Valve's Linux Contributions, Wayland & Open-Source NVIDIA Milestones Topped 2023

Well, things change. With time I became more wary of people who claim they will "never" or "always" do something. It's not a realistic thing most of the time

I hope my company does because I have shares

Valve is not a publicly traded company though. They don't really care if investors aren't making the expected profits.

I mean, they care, but it's all Gabe who decides in the end. If he doesn't care as much then that's the way it is.

Those are quite the claims. Got any sources to back them up?

People don't even know what people want. Gabe knows people expect HL3 to be some godly game and he knows what they make will in all likelihood not live up to that image. Why bother if it will just bring disappointment to everyone? Just save the effort and enjoy the memes.

What makes you think he doesn't know people want HL3? Even you know, and you don't strike me as the brightest bulb in the knife drawer.

regardless of Gabe knowing what people want, the point about being privately owned stands. it really is the publicly traded companies that are the problem. at least private ones aren't legally obligated to pursue profits over all else. they have the choice to be evil. they may still make that choice, but public companies can be sued by their investors for being "charitable to customers" instead of maximizing profits.

You're not very good at this

Half-Life Alyx wasn't good enough for you? Sheesh, go play ANY of the HL mods or many other new games released. Bad hill to die on...

Having seen some of the things Gabe has done, like personally delivering the first Steam Decks and constantly speaking at gaming conferences and doing panels, etc, I think a lot of it is him. I do worry about whether he has a succession plan in place.

Well there was the whole dollarization for less wealthy countries that made them a no-fly-zone. A friend of mine was recently telling me about how he bought Deep Rock Galactic for 600 pesos and since the dollarization the same game now equates to 30 thousand pesos.

It hurts to do it because right now Valve is an amazing company, but I've started buying games where possible on GOG and archiving the installers for exactly this reason. If some horrific Valve-EA merger ever happens in the far future they won't be able to hold all of my library hostage

I keep seeing "Monopoly" repeated, but I'm having a hard time understanding the logic.

They haven't bought competitors. They don't do anything to hinder others progress in this market, sometime to the detriment of their customers (see: Steam launches another launcher, to launch the game). They haven't openly shown anything anti-competitive, in fact they have stuck to their guns (30% cut) when others have attempted to compete.

What they have done is cultivate the best platform that continues to evolve, add features, and maintain stability. Consumers continue to choose to use Steam overwhelmingly, but outside of Valve's own games, there is no threat of exclusivity or punishment.

It's the opposite of monopolistic behavior. Any company is free to compete, build their own platform, and offer software. It's expensive, and tricky to get right, but nothing is stopping them, Valve included.

For launchers there's Epic, GoG, Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft Gamepass, R*. If we're talking game sales there's a litany of other websites to purchase games from Humble Bundle, Fanatical, Itch.io, Green Man Gaming.

Players can buy directly from the publisher in most cases. For outside those, there are options of DRM free or whatever Epic supposedly has to offer.

Steam may have a dominant position, but I'm not entirely sure that's a monopoly. If we had no other options? Sure. We have multiple other options. Steam Keys are the most common for a number of the sites, but I'd also consider that none of these launchers have the set of features that Valve offers with theirs.

Does people choosing a better service make it a monopoly? I think if Steam didn't have even 1/3rd of what it offers then the other options would be more widely used. Rather, if the other options put as much effort into the quality of life of their launchers, they'd be more popular.

But personally I also think the Epic-backed Wolffire lawsuit claiming Valve has a monopoly is kind of BS, unless it comes out to be true that Steams market power forced developers to keep games off other stores and keep it on their own. If Valve were forcing its competitors to be shit, then sure it's a monopoly.

Up to this point, it seems to me that Steam has dominated the market because of reliability. The consistent sales, refunds are consistent, the program has a number of uses from communities to guides to per-game control schemes, to little things like the soundtracks of games being in one spot.

Is it a monopoly? Or is it the people's choice?

It's just a shame the competition kinda sucks. Epic is pulling some good moves with all the free games and some really competitive prices but their launcher sucks and GoG have an abysmal launcher while rarely having newer titles because of so many companies holding tight to DRM

Valve doesn't set prices on the store in the first place. They are giving more margin for big sellers now too.

Ah yes, the monopoly, a business with competitors such as ea origin, Ubisoft dunno what they called it, epic store, gog. The word monopoly must break down like monopol-y as in like a monopole, a magnet with only one polarity that is separate from the other polarity.

They mainly have a monopoly because everyone else's attempt to compete sucks. I haven't seen any launcher that has half the features or conveniences steam has. Most of them are slower too.

Steam offers actual value. Other launchers just feel like a lazy way to add drm.

Well they kind of have used their position to indirectly increase prices... If they take a 30% cut then the games need to sell for more to make the same profit (and there's the geolock and anti price-competition thing too)

Most of these are either misinformed, straight misinformation or just weird nitpicks.

The steam deck works perfectly fine with windows and should also work just fine on any linux system. It is literally just a x64 PC in a hand held format. Nothing has been done to limit the devices functionality on systems that aren’t SteamOS.

AFAIK SteamOS 3 will be dropped in the future. Also afaik, development is currently focused specifically on the steam deck first so it’s not particularly useful outside of that.

Thing is though, there’s nothing stopping people from using any other distro other than the belief that SteamOS is some super special distro filled with gaming secret sauce. It’s just a fork of arch with deck specific tweaks. A lot of the work thats been put into SteamOS has also made its way to linux at large.

Alyx is built from the ground up to be a VR game. There really isn’t any way to convert it to a flatscreen game without completely doing away with what makes that game what it is. There’s no flatscreen version to release. Though something to mention is that SteamVR (and by extension alyx and any VR game on steam) supports all VR HMD’s provided they’re compatible with OpenVR.

The games that are exclusive to Steam, aside from valve’s own games, are there entirely by publisher/developer choice and are not enforced by valve. Unlike a certain other storefront that pays for timed exclusivity rights which is, ironically for them, a monopolistic move.

There are legitimate reasons to criticise valve, they’re not innocent by any means.

But the things I’ve pointed out really aren’t issues.

Also valve being criminals and being abusive to their employees are massive claims. Would be nice to see some proof of that. Not a fan of making up things to be angry about when there are legitimate issues that we can be angry about instead.

Source on

Steam Deck works on selected Linux systems, Steam Deck operating systems isn’t open source after many people demand it to be released for the public.

?

In reading this article https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/linux-on-steam-deck-what-you-need-to-know-what-currently-works/ the only limitation that stuck out is you're supposed to install your distro on a different partition.

Alyx is still VR only game and must buy VR game, unless you mod it. Valve refused to release PC version.

It's a matter of opinion if this is good or bad I guess, but I think VR specific titles are a good thing. More of an opportunity to take advantage of the medium rather than shoehorn the functionality on to a desktop game.

You can just ask for the source code, if anyone can get the source code if they get the binary and can modify and redistribute it, its free, as is steam os

There’s nothing in RHEL or enterprise Ubuntu that’s inherently more secure than any other distro.