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Comment by cwhiz | Hacker News Reader

Valve is hilariously stagnant. The Steam windows app went ignored for nearly a decade until Epic came in and started eating their lunch. The mobile app looks like a contracted out app from 2009. Seriously, go download the mobile app. Half the products or ideas they’ve come up with abandoned, never release, or are mediocre. They lack any clear vision, strategy or direction as a company. They seem like they would just absolutely rest on their laurels and do absolutely nothing if it weren’t for pesky competitors ruining their laziness.

The only reason Valve is in business today is because DRM forbids consumers from transferring their owned games to another platform. If I could abandon Steam I immediately would.

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That's a really bitter way of saying that Steam's been chugging along doing fine for some time now. Epic's store was never really a competitor until Sweeney starting getting itinerant over his royalties red herring, paying developers for exclusive launches, and giving away at least a game a week for something like a year now. It's still missing a ton of features compared to Steam (though one could argue how many of those features should stay missing), and it is slow as molasses.

Steam's only other potential competitor was GOG, and it seems those two have had a fairly friendly relationship over the years. Remember that Valve gives away Steam keys to developers and resellers at very little cost, and that there are thriving third-party markets because of that.

You could argue that they have been stagnant in terms of game development, but everyone knows that isn't exactly true since Alyx was released. I don't really know what state VR was in before its release but from this outsider's perspective it seems to have raised the bar considerably.

Save for GOG, the DRM war is effectively lost, and so I'd rather be living under Gaben's benevolent dictatorship than some of the other more corporate-minded masters.

On the subject of game development at Valve, there's a lot of things that have been worked on but never turned into an actual release. There were 5 cancelled Half-Lifes between Episode 2 and Alyx (Including Half Life 3), Left 4 Dead 3, F-Stop, "RPG". A.R.T.I, SimTrek and probably a few more.

That sometimes over-cancelling willingness I think is also part of what makes the end result great-TF2 took 9 years and several versions similarly to Alyx, but I think both were worth the wait.

What stodgy complainy whininess.

I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

Big Picture works great for a console like experience far better than anyone elses.

Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable.

Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water.

I'm sorry the you doesn't meet your high pop culture desires? It feels much less glossy-plastic & more direct to me than Epic. That's just me I guess. The thing is, that is way way way way down my list of concerns. Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated. The lack of mainstream highly visible overwhelming successes doesn't bother me. Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.

Anyone who says Valve is resting on their laurels clearly hasn't tried Half Life: Alyx. They've sigularly pushed VR further than all the other games and experiences out there combined.

Agreed. As far as my household is concerned there are two relevant VR experiences: BeatSaber and Alyx. (Serious Sam of all games gets an honourable mention). We would not own a Quest if not for Alyx.

>I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

I'd give Valve money JUST FOR THIS ! Thank you Valve - Keep kicking ass. No I'm not a fanboy I didn't even play Half-Life.

>Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable.

The Steam Controller is dead.

>I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else.

Steam OS is dead. The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve. Valve has supported Linux in the (hilariously) limited number of titles they've released in the last decade, and has added some support to the open source community. They are not the driver behind Linux gaming.

>Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water.

Steam Link is no longer in production. Legitimately, have you ever tried other remote play alternatives? There is just no way you can say this with a straight face. The Valve apps are truly crap.

>Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated

What? This isn't a difficult problem to solve. There are a dozen game libraries similar to Steam that do the same job, but significantly better. The only thing Steam has going for it is the DRM stickiness that they acquired by being the only player in the PC space for so long.

>Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.

Legitimately, tell me how they are innovating in "radical ways."

This is comically absurd take that is utterly divorced from reality. Half of what you mentioned to love about Valve is related to canceled or abandoned stuff.

Please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve. Valve has supported Linux in the (hilariously) limited number of titles they've released in the last decade, and has added some support to the open source community. They are not the driver behind Linux gaming.

Valve are not the only ones doing anything for Linux gaming, but they are a pretty fucking big contributor: - Releaseing Steam for Linux, which has encouraged many games to be ported. Yes, the Steam Consoles are cancelled (or on hold), but even the promise of a new market (and the convenience of not having to have a separate distribution channel for the Linux version of your game) has changed the Linux gaming landscape from a handful of titles to more games than anyone can play (depending on your tastes ofc). - Employing/contracting people working on different parts of the Linux graphics stack (SDL,radv,dxvk,more). - Developing Proton. I mostly play native games, but Proton has been huge for many. Yes, it's based on Wine (that is a good thing, NIH syndrome is way too common is bad) but Valve have improved the parts needed to get a good gaming experience and packaged it up in a nice way that is dead simple to use for anyone. Just click a button to play your Windows games. - Lots of other small things. For example Valve's Plagman has been working on https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope which is godsent for thos of us with ultrawide monitors or other uncommon resolutions and aspect ratios that gamedevs like to pretend don't exist.

And best of all, most of those improvements have been open source and available even to those who don't want to use Steam. That's surprisingly open for what is esentially a DRM company. So saying "The open source community is more responsible for Linux gaming than Valve" doesn't even make sense when Valve are part of that opensource community.

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