x86 SIMD to ARM has an overhead that causes a
| performance hit, which is due to emulation.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Both incur a performance hit. ARM NEON isn't fully
| analogous to modern AVX or SSE, so even a 1:1 native port
| will compile down to more bytecode than x86. This issue is
| definitely exacerbated when translating, but inherent to
| any comparison of the two.
| 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.
| mhast wrote:
| Jim Keller goes into some detail about what difference
| the ISA makes in general in this clip
| https://youtu.be/yTMRGERZrQE?si=u-dEXwxp0MWPQumy
|
| Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual
| execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.
|
| Branch prediction is where the magic happens today.
| snvzz wrote:
| >Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual
| execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.
|
| Yet, on a CISC ISA, you still have to support everything
| else, which is essentially cruft.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Does that matter? I lean towards the yes-the-ISA-matters
| camp, but I'm also under the impression that most silicon
| is dark.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Jim Keller _has_ to say that.
| lmm wrote:
| Intel spent years trying to get manufacturers to use
| their x86 chips in phones, but manufacturers turned them
| down, because the power efficiency was never good enough.
| bigyabai wrote:
| You're basically reiterating exactly what I just said.
| Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have
| made more money selling their fab space for Cortex
| designs at that point.
|
| Yes, it cost Intel their smartphone contracts, but those
| weren't high-margin sales in the first place. Conversely,
| ARM's capricious licensing meant that we wouldn't see
| truly high-performance ARM cores until M1 and Neoverse
| hit the market.
| lmm wrote:
| > Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd
| have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex
| designs at that point.
|
| Maybe, but the fact remains that they spent years trying
| to make an Atom that could fit the performance/watt that
| smartphone makers needed to be competitive, and they
| couldn't do it, which pretty strongly suggests it's
| fundamentally difficult. Even if they now try to sour-
| grapes that they just weren't really trying, I don't
| believe them.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I think we're talking past each other here. I already
| mentioned this in my original comment:
| ARM is typically [...] more efficient at idle.
|
| From Intel's perspective, the decision to invest in x86
| was purely fiscal. With the benefit of hindsight, it's
| also pretty obvious that licensing ARM would not have
| saved the company. Intel was still hamstrung by DUV fabs.
| It made no sense to abandon their high-margin datacenter
| market to chase low-margin SOCs.
| fulafel wrote:
| Well, they were targeting Android, and the apps were
| emulating ARM on x86, and they were going against a
| strong incumbent. Accounts on the web of this failure
| seem to bring up other failings as the main problems.
| fulafel wrote:
| Eg this review of the AZ210 phone from 2012 seems to
| think the battery life was good:
| https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/orange-san-diego
|
| "Battery life during our test period seemed to be pretty
| good and perhaps slightly better than many dual-core
| Android phone's we've tested."
| IshKebab wrote:
| > the apps were emulating ARM on x86
|
| They weren't (except some games maybe). Most apps were
| written in Java and JITed.
| fulafel wrote:
| Well, apps tuned for performance and apps using native
| code have more than a little overlap. Even back then
| there were a lot of apps besides games that used native
| code for the hot code paths. But games of course are huge
| by themselves, and besides performance you need to have
| good power efficiency in running them.
|
| Here's some more details: https://www.theregister.com/201
| 4/05/02/arm_test_results_atta...
|
| (note it's a 2-part, the "next page" link is small print
| )
| 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.
| debugnik wrote:
| There's no point in emulating just 32-bit x86 when modern games
| are all built for x86-64 plus several extensions. If they could
| make devs target an arch of their choice, they'd ask for
| aarch64 and skip funding FEX.
| 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 they
| didn't go with Microsoft? 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.
| cromka wrote:
| I don't think they'd target businesses. I think they
| could totally ride the current gamers "Switching to Linux
| instead migrating to Windows 11" wave. Those users would
| definitely appreciate better compatibility with Windows
| apps.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So Valve will finally make it the "Year of Linux on your
| Desktop"?
| lmm wrote:
| > I think they could totally ride the current gamers
| "Switching to Linux instead migrating to Windows 11"
| wave. Those users would definitely appreciate better
| compatibility with Windows apps.
|
| Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay
| for it?
|
| I guess improving compatibility with general-purpose
| Windows apps might help them sell a few more Steam
| Machines, but it's hard to think that it's really going
| to move the needle.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| > Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay
| for it?
|
| Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the
| store. SteamOS is presumably free to install on your own
| hardware once it has a general release.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The big thing is that the current SteamOS image is
| incomplete and missing a lot of key features that the
| Steam products have, since it's optimized for that.
| That's been the one big sticking point for it as of now.
| lmm wrote:
| > Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the
| store.
|
| Right, so my question is how does better compatibility
| with (non-game) Windows apps help them make more money?
| nani8ot wrote:
| A better Linux desktop experience means it's more viable
| as a daily driver, which makes it more likely to be used
| for gaming instead of Windows.
|
| Valve wants independence from Microsoft Windows, a better
| Linux desktop is part of that.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The value in software at that scale isn't the product. It's
| the support. And Valve's support as is is really shaky.
|
| Businesses will happily throw a few million to make tech
| support another businesses' problem. Cheaper than
| maintaining a team in-house.
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Business don't "dislike" Microsoft enough to go with a game
| developer and revalidatd all of their software over their
| entire organizations. The people making the decisions don't
| go around worrying about nerd wars.
|
| They definitely aren't going to trust the long term
| viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing
| operating systems and supporting business for almost half a
| century.
|
| $20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you
| support every Windows APi forever. You're not going to tie
| your horse to valve
| lunar_rover wrote:
| If you include all the low level works needed to make them work
| well which is a lot, then maybe.
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| I cannot speak for the Steam console and I don't care about
| playing PC games on my phone: it's not the form factor for me.
|
| But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.
|
| Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with
| Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).
|
| I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a
| terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to
| play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at
| the edge anyway.
|
| One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2.
| Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.
| komali2 wrote:
| Space Marine 2 runs on my desktop, running Manjaro. Never tried
| on a handheld. Works fine!
| the_af wrote:
| Any tweaks for Proton that you think were helpful? I tried
| stuff from ProtonDB but it hangs during the initial cutscene
| and never recovers.
| cedws wrote:
| The best thing Valve could do is nuke Wayland/X11/Xwayland from
| orbit. Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and
| doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs. X11 is ancient and screen tears.
| Xwayland is the worst of both worlds.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| What do you use or recommend?
| cedws wrote:
| I don't use Linux on laptops or desktops, only servers. I've
| been through all that pain. The userland has a long way to go
| to be a good OS everyone can use.
| shmerl wrote:
| You clearly didn't use Linux any time recently.
| cedws wrote:
| Nope, it still sucks. It's no good as an OS for general
| users. The average user has no idea what it even means to
| have an NVIDIA GPU, let alone be able to diagnose why
| their screen scaling is all fucked up or understand why
| they see stuff about 'killing child processes' when they
| press the power button.
| shmerl wrote:
| It is good, but if you didn't use it in forever, you
| won't actually know if it is.
| bigyabai wrote:
| You're basically confirming the parent's suspicions.
| Nvidia has supported Wayland since their 550 series
| drivers, for the last two years desktop Linux has run
| fine on damn near every supported card.
|
| You're not speaking for the "average user" here, you're
| speaking for yourself. We have a benchmark for what the
| average user thinks about Linux, and it's called a Steam
| Deck. You know what those users never mention? X11,
| Wayland, Xwayland or any of the stereotypical 2012-era
| boogeymen you're complaining about.
|
| It's almost as if... you haven't used Linux in years. I
| won't accuse you outright, but my suspicions are
| mounting. (posted from an RTX 3070 on Wayland)
| komali2 wrote:
| Since you don't have a recommendation, your criticism of
| X11/Wayland feels a bit hollow. You can just say you don't
| like Linux OSs instead.
| shmerl wrote:
| No, thanks. That's the worst Android did, creating their own
| incompatible thing. We don't need another NIH like that.
| cedws wrote:
| Android is a much more successful platform than the Linux
| desktop.
| shmerl wrote:
| And that only created a problem by making the impact of
| that rift worse. So we don't need even more of such
| effects. Ubuntu tried going there with Mir, but luckily
| they figured out it was a really bad idea in time.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| More?
|
| Linux desktop is non-existant, compared to Android
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Not as a desktop OS.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Is the problem in this relationship Wayland of Nvidia? It is a
| shame that GPU's are pretty much the one big part of your
| computer that doesn't really conform to the general "ownership"
| model.
| breve wrote:
| > _Wayland is a mess that apps still don 't support and doesn't
| work with NVIDIA GPUs_
|
| KDE supports Wayland: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-
| all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
|
| Nvidia has had Wayland support for a while. Here are their
| latest beta drivers. The first item of the release notes is
| about Wayland: https://www.nvidia.com/en-
| us/drivers/details/258750/
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Commoditize your complements (layers above and below).
| shevy-java wrote:
| Unless I misunderstand something (not quite awake fully yet...),
| that's good right? Aka "play games on any platform" as goal. A
| bit with the inofficial goal of scummvm, to rescue old commercial
| games from vanishing for young, future generations.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| fix anticheat!
| LelouBil wrote:
| Oh so they did not "adopt" Fex, they actually financed the
| leading developer from the start.
| zallarak wrote:
| This may be a naive question but why ARM and not RISC-V?
| zallarak wrote:
| This may be a naive question: why ARM and not RISC-V?
| fnands wrote:
| How many people do you know with RISC-V computers?
| debugnik wrote:
| RISC-V SoCs are still underpowered for the job, and the
| software ecosystem hasn't matured compared to ARM, specially
| for Windows/x86-64 emulation. The focus on RISC-V chips is
| simply too recent and has lacked enough demand for it. Your
| question is at least a decade too early.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Don't you think that if usage goes significantly up, MS will just
| use its lawyers to shut down all of these cute initiatives ?
| nialv7 wrote:
| No, the supreme court has settled it [0], there's no basis for
| a lawsuit.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America
| ,_....
| petterroea wrote:
| For an understanding of what Valve are doing, here is a 1 hour
| talk by Gabe Newell (CEO):
|
| Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions,
| and the Future of Corporations
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
|
| TL;DR:
|
| * The most skilled workers are the most undervalued
|
| * Make products to serve the customer
|
| * Management is a skill, not a career path
|
| * The only people they consider themselves to be unable to
| compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to
| produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient
| way of producing things.
| komali2 wrote:
| > and that's when the Fex compatibility layer was started,
| because we knew there was close to a decade of work needed before
| it would be robust enough people could rely on it for their
| libraries.
|
| In a recent Linus Tech Tips video, Linus Torvalds (original
| Linus) was asked, "if you could go back in time and start the
| Linux project from scratch, what would you do differently?" He
| had two answers, one was "nothing," and the other was "if I knew
| how much work this was going to take, I never would have started
| this project."
|
| It makes me wonder, is there some kind of blissful ignorance
| required to kick off a project that will take you years to see
| through? How many times have I self limited myself, stopped
| myself from starting something, because I put on my lead hat and
| did some estimations and thought eh, not worth it?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA
| devwastaken wrote:
| Steam API doesnt even have an arm version. You cant build a
| native arm app with it.
| bitwize wrote:
| What Valve hasn't announced yet, but which has leaked, is
| "Lepton", a fork of Waydroid they're working on to enable Android
| gaming for Steam--in particular, getting Oculus Quest games going
| on the Steam Frame.
|
| The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming
| development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans
| notwithstanding.
| globalnode wrote:
| valve is just as ambitious as microsoft or google, they just
| appear to be the good guy for now because theyre trying to gain
| some ground on evil corp, and linux is one of the only openings
| they (or anyone) has got.
| systematizeD wrote:
| The only proprietary, steam client itself, you can fork their
| stack build your own store if you like.
| unixhero wrote:
| I suppose this will is in order to be able to push lower powered
| hand helds to penetrate further into global markets. Not everyone
| can afford an X64 Nvidia usd5000 gaming workstation.
| dominostars wrote:
| Given how expensive PC gaming is, between GPU and memory price
| explosions, I imagine everything Valve is doing, including
| recently announced hardware, is all in service of keeping Steam
| relevant.
| thesnide wrote:
| Video tech is driven by pr0n and OS tech is driven by games.
| nottorp wrote:
| The one thing that worries me is that PC gaming is going fast to
| requiring controller support.
|
| Which is reducing the complexity of control schemes to either
| nothing or mortal kombat like combos.
|
| Forward, down, forward, high punch to build a new city in a 4X in
| a few years?
| skibz wrote:
| Controllers provide analogue controls (eg. thumbsticks and
| triggers) that most keyboards don't have.
|
| If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are
| becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then
| surely the result would be more games that are playable with
| only a keyboard, not fewer?
| nottorp wrote:
| Heh the MK combo mention was a joke. Forgot I'm on HN.
| dirkderkdurk wrote:
| Original MK, Sub-Zero spine tear, sigh, the first one I
| ever did. Got me into gamedev. I appreciated it!
| nottorp wrote:
| Had to look it up to post :)
|
| It was back in the days when we gathered at the kid whose
| keyboard could actually support so many simultaneous
| keypresses and did tournaments.
| dirkderkdurk wrote:
| Trying to play with 2 players on the same keyboard was a
| nightmare. On mine WASD seemed to cope better than the
| arrows, so there was always a rush to pick sides of the
| keyboard. Ah, good times.
| utopiah wrote:
| > PC gaming is going fast to requiring controller support.
|
| Hmmm I don't know. I did play Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a
| controller but I also played Baldur's Gate 3 on mouse and
| keyboard. I also play VR games with controllers or hand
| tracking. Basically I play with whatever the game recommends.
|
| To me it's like saying PC game is dead because mobile phone is
| so popular. Sure a LOT of players, and thus money, goes into
| mobile gaming but that doesn't prevent proper AAA and indies
| games on PC to have interesting mechanics.
|
| PS: if you are into these kind of things checkout exotic
| controllers in events like Amaze. I remember a collaborative
| where you had to blow in pipes to push a rocket in the right
| direction and plenty of weirder stuff. Really cool but totally
| niche.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a controller
|
| I play soulsbornes on consoles with a controller, of course.
| Because From doesn't know how to do any other control scheme,
| they have "console DNA".
|
| But how do you play Civilization (<= 5, the good ones) with a
| controller?
| viktorcode wrote:
| The one very visible trend in the last 30 years of game
| development was about reducing input complexity. It has nothing
| to do with complexity of games themselves. Now instead of
| fighting clunky controls like in good old times you fight game
| challenges, where the input tries hard to be as transparent as
| possible
| nottorp wrote:
| > you fight game challenges
|
| Like "kill 100.000 mobs" ?
|
| With the 2 options you have left because those are all the
| buttons :)
|
| And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
|
| But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because
| those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests
| that create toxic communities.
|
| I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of
| complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a
| controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when
| playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of
| properties like wargames have.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I genuinely think you're hallucinating this threat to
| keyboard/mouse gaming input for anything other than AAA
| console-first releases and for specific genres like
| action/fighting games. Keyboard/mouse is still by far the
| dominant input scheme for PC gaming and PC gamers are
| broadly quite firmly set on this choice.
| nottorp wrote:
| You're sure developers won't feel guided to get the steam
| deck and steam box badges for their titles to ensure more
| sales?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Depends entirely on the genre of the game, the resources
| available to the developer, and the pressures they're
| facing from management. Most of the games in my library
| either have controller support as an afterthought or not
| at all. Controllers have been the minority choice in PC
| gaming since about forever and I haven't noticed that
| changing. What _has_ changed is the gaming industry has
| created de facto standards and idioms for how PC games
| should handle. Play early shooters with their default
| setting and you 'll get to experience all kinds of key
| mapping that send modern gamers looking for mods to fix
| it or another game to play. These days you can pretty
| much count on WASD for movement, the mouse for looking.
| Nobody ships a game with movement bound to the arrow keys
| or modal mouse look. Game developers now meet gamers
| where they are, and for PC games that is almost always
| mouse and keyboard, except in those genres where gamers
| expect controllers.
| btdmaster wrote:
| > When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck,
| I think you'll find that there's an Arm chip that maybe is
| competitive with x86 offerings in that segment.
|
| At which point does this pay off the emulation overhead? Fex has
| a lot of work to do to bridge two ISAs while going through the
| black box of compiler output of assembly, right?
| hydroreadsstuff wrote:
| afaia emulators like Fex are within 30 to 70% of native
| performance. On the fringes worse or better. But overall
| emulation seems totally fine. Plus emulator technology in
| general could be used for binary optimization rather than
| strict mappings, opening up space for more optimization.
| aperture147 wrote:
| I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the
| hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just
| protecting their business and protecting their business
| "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The
| movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have
| invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement
| "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-win
| situation, users can escape themself from a bloated Windows and
| Valve has the pioneering advantage.
| egil wrote:
| They are a significant actor in the market, and as a non-pc-
| gamer I am glad that their business goals align with Linux
| users. I don't believe that they do it out of kindness, but
| that's actually a good thing for a long term investment.
| aperture147 wrote:
| > They are a significant actor in the market, and as a non-
| pc-gamer I am glad that their business goals align with Linux
| users.
|
| Until MS (or worse, Oracle) shows up with their half-baked
| clone (like Xbox Machine or Larry Cube) and ruins everyone's
| party
| bayindirh wrote:
| I believe the same but,
|
| > they are just protecting their business and protecting their
| business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's
| benefits.
|
| part is wrong. From my observation, they are protecting their
| business _through_ protecting their customers ' benefits.
|
| Plus, they're building a moat collectively and from an open
| source stack. So, given the stack gets enough momentum, having
| Valve or not as a company won't matter anymore.
|
| It's trying to get the elephant out of the bag, and once it's
| out, then there's really no way to put it back, because it's
| being out is better for _everybody_. Game companies and gamers
| alike.
| aperture147 wrote:
| > From my observation, they are protecting their business
| through protecting their customers' benefits.
|
| Yeah that's what I mean too, that's why I put the
| "accidentally" in a double-quote.
|
| This sounds like what Red Hat is doing, they created an open-
| source software, prove the importance of it in the community
| then sells the support package to enterprise who interested
| in using it.
|
| Hope that they will not close the door when Microsoft, AWS or
| Oracle making their own GabeCube and call it SatyaCube,
| BozosCube or LarryCube
| HighGoldstein wrote:
| Microsoft already has the XBox and despite being backed by
| one of the biggest tech companies in the world it's a
| rather weak product. To add to this, with every major
| studio acquisition they have done there has been a
| noticeable increase in game monetization and decrease in
| quality.
|
| AWS has tried to get into the gaming market and only
| succeeded in creating giant money sinks even if some of
| their products were technically appealing.
|
| Oracle making anything consumer-facing, much less something
| that isn't a total nightmare, seems inconceivable.
|
| Valve is able to completely outmatch competitors in a
| chosen field because of what they are like as a company. No
| shareholders that expect quarterly growth. No massive
| bureaucratic corporate structure, just highly skilled
| engineers for the most part.
| danaris wrote:
| Microsoft is also moving more and more away from hardware
| exclusivity. Even their Xbox Game Pass service is now not
| tied to the console.
|
| More broadly, AAA gaming as a whole is also moving away
| from hardware exclusivity. Third-party developers (like
| Square-Enix) have been making recent releases for all
| major platforms, and even some first-party console titles
| are now coming to PC (eg, the Horizon games from Sony).
|
| I'm optimistic about the future of non-locked-down
| gaming.
| atoav wrote:
| The trick is to get your egoistic interests to align with what
| is good for the world.
|
| Environmentalists also only do what they perceive as doing good
| (and may as well be _objectively_ good) because not doing so
| won 't jive with their self-image. But that in itself doesn't
| devalue the thing they did.
|
| If Valve shows anything it is that not being a pushover and
| trying to align your business interest with your values (and
| not vice-versa!) can also pay of economically.
| sushibowl wrote:
| You are absolutely correct. Valve's linux push was driven by
| developments in the windows platform, specifically around the
| release of windows 8. Microsoft was pushing a windows store
| similar to Apple's app store, and Valve was unequivocally
| stating that they were worried Microsoft would basically lock
| down the platform and only allow software sales through their
| own store, destroying their steam business. Gabe said it
| plainly himself (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377):
|
| > Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows,
| said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as
| a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage
| Windows 8 was likely to do.
|
| > "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said,
| "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit
| the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's
| really exciting.'"
|
| > This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to
| the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating
| system.
|
| Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is
| primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that
| windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e.
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-
| the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since
| has been an effort to protect his company against that
| existential threat.
| aperture147 wrote:
| Well actually they tried with Windows Phone, Windows RT and
| Windows 10 S but failed miserably. Even Apple didn't even try
| to lock their macOS from installing 3rd party app.
| BirAdam wrote:
| He didn't just "work on Windows."
|
| GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and
| Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that
| no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of
| Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St.
| John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX,
| GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded
| to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.
|
| I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go
| the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.
| randunel wrote:
| Valve's Steam platform is well liked and actually wanted by
| gamers. Gamers move their games to the steam launcher and often
| wait for games to come to steam (e.g. with Anno games from
| Ubisoft).
|
| This is in contrast with EA's Origin, Microsoft's Xbox PC and
| Ubisoft's Connect, which everyone hates.
| nialv7 wrote:
| I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because
| what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that
| each individual acting in their own self-interest end up
| benefiting everyone.
|
| And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea
| is correct, because in that case most companies will be like
| Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like
| Valve? No, that's because capitalism is bullshit and that makes
| Valve stand out.
| mubou2 wrote:
| > acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting
| everyone
|
| I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that
| does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers
| wanting to reach the PC gamer market _must_ comply with Valve
| 's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel
| released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that
| requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and
| often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick
| of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the
| trash porn games.
|
| Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control
| over specific studios' works while threatening financial
| repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That
| sounds more like the mob to me.
|
| Stop deifying companies.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Many of steams consumer benefits were a direct result of
| Valve getting sued and losing court cases. For example
| refunds and forced arbitration clause.
| literallywho wrote:
| It's funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other
| wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them
| as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.
| nialv7 wrote:
| oh that's funny. do you have a link to where he had said
| that?
|
| i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some
| basis. but then again, what an organization is internally
| and how the organization behave as a whole can be
| different.
| oersted wrote:
| I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and
| I always dreamed of working there, but let's not kid
| ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic
| cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain.
| Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still
| rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow
| economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.
|
| Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building
| truly outstanding products in good faith and by being
| pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an
| exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately
| innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.
|
| My point is that Valve is not all that special for being
| nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they
| don't have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people
| with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it's
| not exactly a high standard, and they are quite inefficient
| in leveraging that advantage.
|
| There's no Bell Labs without AT&T.
| sylware wrote:
| It should be RISC-V...
| ramon156 wrote:
| What would be the benefit?
| sylware wrote:
| See the FAQ on risc-v site.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few
| years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but
| between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it's even
| possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as
| more games get optimized.
| Glemkloksdjf wrote:
| How did you do that?
| shortformblog wrote:
| I followed the same steps the Verge reporter did: Downloaded
| GameHub, connected my Steam account. The initial boot was
| lengthy, but it worked.
| kwar13 wrote:
| Valve has done wonders for Linux. I've often thought about this:
| https://kaveh.page/blog/linux-valve
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