Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-source community
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
Seriously. Yeah give them flak for steam’s store policies and such but Valve has always cared about gamers. They just don’t have the means to do it all (maybe they do?). I’m a fan. Not for HL1 or 2, not for Portal or TF2, not for CS, but for their never ending support on making sure “gaming” can be enjoyed by all.
Perhaps this is all wishful thinking, but history has proven that Valve was perhaps the best steward we could have asked for in supporting the transition to online distribution. If we look at the alternatives be it Microsoft, Epic, or even GOG, no one has done it better. And, when tested, Valve continues to show they strive to do the right thing. For example look at returns. I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. On top of this, when the policy doesn't work (e.g. games which are broken outside of the return window), Valve again does the right thing and creates exceptions.
however it was still miles better than "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it
The profile pages and screenshot uploads were fun too.
Another online community lost to the sands of time, alas.
Do people really think this? I remember applying updates to CS before steam and it was awful. Steam streamlined that and gave us a much needed friends list. I never ever thought steam the application was a bad.
the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do anything
this wasn't a meme for no reason: https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o
Few people then knew that it was way ahead of its time, and even fewer knew how much of a fight valve would be putting up against capitalist regimes trying to kill gaming.
Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam.
It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004.
It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?
And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.
Wikipedia tells me that "window" of time was a year or two
One copy of the Half Life box set (with Blue Shift, Opposing Forces, etc) could basically become as many copies as the whole thing.
I turned that one box set into several Steam accounts for my friends/I to share. Each 'mod' (turned game) basically granted a new Half Life license and cloned the derivatives
That was not included as part of that bundle.. but if you used the dedicated server tool to download the czero mod and copied it to your halflife folder you could play both the single player and multiplayer version on steam
My understanding was they were solving the update problem:
Back in the day, every CS update broke the community - not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update then you can only join a server that's updated. Most people don't update immediately, and servers want to only update when most users have updated, so as a result the servers don't update. But now users don't want to update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.
This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.
Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason not to update. The community stays unified, updates aren't inherently socially painful. That's what Steam accomplished for CS.
I also... Fondly?... Recall the time everybody was excited to have Xmas or star trek themes desktop with windowblinds.... Funny how not just fashion changes, but even need for fashion - virtually nobody customizes their windows desktop anymore :)
It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realized I could take my laptop to campus, download it over their incredibly fast WiFi, and then transfer the files to my desktop that had a decent GPU.
The popularity of the mods, CS included, is what drove Steam to become the store that it is.
We are, admittedly, in a pretty sweet spot right now with games running the genre gamut from Rimworld to Minecraft to Cities: Skylines to Starsector to the Bethesda RPGs having vibrant mod scenes but man, I have serious nostalgia for CS, NS, and DoD, oh and Tribes.
If it's even still possible to install/activate them. Whenever any of them became available on Steam I would rebuy them there just for the convenience.
But for some reason people will insist on ignoring those problems, or instead compare it to some earlier experience with standalone games or some Microsoft pile of garbage, and will defend Steam in places like this.
Valve's Steam service is super nice for consumers (though developers get squeezed terribly), but the client is just horrible.
I don't think there's any grand conspiracy like you make it out to be, perhaps you've had an outlier experience.
Having access to so many gamers, at once, without me having to setup a storefront, and pci compliance, and credit card data, is actually good for me. If you live in part of the world where there isn’t a tax treaty with the United States, that’s not exactly Valves fault. Blame your government for the squeeze.
Steam is by far the jankiest program I have installed on my machine. It's TSAB (time to seeing a bug, I just made it up) is measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. I know they're raking in money for being what is mostly a very large FTP server (I kid...), but please spend some of it on the basic experience.
A lot more stable than Tim Sweeneys ego.
Used it on hard drives, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs.
And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung) Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as hell.
Try disabling the options that preload and refresh all the store/community "stuff" behind the scenes. Maybe auto-updates too.
In general their policy very good, but it's not quite no questions asked—they're pretty strict about the 2 hour playtime limit, which is quite a short time to decide if a game will actually be fun. In many types of games by the time you get through the tutorial and have access to all the game mechanics you're already past the two hour mark, and they also can't tell the difference between actual play time and time in the menu while you're doing something else.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad policy, there are obviously reasons for this. But it's not truly no questions asked.
Costco has a no-questions-asked return policy, and demo-ing your purchase is absolutely part of the expectation for how people will use said policy. Steam even explicitly includes "it wasn't fun" as a valid return option, as long as you reached that conclusion quickly enough.
To be clear, I'm not saying the policy is wrong, it's clearly designed to prevent abuse, I'm just saying that it's not no-questions-asked.
Valve is there to facilitate the sale of the game, not guarantee the game is good.
The current limits are 14 days since-purchase as long as you've played the game for less than 2 hours.
It still is abused for short indie games, with people buying them with the intention of speed-running through and refunding.
The refund policy is intended more for “crashed repeatedly”, “far too slow despite my machine matching the stated specs”, and “simply wouldn't run”, type problems, rather than not liking the game. There isn't much a service like Steam can do about that, that won't be abused, other than offer demos (enough for you to try out those core mechanics) which is really down to the game creators and out of their power. Other than that you just have to not be first in line, and wait for reviews from sources you trust.
Too much shovelware on Steam these days, and the user has to pay retail price to even try it.
Whereas things like DRM and returns and even royalties differ amongst platforms, and none of those have the same hegemony as Steam does; and the compulsory platforms, like the App Store and Google Play, developers complain bitterly about them in a way I've never heard regarding Steam, which they participate in voluntarily.
Years later, Valve again: “You know, we just kept going on that thing we told you about, here’s a full fledged x86 win32 compatibility layer for anything posix. We had to patch the kernel but they were receptive.” Who does this? No one. Not a single company does this. They all have ulterior motives. Patch Linux for some hardware they are introducing for sale or patching it for some platform to get your PII data. Valve is the only company that is patching to make things better for the sake of making “the ecosystem” better. Apple: “We have the best products” yet those products aren’t helping the compute ecosystem. Microsoft: “We have AI” yet those products are still being worked out and is under active litigation from pretty much every creative out there. Valve: “We just want to play, make sense of players, to make better play experiences, to make better games, and not write more code than we have to. Our business is games, not code”.
Google on the other hand...
Google, isn’t the same Google. Eric Schmidt is from my area of the world but advertising poisoned the company (one would argue, gave it a monetary value). Like Napster, Google was designed with good intentions in the beginning. That’s why it beat Excite, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Bing, AskJeeves, etc was because its usefulness at searching AND ranking.
All the FAANGs contribute to open source. That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m saying Valve does it not just for them but for everyone. With the only hope that Gabe can get HL3 running on a CoreBoot Linux Handheld because console royalties suck.
Sure it is self-serving in the sense that they do get a lot out of the community as well, but I don't feel that super min-maxing of resource allocation on their open source projects.
In Valve’s case, it pays them to have this “good guy” look - some other stores try different strategies, but overall we really should never put personalities behind companies. They all are lawnmowers.
The only thing I care about my set of ETFs is how profitable they are. If one of them stops giving me profits, I'll sell it, contributing to de downward trend of the etf and its underlying stocks.
Social, environmental or other aspects do not play in capitalism.
That was however not Valve's idea, but only came in response to EA Origin offering a return policy in 2013, Valve follow up in 2015 with their own.
One of the very rare cases where the competition was a little ahead for once.
Rod Sims, head of ACCC at the time, asserted that Valve's original no-refund stance broke Australian law.
> Under Australian Consumer Law, everybody who buys a product or a service has a right to a refund if the product doesn’t work. They have a right to a refund, or a repair. Those rights are enshrined in Australian Law, and our allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law
[1] https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-why-w...
I'll save some time:
Consumer Rights Act (CRA), 2015, UK:
Section 34
Digital content to be of satisfactory quality
(1)Every contract to supply digital content is to be treated as including a term that the quality of the digital content is satisfactory.
(2)The quality of digital content is satisfactory if it meets the standard that a reasonable person would consider satisfactory, taking account of—
(a)any description of the digital content,
(b)the price mentioned in section 33(1) or (2)(b) (if relevant), and
(c)all the other relevant circumstances (see subsection (5)).
(3)The quality of digital content includes its state and condition; and the following aspects (among others) are in appropriate cases aspects of the quality of digital content—
(a)fitness for all the purposes for which digital content of that kind is usually supplied;
(b)freedom from minor defects;
(c)safety;
(d)durability.
Digital goods are treated differently by the act to other goods(hence them being mentioned specifically in this section).
Purchasing non-digital goods online provides a greater right to return them even if they are not faulty. Digital goods, as your quoted section points out, can be returned if they are not of (objectively) satisfactory quality.
The two week mandatory, no-fuss return you mentioned originally only applies to non-digital goods/services bought remotely.
But by reliability issues I don't mean it occasionally failed. It did, but that was early on. I assume they just killed the backend and never pushed a client update to remove it because I remember what was at least months if not a full year of the friends UI just saying it failed to connect to the Friends network.
The actual matchmaking never had any real issues that I remember, but the login servers definitely did, and deleting clientregistry.blob and restarting steam was just a routine thing you did to get steam working again.
None of this is really that surprising though, steam was originally a tool just for beta testers, while the live game used WON for matchmaking. WON was shutting down and Valve had to rush steams public release.
I wasn't trying to imply they were released on literally the same day, of course steam was out before HL2, but HL2 is what drove its popularity because people were forced to install steam to get access to HL2.
And most people resented them for it. At that time, store purchases was still the common way to get at PC games.
Steam was the first “online required” for offline play I think. Others like EA and Ubisoft followed shortly after but didn’t have their own stores until many many years later.
They'd also pocket all that money, but I guess they don't want people who spent more than said cap to get their skins. But people who are spending 100+ on skins should know they are playing the NFT game.
Not sure if that's still happening.
2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins, Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open market for Steam credit.
Valve takes 5% of each market transaction and many skins hold their value quite well so using a $200 knife for years and years could only end up costing $10 (+ opportunity cost) or so assuming the market stays flat and you will eventually buy $200 of games in the future.
The real losers in the system are the people with gambling addictions opening cases and hoping to get something really good for less than market price. Cases are free drops but cost $2.50 to open and the average market value of what you win is usually less than (value of the case)+$2.50. Because the cases can be sold there's no limit to the amount of gambling one person can do.
... on their own community market platform. Valve supports third party stores that don't have a Valve cut, and they freely provide the ability for users to trade items for items with no fees to allow third party stores to work. These systems kick off a whole third angle of businesses being propped up around the exchange of these items and of people doing speculative trades on certain items.
To me this is infinitely worse than just having a skin shop and/or battlepass.
One possibility is that they're gambling addicts in countries where gambling is heavily restricted, and buying "loot boxes" containing random items is the closest they can get to playing a casino slot machine.
Or perhaps they think of themselves as clever investors in collectables, which they hope to sell on at a profit later on. You and I might think they're buying the equivalent of tulips or beanie babies - but they think their purchases are more like fine wines or rare postage stamps.
Perhaps the big spenders actually only spend big five bucks at a time, and they're merely poor at managing their personal finances - spending five bucks a day for five years, unaware of how it's adding up.
Or it could be money laundering - perhaps there's some criminal scheme where bank transfers are heavily monitored by the cops, but transfers of rare TF2 hats aren't.
Perhaps the big money transactions are actually fake, aiming to pump up prices or make people spending mere hundreds of dollars feel better about it because at least they're not spending thousands.
Yet another option is that they're super-successful billionaires, and a thousand bucks is nothing to them, not even worth bending down to pick up if they saw it in the street.
People who make games with microtransactions for a living probably find it a lot easier to sleep at night if they think all their whales are billionaires.
They have a fair amount of disposable income, but certainly aren't billionaires.
I bring it up because games like Overwatch 2 get regularly shit on for introducing things like a battle pass and paid skin shop. Those rely on FOMO as well, but not nearly to the same extent. There are no gambling mechanics, and there is no Blizzard-sanctioned auction house where the most desirable items sell for thousands of dollars. The most desirable cosmetics in the game can be had for 10 dollars plus spending some time playing the game.
As a player, it also just feels really shitty that customizing my character the way I want is reliant entirely on blind luck through gambling mechanics or spending obscene amounts of money.
So if Blizzard is gonna take heat for this (and they do deserve at least some of it), then Valve absolutely should get raked over the coals for their far worse system.
My new thesis is: if "winning" is "looking cool by getting good loot", then allowing people to pay for drops is effectively pay to win. I think this nuance is often skipped over in the conversation about whether some new game's micro-transaction framework is sleazy or not.
At worst, you cannot buy more games or gifts or trade your items. But you can still download the single player games you already have.
EDIT: Generally it seems account suspension is possible, but that usually means they noticed something illegal or extremely suspicious activity.
They're just the biggest player and the 30% cut is worth it for all the additional sales.
Like what? GoG? And what else?
To be fair, none of these things were pioneered by Valve, but more of a general change in what society accepts as the new normal.
Even though I can remove SteamStub DRM with an automatic tool to solve these issues, It still irks me how there isn't a regulatory solution to these problems
This is the email I sent, make of it what you will:
Mr. Newell,
I figured I would email you as a sort of spiritual goodbye to my fandom of Steam.
I have been a customer for as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure it's longer than the 15 years my profile lists as I had a profile that I lost access to before this one. For this entire time I've been a staunch supporter and advocate of Steam. I've slowly built my collection over the years and would always prefer to buy via Steam vs.another platform or even direct. I would always recount my many positive experiences with the Steam platform when discussions online turned negative. Overall I was a very happy customer and advocate.
My son is now 10 and I had finally decided to start a game library for him. We are a multi-PC family and we frequently want to game together or just want to all play games at the same time, even if they are different ones. As the Steam sharing feature means we cannot all play different games I decided I'd just buy him some of the games he asked for or that we could play together. The last two of those purchases is what triggered my loss of faith in Steam. And to be honest, it was such a trivial thing to trigger it in the end. I purchased a copy of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition and a copy of Conan Exiles - Complete Edition. They were both on sale for a good amount off, 75% for ED and 40% for CE. As I seem unable to just purchase a game and hold it as a later gift to someone and instead I have to specify the recipient right away I went ahead and sent it to my son's email address. That address is simply a group that goes to myself and my wife until he's a little older. Apparently I missed the fact that I needed to go and accept the gift or the gift would be REFUNDED. Eventually the gifts were both refunded and I had missed it until the second gift was refunded. I immediately reached out to support to help un-refund the purchases. They said that they were unable to help me.
That is really where the story ends I'd say. Nothing dramatic, but I told them they'd lost a customer for giving me my money back. Pretty ironic really.
I keep getting emails about deals on items on my wishlist and I keep realizing that I meant what I'd said. You guys lost a customer. I've gone so far as to start buying games I already own on Steam on GOG instead now. I won't walk away from my Steam library and I'm not saying I'll never spend more money on Steam. But I'll never do it as a first choice and I'll never do it as a happy customer.
I just wanted to write to you on the off chance that you might read this so perhaps you can do something for the future to not lose another loyal customer over such a trivial thing.
And this was the response:
Hello Mr. [X],
My name is [Y] and I am a developer on Steam. Thank you for taking the time to email us and bring this issue to our attention.
I have reviewed your help request and I am contacting you to apologize for the responses that you received. Your request was not handled appropriately and we will use it as well as your feedback to improve how we handle cases like yours in the future.
We would like to add free copies of the games that were automatically refunded to your son's account. From your email, it sounded like you were hoping to delay giving him these games until he is a little older. So, I have added giftable copies of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition and Conan Exiles - Complete Edition to your account's inventory. You can access your inventory through the dropdown menus near the top of the Steam Client and gift them to his account at any time.
We also think it is great that you are starting a game library for him and we would like to contribute some games from Valve as well. I am including two CD keys which you can register on both of your accounts so that you can play the included games together. These keys include all present and future Valve titles:
[CODE1]
[CODE2]
Thank you again for bringing this to our attention. Please let me know if I can help with anything else.
That sounds unreasonable.
I don't do customer support very often, but when I do, it's my default response.
I have zero affiliation with them, I just have had absolutely amazing interactions with them.
I posted the email exchange I had below another comment. In that exchange you'll notice that the dev said they'd added the games under my inventory to gift to my son at a later date (when he was older). That came about 2 years later when he was 12. The problem was, when I tried to use the gifts from my inventory they both failed for unspecified reasons. I reached out to the initial dev again, hoping he was still there. He was and he helped resolve the issue right away.
I know some people have had bad customer service with Steam or have other complaints, some valid and others not so much. In the end, I'm a pretty satisfied Steam customer and will generally speak well of them when the situation arises (like today).
That said, I'm scared about the inevitable creep of capitalism. What happens when Gabe retires? Or some legal/financial event changes things?
I have no reason to doubt them, but history gives me reasons to be cautious with my optimism. We've seen similar parallels with beloved tech companies in the past.
Epic makes a big deal about digital storefronts only needing a 12% cut to turn a profit, but Epic isn't turning around and investing that money into things that make the platform better for everyone like Valve does (Steam Input, Proton, Workshop just to name a few things).
Apple don't reinvest in creating open standards, and don't invest in improving user experience for everyone.
Their investments are generally to increase lock-in.
Apple gives you less features, has a lot more restrictions and is pretty annoying to deal with
Correction, for Steam users, not for everyone.
Steam Input and Workshop are completely proprietary services that do not work outside of Steam. Steam Input configs are difficult (not impossible, but unnecessarily complicated) to access/share across services, meaning that even if you do use Steam, if you bought a game outside of Steam and are importing it, you're probably going to be rebuilding the Steam Input config from scratch. Steam Workshop is also inaccessible to games purchased outside of Steam even if you import those games into Steam. And not only has Valve not built a way to link imported games to a Workshop and not provided mechanisms for games to make use of Workshop outside of Steam as an independent service, the company has actually clamped down on efforts to circumvent that DRM and shut down community projects.
Both Steam Workshop and Steam Input are very clearly designed to be vendor lock-in. To gamers who only use Steam and nothing else, it feels like Valve is making it better for everyone, but it's a lot more like the Apple ecosystem -- Valve is leaving behind anyone who buys games outside of Steam and almost explicitly punishing users who get games from other storefronts. The company offers a lot of services that can't be debundled from Steam -- you can't as a developer pay Valve to make use of Workshop outside of Steam. And so a lot of these "universal" benefits are really only benefits for people who buy games exclusively on Steam.
That's not to say Valve doesn't do great work elsewhere. Proton is genuinely good for the ecosystem, even though Valve still ties it heavily into Steam and combines it with Steam-specific features like shader caches that are inaccessible outside of Steam. I think the Steam Deck is a wonderful device hampered only somewhat by the fact that it's so reliant on Steam Input which is entirely proprietary. But it's still miles above other consoles and I'm genuinely grateful that Valve built it and even more grateful that they based it on Linux. It's repairable, it's far more open than other consoles. Valve might "punish" users for installing 3rd-party software on it but at least installing that software is allowed.
Valve is neither perfect nor evil. People get enamored with Valve because our standards for companies have fallen so unbelievably far, to the point where just allowing people to install 3rd-party software and responsibly contributing back to an ecosystem that Valve is heavily reliant on feels like being granted an unexpected gift. We're used to companies abusing consumers even when there's no reason to do so. And so Valve saying "yeah, it makes more sense to us contribute upstream and it makes sense not to treat our customers like crap" is a refreshing difference.
But Valve is still a company and is still willing to prioritize its own hold on the PC marketplace over consumer and developer rights; it has plenty of vendor lock-in and plenty of proprietary services and systems that are designed to make it so that you as an end-user can buy the exact same game on two platforms and run both versions on the same device, and one of them will literally perform worse, will be harder to configure, and won't have mod support.
And regarding the workshop, I would be lying if I said that I never bought a game on Steam only for the convenience of using the workshop for said game... But then I have also paid Nexus for their mods because by default they cap downloads at 1 mb/s. I am also aware of tools that let you download workshop mods for games you don't own. It's certainly less convenient to have to manually download them and drag-and-drop them into your mod manager or mods folder or whatever, but they hardly make it impossible, so it's not like the mods are actually locked in to the platform.
I mentioned this -- you can only do so if you use Steam as the launcher, Steam Input is tied to using the overall Steam client. Additionally, you'll have to make that config by scratch, Steam's community sharing for configs is much more limited for non-Steam games. This seems like a small complaint but if you're buying new games you don't know what the optimal config is, so the Steam Input experience for non-Steam games is that you load up the game and as you play it you constantly adjust the config until you find an setup that works, as opposed to Steam games where you just download the highest rated community config and go from there.
On top of that, there are Steam Input features that flat-out don't work for 3rd-party games; specifically input glyphs within the game. Steam offers an API for developers to define "action sets" that among other features will make sure that instructions within the game use the correct keybindings and pictures. 3rd-party game are (as far as I can tell) completely locked out of that service.
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> I am also aware of tools that let you download workshop mods for games you don't own [...] but they hardly make it impossible, so it's not like the mods are actually locked in to the platform.
I mentioned this as well, Steam has actually gone after and shut down community projects that allow you to do this. It's much harder than it used to be and for some games it's outright impossible.
Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm concerned; there are plenty of games that are completely inaccessible. Even if that wasn't the case, the inability for 3rd-party games to be linked to Steam Workshop profiles by users is vendor lock-in. The vast majority of gamers didn't have the technical skills to route around Steam's restrictions even before Steam started shutting down community projects and putting ownership checks in front of downloads.
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What would be far more market-friendly and what would actually benefit everyone would be for Valve to debundle those services from Steam -- I'm not saying every developer should be able to use Steam Workshop for free, but Steam Workshop should not be tied to Steam. It should just be "Valve Workshop".
There are a lot of games that are Steam exclusive specifically because there are Steam APIs that they can't take advantage of on other storefronts. And it's very common for games to come to other platforms outright missing features (particularly online content) because developers don't even have a choice to pay to utilize those features outside of Steam.
I think modding and input configuration are the two most obvious examples of this, but if you've ever bought a game on GoG and then found out after the fact that it's missing an entire game mode, Steam is (in my experience) probably the reason for that.
The input thing does seem like a niche complaint, sorry to say. I don't think I've ever encountered that, and I think even if I did it wouldn't stop me from playing the game, I would just bind the controls myself. I guess this could be decoupled as well, but I don't think the reason that it isn't is necessarily lock-in; I would bet that there just aren't enough people that care about it, so to Valve it would be wasted effort. But now I'm assuming intent so what do I know, really.
SDL is currently working on an Action Set equivalent, and I think their plan is to just use configuration files on disk for the most part. So in the same way that ProtonDB is mostly community maintained and outside of Steam and you can look up a game's settings and apply them to a 3rd-party game, what I think would be the easiest improvement would be allowing arbitrary search for community-supplied configs and moving that to be an independent URL that Steam hits that just downloads an encapsulated config file that Steam reads.
There is some way to do share non-Steam configs, if you link a 3rd-party game in Steam you will sometimes in community configs and then see a subset of the normal configs? I have no idea how that subset is calculated or if users need to do something to enable it though, the entire interface around sharing Steam Input configs even for games purchased from Steam is a little bit of a mess, or at least it is on Steam Deck.
I feel like I'm settling by saying this because I'd also like straight-up input binding outside of Steam, but even ignoring stuff like action sets, 3rd-party clients -- just being able to load a community config by typing a game name into a search box instead of needing to build my own would get rid of a lot of my problems, particularly for control schemes like flick stick that require me to take measurements of mouse/gyro sensitivity.
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> but an independent Steam workshop page that developers pay to opt into would be a good approach to that
My current plan for my own games I'm working on is to leverage git for modding support -- I'm not going to build a studio-specific mod hosting service or partner with a company, I similarly don't really like ModDB that much and don't think they're great community players. So instead I'm going bundle a small git client with the final game and use that to download/update mods and handle stuff like versioning, readmes, etc...
That doesn't help with discoverability or ratings, but my thought process is that a lot of games (Terraria, Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc..) are organized around Github/Gitlab/Codeberg already for the primary modding engines, so at least if people are using that they can get issue trackers and embedded wikis, there's a standard way to download, it encourages releasing the mod source, you can look at activity to see whether or not a mod is active, you can have beta branches, you can check for updates without re-downloading everything, you can have a canonical source URL without wondering if a mod is only updated on Workshop/ModDB/whatever.
At least for the moment I don't plan to enable Steam Workshop for any of the games I'm working on, I think git will give me most of the same features minus a search function and user ratings. To be fair, search and user ratings are pretty important though, so :shrug: I'll see how that goes.
I think that the Steam Workshop would be at least partially fine IF they allowed all Workshop items to be downloaded without a steam account. And even if a game developer enables this option, steam randomly disables it occasionally and the game developer has to re enable it all over again (this happened with Terraria).
Furthermore, its really, really hard to download Workshop items for a lot of games. Short of buying the game (a good $30-70 down the drain), your only options are to:
- Download through steamcmd. this only works if the game has explicitly enabled the anonymous download thing I talked about earlier. steamcmd (like the name suggests) also has a CLI which a lot of gamers can't/won't navigate.
- Go through external services. These external services often charge you if you download Workshop items for popular games or if you download Workshop items that are new.
- As a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you. In the Terraria discord server you'll find plenty of these people (I'm one of them!). This also doesn't work for games without an active playerbase.
> As(k) a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you.
If anything this might be my biggest critique of Valve's handling of the situation. Even with the DRM on top of Workshop mods, community mirroring of locked-down games would be possible to do in a way that was convenient for end-users outside of Steam... if Valve didn't occasionally just straight-up send cease-and-desist letters to those services.
It wouldn't cover every game, it would still be a problem, there would still be legal and ethical questions about distributing mods without modder consent, but it would be a lot better than the current situation. Right now if a game has those restrictions turned on (which Valve seems to specifically encourage) you kind of have to go underground or interact with shady services or ask players directly, and so coordination between communities becomes very difficult.
I can't read Valve's mind, but I lose a lot of sympathy for them when they're both not supplying any option for users to get access to mods without rebuying the game on Steam and stopping anyone else from trying to solve the problem Steam created for them -- at that point it's very hard for me to avoid thinking that Valve is being deliberately anticompetitive.
I'd still have criticism of a less locked-down system, but it would be easier for me to assume Valve just doesn't see it as worth the effort to support rather than thinking that they seem to be taking a lot of active steps to make the situation worse than it needs to be.
Though even if they didn't, I can't see how these features being exclusive to Steam "punishes" users for buying games elsewhere. The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all.
The biggest alternative to Steam Workshop is Nexus Mods, which is ironically far less friendly to mod developers.
I've talked about this in a sibling comment more, but as far as I can tell, no they really don't. Valve does ownership checks for a nontrivial number of games before downloading workshop mods. And I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that 3rd-party games can be linked to the workshop, I am not aware of any mechanism to do that. I'd definitely be using it if it existed :)
Steam Input partially works with 3rd-party games but won't work with things like glyphs and seems to (in my experience) have very limited support for searching for existing configs.
> The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all.
I strongly disagree with this, and I think if we slip into thinking in this way, you can excuse almost any abusive behavior. It's just as plausible to say that without Epic's exclusive sponsorship a number of indie games also wouldn't exist -- and in fact many developers have outright said that Epic is the reason their games were able to be funded at all.
But I'm not going to give Epic bonus points for doing timed exclusives, it's still abusive behavior. And similarly I'm not going to give Valve bonus points for building services that are arbitrarily tied to a specific storefront. There is no reason Steam Workshop and Steam Input couldn't be debundled from Steam.
We're on here praising Valve for upstreaming code to Wine through Proton. If Wine wasn't already Open Source and Valve had built it from scratch, I don't believe they would have Open Sourced it. What I'm asking for (particularly with systems like Steam Input which could be standardized outside of Steam and which are heavily reliant on clientside APIs that run entirely locally) is for Valve to not conditionally engage with Open Source communities only when they have to or are they working with codebases that are already Open Source.
"We wouldn't build this if we weren't able to use it for lock-in" is how companies get away with a lot of consumer-abusive behavior. And I just don't buy it -- if anything, the opposite is more likely true; we might have standardized on more Open mod platforms and might have gotten true platform-agnostic controlling binding support within libraries like SDL much sooner if Steam Input didn't exist and games/gamers weren't able to just ignore the problem and stick with Steam's solution.
And if mod support for non-Steam games was as technically challenging as you suppose, Valve wouldn't need to be sending cease and desist letters to community projects that redistributed mod files. Valve wouldn't need to be verifying purchases before allowing users to download files.
The fact that Valve is putting additional technical and even legal barriers in front of mod redistribution means that it's not just that the mods wouldn't work without a special Steam build. The reality is that many of the mods would work, and that is precisely what Valve is trying to prevent. Tools that allowed for loading mods from Steam Workshop weren't shut down because they didn't work, they were shut down because they did work.
----
There's a somewhat weird deference here to technical issues, but it's not clear whether you're claiming that developers are solving those issues or Valve is.
Saying that Workshop needs to deliver assets in the "engine's own format" is really just another way of saying "different games need to be modded differently." But that has always been the case and yet before Steam Workshop modding files were distributed and installed manually. Similarly, asset patching and replacement for games has always been a thing. And mods worked.
To the extent that mods today are drag-and-drop, they are drag and drop because the developers put in the work. Valve is not going into engine source code, decompiling everything, and then figuring out how to get the mod to work. They're providing APIs and mechanisms for developers to tell Steam Workshop how to modify the game files.
So unsurprisingly, the majority of mods that work in Steam work outside of Steam because once the developer puts in the work to build a modding system that's compatible with the assets and files that Steam workshop downloads and once those assets are patched for a version of the game, then developers are shipping that same version of the game on multiple platforms (unless they're using proprietary Steam APIs, in which case it's probably a Steam-exclusive game anyway).
Whatever APIs Steam is providing for Steam Workshop, there is no reason those APIs need to be restricted to Steam. A debundled service could provide the same stitching and the same APIs on-demand for games outside of Steam.
----
Now, if you wanted to defend some of Valve's other anticompetitive behavior, such as precompiling shader caches, that would be much easier for you to do, since shader caches are not only game-version specific, they are also often platform-specific, and there's very little way for Valve to provide those assets without knowing exactly what version of the game is installed where. It's not like Valve can compute a single set of shaders and then just give them to everyone, they're dependent on the actual install.
But mods aren't in that position. Developers are putting in the work to support modding, games have to opt-into this system anyway so it's not like 3rd-party installs can't report to Steam Workshop what version they are, it's not like games who are adding modding support can't upload resource files to a debundled Workshop to be modified. And the end result of that process would work for games outside of Steam, as evidenced by the fact that in the instances where you can download mods from Steam Workshop and get access to the files, they tend to work in versions of the game from alternate storefronts.
This is another way of re-saying -- if this was actually a technical issue, Valve would not need to put barriers in place keeping people from downloading mods outside of Steam. If it's so impossible for Valve to support mods outside of Steam, then fine, they don't have to do anything. Just get rid of the extra barriers they've constructed and let communities solve the problem for them without interference. But Valve isn't willing to do that. The reason Steam Workshop has such poor support outside of Steam isn't because it's an impossible technical problem, it's because Valve is taking active steps to prevent people from accessing those mods. Valve could do literally nothing to support Workshop access outside of Steam and the situation would be better than it is today.
What you can’t do, is take mods, put them up on your site to download, without the authors permission unless stated in the license.
This isn't a problem for Valve, which has been granted permission to host the files by the authors who uploaded the mods. I'm not saying Valve should give permission to mirror mod files without the author's permission, I'm saying Valve should stop blocking non-Steam users from downloading files from Valve that Valve has permission to host and distribute.
Redistribution of mod files outside of Steam is a problem for Valve that only exists because Valve is locking mods behind login requirements and ownership checks. Nobody would have a need to redistribute mods out-of-channel if Valve wasn't going out of its way to lock down the channel and prevent legitimate access.
And it's Valve making the decision to do that, it's not that mod developers are asking Valve to block downloads of their mods. Mod developers themselves get zero input into whether or not a game's workshop page is locked down. Locking down the official channels is a decision made by Valve (and to a lesser extent the game publisher). Valve doesn't need to offer that option at all to game publishers, and Valve certainly doesn't need to default that restriction to on. The locked-down nature of Steam Workshop has very little if anything to do with the IP rights of mod authors, they're not consulted for any of this and Valve gives them no control at all over how their workshop mods can be accessed.
And of course Valve has permission to distribute their own assets. You take it as a given that downloading workshop files using a non-Steam client would "rightfully" draw Valve's ire, but I can't for the life of me figure out why that would be true if Valve is acting reasonably and isn't trying to be anticompetitive. The only reason for Valve to be angry about unauthenticated download requests to the Steam Workshop would be if they were trying to lock consumers into Steam, which is... exactly what I'm criticizing them about, that they should not be trying to create anti-consumer moats around their product.
Epic invests in devs. Valve invests in users. I guess the difference in focus is why you'll see such different reactions to Valve vs. Epic online vs when talking to actual devs.
Is this true? I know they pay up front to have exclusivity for some games, but I don't know if I would consider that "investing in devs" in the same way that Valve "invests in users." Valve puts money into platforms and tools that users enjoy (things like forums, hosting mods, user reviews, community pages) as their investment. Does Epic do something similar for devs? The only thing I can think of is using funds to polish Unreal Engine, but that would only invest in devs that use Unreal which is not really applicable to most devs.
Sure,
- They invest in Unreal Engine and all the adjacent tech available, some of which can be used without Unreal Engine (Epic Online services). Of course, tech like Metahuman and Quixel want to draw people into UE but if you are already using UE it's a strong consideration.
- Similar to Unity, they have an asset store which enables some devs to make money selling tools/assets to other devs
- Lastly they do directly fund various games and tools. The forced exlusivity didn't put a good taste in consumers mouths but I'm mostly talking about Epic Megagrants. No strings attached, they can just throw money at good devs and most notably they invested into Godot and blender (again, no strings attached. True grants just to make open source tooling better).
most of their stuff is skewed towards Unreal Engine, but I don't see it as any different from Valve being skewed towards Steam. The difference is that consumers want to buy games while devs want to make money. So while there's a stronger business angle to every Epic solution, it fits with what a dev would want to do.
Oh how I wish that was true. Steam's accessibility story is an utter and inexcusable piece of garbage. Using Steam with a screen reader is a constant struggle, to the point where people had to write guides [1] on how to go about this. It got a bit better recently, at least on Windows, Mac still sucks. There are plenty of Steam games that a blind person can play, sometimes natively[2][3], sometimes through special accessibility mods[4][5][6]. Not to mention the Steamdeck, which has no accessibility support at all, despite the fact that Linux screen readers do exist[7], and consoles like PS5 and Xbox implement their own[8][9]. Valve really doesn't care.
[1] (outdated) https://www.mail-archive.com/audiogames-reflector@sabahattin... [2] https://blind.shadows1428.com/ [3] https://mortalkombatgamessupport.wbgames.com/hc/en-us/articl... [4] https://github.com/bradjrenshaw/say-the-spire [5] https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/16205 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQC6TJkBElY [7] https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/getting-started-with-orca/ [8] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib.... [9] https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-acces...
In before Steam has moved off of web interfaces (I haven't checked in a couple of years so they might be doing something different now particularly with big picture mode), but I'm frustrated that we all started building interfaces for native platforms in HTML/Javascript and it didn't lead to embracing any of the accessibility features that those same interfaces would get by default inside of a web browser.
To be fair, my understanding is that Linux screenreader support is pretty bad, but it does seem like if a developer is going to the trouble to build the majority of their interface in a semantic XML-like pure-text format, there should probably also be an option to read that text out loud.
They have billions so they can do both games and services if they want to. But it sounds like there was a lot of brain drain from the game designer perspective as Valve's priorities shifted. Why risk something as unstable as a game if you can focus on steady income from others making games?
well of course not. These aren't product that directly make money. Maybe a small chinese startup can do it, but they would still prefer to ship with Windows.
I only really played Portal so I have no real fond memories of TF/CS/HL. But I'm just saying that Valve definitely has the money to invest in games if they really wanted to.
I'm being pretty critical of Valve on here in other places, but I would say that taking the time to make an excellent game even though a platform is niche and even though that game is essentially just a hardware advertisement and even though that advertisement isn't likely to move that platform to be non-niche to me shows a strong commitment to good game design.
Alyx didn't really need to exist I don't think. I don't think it moved the needle on making VR any less niche. I don't see it as a good economic move. And yet it's arguably one of the best shooters on VR.
I do think they're a lot less interested in game development than they used to be, I do have criticisms of some of their monetization schemes, but whenever they do get interested in games enough to actually make something, they seem to do a pretty good job of it. Even with Artefact, I'm not sure if the game was bad as much as just part of a crowded market and burdened with Valve's (admittedly awful) monetization philosophies for games as a service.
I was able to get back in by emailing Valve support the account name, and photos of the box and serial key HL2 came in.
I was genuinely impressed - up to that point I had absolutely despised Steam as DRM shovelware that almost never worked right due to constantly downloading updates over my shitty internet connection.
Take your favorite game today. In ~20 years, you'll be lucky if you can even play it at all.
I guess luckily the backup insurance we have is Linux... but that's also a matter of how far back of a Linux install you could log into Steam with. I guess we'll see. :)
https://kotaku.com/valve-steam-gambling-csgo-skins-ban-18504...
they don’t care about gamers wellbeing when the alternative is a money printer.
- they did a massive fuck up with Artifact, thinking they could pull out MTG's monetization model for an online game (where you didn't even receive card as rewards for levelling up, you actually had to spend money to enjoy playing the game)
- they released Underlords and killed it right away, the battle pass is still the first one and the game hasn't received any balancing patch in 3 years
Underlords could be a real good competitor to TFT. and Artifact would be nice to compete against Hearthstone's cash grab. Thankfully they actually listened to our feedback and put a nail on the coffin for Artifact.
Long live Valve. Long live the cabal.
It's been great to see that Valve have been pushing so many of their improvements upstream rather than trying to keep them to themselves - long may it continue.
Like, I've used Linux through college and dual-booted for a good decade, so I'm familiar with how Linux works as a daily driver. But what makes it so hard to distribute a Linux version? Even for devs who do think the same they seem to struggle with that compatibility.
Then realized it doesn't support Linux. I can't install it. I was shocked.
And then I realized how crazy it is that I had presumed a game would run on Linux. How far we've come.
Once you've chosen a Proton version, the option to "Install" will be available in your game menu.
I gave up on Windows a couple years ago, and most Steam games run in Linux using Proton through Steam. Some modern titles with fancy DRM don't work, but I generally don't buy those anyway (Denuvo, certain anticheats, etc).
For non-Steam games, I do the same thing, either with Steam (by adding a non-steam game installer, and using proton to install it), or by using Lutris (https://lutris.net/). I generally use Lutris with my GoG library.
To the point that I'm far more likely to find a game with clunky default controls on Steam Deck than I am one that won't play. And learning to use some of the more advanced control features of the system goes a long way to fixing that.
I need to take the time to do that some day. I’ve seen people swear Factorio was playable and fun on the deck, but the controls were just always too much of a struggle to get working in a way that worked for my brain.
I could play, but I just couldn’t get it smooth enough that the controls got out of my way.
I’d love (and hate) to have Factorio playable on the steam deck.
I had managed to get used to the Steam Input mappings so my experience may not reflect too much on you, but the official mappings are also pretty nice. IIRC they also show control hints underneath the map for context-sensitive actions, which help a lot too.
Thanks, that's deeply concerning to me since I have a baby I need to keep alive. But I'll give it a go sometime.
Yes, the Linux team at Valve really understands how open source incentives align with their own. Since they & their contractors upstream almost everything they do, they don't have to maintain a diff, or even build most of the software they ship (they just use Arch packages for most stuff, as mentioned in the article). Unlike many proprietary companies who try to keep as much as possible in-house, Valve understands you get higher quality software with a lot less work overall when you work with and are friendly to upstream projects, even if it means a bit more work and negotiation up front.
I was the creator & lead dev on Proton for its first 5 years (2016-2021), and from day 1 Valve understood that most of the work we did for them would be going upstream[1]. It wasn't even a conversation point in the early meetings. They've taken the same approach with every other OSS project they've worked with, and it shows in the great results & community relations. Valve is a great open source citizen.
[1] E.g. https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/aeikum/2019/3/27/how-proton...
In your opinion, what steps should Apple take, and in what order, to make Mac a compelling, long-term platform for third-party game developers? They're certainly showing some interest in making games happen (GPT, raytracing), but most of the efforts so far seem to be pre-aligned in their favour (Metal, Apple Arcade).
I dunno, man. They've burned a lot of bridges, and they are a small piece of the pie[2]. Not a lot of incentive for people to put up with their BS.
[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...
[2] macOS: 1.57%, Linux: 1.82%, Windows: 96.61% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I'm here to inform you that that ship (with some notable exceptions, such as Baldur's Gate 3 releasing on Macs today, I think, which is FANTASTIC) has more or less sailed. Tim Cook is neither a programmer, nor a gamer, nor an open-source advocate, and every move Apple makes and has made since he took the helm shows where his priorities lie, and they're not in the AAA gaming market (and additionally, they're starting to be open-source-developer-hostile, IMHO). I think macOS would have achieved a ton more success (it would have basically become a better, more user-friendly Linux) had Apple open-sourced it and simply made Mac hardware the "reference" macOS hardware (between you and me, I also think this move would have instantly garnered Gabe's support), but it's simply not going to be. Apple likes their walled garden and their 30% App Store cut and their iOS-specific lame-games and their proprietary CPU/GPU/SoC architecture that is only being pried open by extremely clever individuals like Asahi Lina https://github.com/asahilina and Alyssa Rosenzweig (with zero help from Apple other than "leaving the door open," essentially... Which, by the way, they can still shut at any time...)
I've become more of a Linux fan over the years but only after I found NixOS- which unfortunately has kind of a steep learning curve. The reason why I couldn't use Linux as a daily driver until NixOS is that Linux's huge customizability (and my need to experiment and explore!) also lead directly to huge opportunities to brick your system or just break things in general (which happened again, and again, and again for me, across many distros such as Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Pop_OS, etc.). Linux is thus like a hugely customizable sports car without brakes or safety belts. NixOS gives you both of those, so you get to fly with the sports car, enjoy all the customizability, but if anything goes wrong (which it rarely does, thanks to NixOS's architecture), you can instantly roll back to any prior version of the OS and its declaratively-installed apps and configs. It's the best of all worlds, currently, completely open-source, but the learning curve is still too steep for most. (I have hope that a NixOS-derived more-user-friendly distro like https://snowflakeos.org/ may help here, but it will take time.)
In parallel with that, gaming on Linux became "viable" (modding is still tougher than on Windows, but that will eventually be easier too) thanks to Valve's Proton efforts.
Largely though, I agree with your conclusion. It speaks volumes that Apple's most significant GPU translation efforts to-date (Game Porting Toolkit) is largely based on Open Source DXVK code. Apple and Microsoft basically have the same tactic now; push a high-level GPU API across your software platforms, using your clout to force developers onto it and 'lock them in' to your ecosystem, so to speak. The bigwigs might try to tell you that this is necessary for a quality native port, but I've doubted those words since I beat Elden Ring on Linux. Apple publishing the G.P.T. is their shameful admission that a Vulkan driver would fix gaming on Mac.
To me it sounded like there was a group within Apple that wants to create an emulation layer (and did essentially) but that leadership hates the idea and in its current state it is a compromise that it even exists at all.
Heh, I hadn't heard that, but I can totally believe it. Openness really isn't their forte.
yeah, like I said. Tim Cook is neither a gamer, nor a programmer, nor an open-source advocate. Any one of these might open the door, but if you have none of them? Best of luck.
Success in the gaming market, maybe. But Apple isn't a dedicated gaming company like Vavle. Mac is still a status icon (and most of the time, a pretty good machine in general) and macs dominate college campuses and especially the art industry. Which is why they have a higher market share than Linux.
Their moves are more hostile to open source, but it has a similar goal to Valve: make and own the entire vertical stack. And now with M1, they can converge that and more or less launch IOS and Mac devices on the same chips. That's why the IPhone 15 is running pretty modern games.
Gaming on Mac is definitely not my first choice, but I don't have the time, energy, or budget to deal with separate computers these days (or the fan noise and summer heat of a desktop GPU). Limited to whatever comes out on Mac or GeForce Now :/
And unfortunately it's hard to use Linux on desktop for frontend work. Adobe Suite is a must for me, and Linux font rendering is different enough to Macs and Windows that it's hard to get an apple to apple comparison of how a web page would look on mainstream computers.
I'm sure it's come a long way though! When I first tried desktop Linux in the 2000s, it didn't have the right fan drivers and melted my laptop, cracking the glass table underneath lol.
In the meantime... off to play BG3!
I'm a frontend dev happily using Linux, btw. I have no use for Adobe Suite, though. Figma is enough, and runs on any OS with a web browser. I agree font rendering is a bit different, but not so much that it's ever been a problem in my experience.
In fact GFN works so well I ended up getting a Logitech GCloud (https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/cloud-gaming/cloud-...) to replace the Deck, because it has a much better screen, battery life, and is like half the weight. It only streams games though (cheap Android hardware) and has sketchy ties to Tencent, unfortunately. But for anywhere with good internet, it's wonderful... ultra graphics on a nice screen in a lightweight and quiet form factor.
As for dev on Linux, yeah, that sounds right! I use Adobe less and less these days, frankly, but I do really enjoy any chance I get. Used to do a lot of graphics work with the dev work, before my job became super-specialized :( Right now I'm really happy with my Macbook, but if ARM ever gains a foothold in the PC laptop market and we see better hardware (especially performance/watt and decibels/performance) in the future, I'd reconsider that. Apple Silicon is pretty phenomenal for the time being... blows my old ThinkPads out of the water.
Wow, than k you. I know it takes a village, and it’s always a team effort, but still thank you. My windows PC is gathering dust now. I only use my Linux laptop and steam deck now. If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just won’t play it anymore.
That’s a huge change, and I really appreciate it.
Thanks to everyone who contributed.
I know I'm not the only (ex-)Wine/Proton dev who posts here on HN :)
I remember being really disappointed when they did - I assumed gaming on Linux would be following the same path, because what the fuck kind of company breaks down a wall by repeatedly bashing their forehead into it?
Steam machines did not do well, and instead of Valve saying "Maybe this is a money pit we should abandon", they just shoveled money into it until it was mostly full.
Going back a few years, my experience was that you had to do some research to see if a game was likely to work, install it through wine, and then usually faff around with a load of winetricks/configurations/packages/etc to get a game that mostly worked (often with some weird bugs, performance issues, etc).
Now there's a whole library of games that you can just right click -> install and they work perfectly well on Linux. And of course that wouldn't have been possible without the years of work building up to it - but it was a massive improvement when Valve threw their weight behind it and built it directly into the Steam client.
Unlike certain public companies that bring in executives that perform spectacularly bad decisions (cough, cough, Unity).
But there also seems to be an element of vision at Valve that's been allowed to flourish. Where other companies would produce an MVP and walk away if there's not enough money being made, Valve seems to have consistent enough resources and vision to dedicate itself to long term research, development, and planning. In a sea of public companies that are always getting greedier, Valve appears to have made the open source world and maybe the world at large a better place.
Long term thinking is basically impossible for publicly-funded companies.
A private company though, like a 500 year old vineyard in Tuscany, can just do what it does, make profit, maybe not, and be satisfied that it makes enough money to keep the people there employed for the long term so they can maximize their craft. Great products are the natural result of that nurturing and revenue tends to follow great products.
https://www.tiktok.com/@chetfaliszek/video/72814172402960335...
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Now if we could just get those anti-cheat companies to support Linux, protonDB scores would explode upward overnight.
That said I'd bet they're pretty happy with that decision, I don't know that Linux has made them any money yet but Microsoft has definitely continued to shenanig
* The sale includes access to the source code
* The access to the source code includes the right to redistribute it, or modified versions.
If the people who pay for software choose not to redistribute it, it would not benefit everyone else.
Good! I would prefer them not to go bankrupt while working on all those wonderful things.
I don't think games being too expensive is the issue. Games simply not being interesting or fun is.
>I don't think games being too expensive is the issue. Games simply not being interesting or fun is.
Certainly. When prices raise demands change. But I don't think any other industry would call a $10 price hike "anti-consumer". That's where it gets a bit weird.
It is ultimately internet noise either way, though. Not reflective of how consumers really buy. Zelda sold fine even without a new console to justify its price raise to. I'm not worried about Spiderman 2 either.
If any of the big vendors of AAA is reading this, please consider that there is a severely under served community who is willing to collaborate, help and improve everything that is needed to make your product run better. Consider that your company would have the power to tune the environment in ways that the competition can't even dream of. Consider what we did to servers, mobile and HPC and enable us to do just the same with games.
* Best native game for Linux gets an award, highlight in shop and 50% discount on shop fees.
* Best native - platform exclusive - game for Linux gets an award, highlight in shop and 100% discount on fees.
Proton is helpful like WINE but it is an aid which needs a lot work (and even more by Valve) and hinders *high-quality* native ports. We need more games like HL2 and CSGO natively. Valve shouldn’t do the work of application developers. The resources of Valve are in long term needed for Linux, Mesa, SDL and other utilities. I respect the amount of work in Proton but Valve cannot do that for another decade. The job of Proton should be making itself superfluous?
Isn’t that is unfair? Not as long others use incompatible APIs (Mantel and Direct3D) and enforce users to switch platforms (all consoles). Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo use platform exclusive titles for decades.
PS: Great native games? HL1, HL2, CS1, CSGO, Civilization, Tomb Raider, OpenRA. Especially Day-1 ports are important.
That said: it's funny you talk about rewards offered by Valve and then list 4 Valve Games. I know they wouldn't do that, but it'd be hilarious to think about.
> Isn’t that is unfair? Not as long others use incompatible APIs (Mantel and Direct3D) and enforce users to switch platforms (all consoles). Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo use platform exclusive titles for decades.
I don't see it as unfortunate, since very few devs are going to make games specifically to compete for saving 15% on rev-share. That's a huge gamble. And no one is going to bet on Linux exclusives for a chance to save 30%
The only potentially unfair issue may be that some AAA game ends up getting the rewards, the sort of studios who'd need that money the least. But that is ultimately what we want to encourage, so IDK. Maybe 2 rewards, one for general and one for "small teams" (defining that term will take a lot of fanagling).
What I expected for 2023 was Half-Life 3 with a Linux port. And the press release stating that a Windows port “may” follow later but not now.
Meanwhile in Windows land, you static link everything and import only the system DLLs, and everything is great. You can't do that on Linux even if you wanted to.
People also ship Microsoft’s system libraries. Windows tends to be in “undefined state” due to missing package management (file corruption), broken Windows-Update or whatever went wrong.
It is hard teaching developers not to package their software for Linux! Native packages are maintained by distributions and require well documented dependencies only. Instead many developers maintain themself various packages for outdated distributions not used by anyone. Examples?
* Amazons MP3-Downloader (that’s old)
* Valve (shipping only for Ubuntu but they learned to allow redistribution quickly, one of the first requests came from Arch)
* Microsoft with Teams (yes, they should know better…)
Do it once with Flatpak. No Snap! No AppImage. Just Flatpak. It is designed for that usage.
Else?
Provide binaries in tar.gz, document instructions, allow in any case redistribution. Always. If need the distribution maintainers will care. If not the users can copie them just on disk.
I feel like insisting on Linux native ports is letting perfect be the enemy of the good, and that native ports don't necessarily guarantee anything at all.
I certainly do appreciate developers who can provide native ports, though. In the end, I just want to relax and shoot alien space nazis in the face, and not think about how to get the alien space nazis to run on my machine.
Here's a case where there were no good alternatives (in linux) to remotely play latency free. Now, some prefer this method for remote desktop more than VNC.
I will add this to try this week.
I have ended up buying 2 dozen games since it arrived and have gotten back into games. It is a life saver when travelling. At home, I leave it on the dock and actually use an old Stadia controller as the main input.
The Steam Deck is a special device.
I do wish that the desktop stuff was a bit more polished. TBH a lot of people could probably just use the Deck as a primary computing device in addition to playing games.
It's the sheer convenience of it that makes it a winner. You can just pause/resume it and even just play a bit of a game during a TV ad break. It's great for exploring old, unplayed games from my Steam collection.
Now, if I can just figure out how to enter a cheat code to get me past a Half-Life 2 save point (in Ravenholm) where I don't have enough health (or more likely skill) to survive.
I'm using the JSAUX one. It has all the necessary features that I need. I would recommend it.
It's great, basically a Steam console for me.
Other than that, it has some clunkiness, but I'm happy with it.
Sounds like something that could be fixed with an update hopefully.
Yep. Vulkan (the open version of Mantel) for graphics, Proton for low level Windows emulation, driver support and controller customization and options (the Steam Controller was NOT a failed project, just a precursor), and giving it all away upstream... There's something to be said about the ability of a privately held company to execute a vision long term. Everyone from Canonical, to Nintendo, to Activision/Blizzard should be worried about Valve coming to eat their lunch, and they'll do it by giving customers a better experience and thinking long term.
plus Gabe has so much $$$ already he doesn't care about Microsoft's cheques
Valve have got their shit together regarding technical stuff, but not regarding creative stuff. Nintendo will be fine.
I mean Linux? Running Windows games? Without hacks and tricks and magic and stuff to make it run maybe good enough to say "yeah, it kinda runs sometimes if you don't pay attention to the bugs"? Absolute lunacy.
But they did it.
The absolute madmen did it in just a couple years. That's incredible.
Congratulations to Gabe, Steam devs and proton devs.
I'd say Proton absolutely qualifies as "hacks ans tricks and magic and stuff". It's just polished and packaged so increadibly well it doesn't feel hackey. I'm constantly amazed at how well it all just works.
It's mostly DXVK/Proton's VKD3D that actually allowed a lot of games to work on Linux with little overhead, both are funded by Valve. So I don't think calling upon Pareto principle in regards to Valve is fair either.
As I should!
Because it's a massive, MASSIVE win for open source, which wouldn't be possible if, for the past decades, people didn't relentlessly try to create a worthy free alternative to Windows, that is also capable of flawlessly running Windows software.
https://www.youtube.com/live/L98v4epQmrg?si=T-snMWdtnDLpN_TJ...
And here are the slides:
https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/osseu2023/83/steamos-a...
World class culture and compensation will do that for you.
Valve itself is a pretty small shop. Although their own efforts & funding absolutely should be praised.
Userspace stuff for sure. But the drivers are mostly Valve.
> ...
> We hope that this talk will expand the limits of your imagination on what a company can look like, and that next time you think about starting your own company or looking for a new job, you consider a co-op!
https://archive.org/details/fossy2023_Inside_Igalia_Scaling_...
For an industry this big, we have countless examples to know very well that it could have gone much, much worse.
GOG at least tries to do things right with far less resources. The rest are simply abysmal.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377 https://web.archive.org/web/20230709000125/https://www.bbc.c...
And he's right, you know. 100 years from now, the only OS that will be easily resurrectable will be some flavor of open-source OS.
Thank you Valve!
Valve is privately held. Thank god.
It's not because of the Linux support. That's just gravy on the cake.
It's because I feel good about buying my games from Valve. It's like, I know they'll be around for a long time. I also know they'll do everything they can to keep the games working on existing platforms. How do I know? Their track record speaks for itself.
I don't feel the same way about Microsoft Store or Apple's App Store. I also don't feel the same about GOG or Epic Games. Epic Games feels like I'm buying games from an unsavory drug dealer on the street corner, so I don't do that. I do take all the freebies they give out though. GOG is like the little kid on the street, kicking the ball down, shouting "Hey Mister! Wanna play?"
Valve is the quiet, dependable shopkeeper waiting for you to come by and buy the latest game. Even offering discounts and sales on occasion.
They've built up a lot of goodwill with gamers and continue to do so - even at their own expense at times. It costs money to do this, and they don't seem to have any short-term plans to rake in cash from it.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Valve and PC gaming is massively, massively contingent. It could very easily have been a much worse player at the helm.
If competitors are just as open they no longer have a competitive advantage and are essentially just helping improve Steam.
I'd argue it's actually hard(er), based on history.
Isn't that basically an admission that all of Valve's most meaningful developments are Open Source? To the contrary, why are competitors having such a hard time when stuff like Proton and pressure-vessel is freely available?
Source 2 is still closed source and they still haven't released the SDK despite it now being over 3.5 years since HL:A released.
>To the contrary, why are competitors having such a hard time when stuff like Proton and pressure-vessel is freely available?
Because Valve already has the user content flywheel going. Valve has most content that people want and has a large install base that developers can target. There are a lot of gamers who only want to buy games on Steam due to the integrated experience doing so offers.
Convincing AAA devs to release on your platform is not easy to do. Adding Proton to your platform won't convince developers to use it.
I don’t know of any other software companies that are trying for “just works” on Windows, Linux and MacOS, other than the electron / web ecosystem. Valve’s stuff also cares about exposing low-level performance optimizations, unlike that stuff.
If I could buy ahead-of-time compiled slack and zoom clients from steam, I’d do it.
Do they contribute to open source development, upstream so that even competitors could use it? Yes. Do they allow you to share your library with family (and let's be honest friends too)? Yes. Do they allow you to play your games offline while not connected to their servers? Yes. Do they allow and actively encourage mods and user control of their content? Yes. Are they a "first mover" that actively brought new business models and technologies to market, which they themselves developed? Yes. Have they reversed course when users complain or give negative feedback? Yes (such as the paid mod idea years back).
About the only shame thing regarding Valve is that they were in on the microtransactions craze along with many others in the industry for a bit there (TF2 hats anyone?). Not a perfect company, but the "monopoly" here isn't "competitors can't come to market." It's more that they just offer a far better service and have NOT abused their market leadership in order to chase short term profitablity over long term success. More monopolies like this please.
In the same way Nintendo doesn't, no.
>Do they put up barriers to entry to keep small devs / publishers out unless they pay to play? No
Technically $100 is a barrier. The smallest non-free barrier, but a barrier nonetheless.
The bigger barrier is the opaque rules they sometimes have regarding certain sexual games. Even a few rated by the ESRB were rejected, so who knows where the barrier is. The only thing worse than a high barrier is a misty one.
>Do they prevent you from using other people's hardware? No.
Because they didn't have their own successul hardware until 2021. And 1m copies isn't a market large enough to do much with. Even the failed Vita sold a few million in the US.
>Do they engage in mass censorship or shadow banning of content? No.
yup, just not for the kinds of games people care to try and defend. Except that Stein's Gate one. Never underestimate anime fans, I guess.
They've done good stuff but let's not pretend they are saints nor perfect.
>Have they reversed course when users complain or give negative feedback? Yes (such as the paid mod idea years back).
still went through later. Heck, Steam marketplace is worse than any paid mod. I'm still so confused how people don't see this. Any other AAA studio woulda been burned for this (and still are burned).
>More monopolies like this please.
I'll pass.
To be fair, it's only a barrier to Steam. Every device that can install Steam can also install another game, app or even launcher. Steam will even put it in your library and launch it with Proton if you add it, just not give it a Store page or discussion/workshop/whatever.
> Because they didn't have their own successul hardware until 2021.
How exactly did that change things, though? No part of the Steam Deck is capable of being locked down in a potentially harmful way.
> yup, just not for the kinds of games people care to try and defend. Except that Stein's Gate one. Never underestimate anime fans, I guess.
facepalm
Taking games off an optional storefront is not "censorship". It's the same argument as people who say that Walmart is censoring America by taking confederate flags off the shelves.
> Heck, Steam marketplace is worse than any paid mod.
> Any other AAA studio woulda been burned for this (and still are burned).
You seem to miss the point of why people don't care. Contrast these two scenarios:
- Scenario A: EA not letting you play as Darth Vader until you unlock enough lootboxes; Bethesda making certain in-game missions exclusive to pre-orders or specific retailers; Blizzard locking off Overwatch characters even to paying customers who bought both games; et. al
- Scenario B: Valve selling hats for Team Fortress 2, letting users trade and purchase cosmetics in Dota, giving users a platform to trade game stickers and trading cards, etc.
It should be plainly obvious why other studios are burned and Valve is not. Honestly speaking, the closest Valve ever flew to the sun was with Mann Vs. Machine requiring paid tickets to play. The marketplace itself doesn't prevent you from enjoying anything in any of their base games.
technically, you can put apps on Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft's consoles as well. It's more a matter of popularity and long term support. I guess we can definitely talk about adding other game stores on consoles, but it doesn't seem like a conversation that got much traction. Even from people like Epic that is going hard after Apple over this issue.
>How exactly did that change things, though?
you can't lock down hardware if you don't make hardware. I'm not speaking metaphorically here.
Steam is a software company that dabbles in hardware. The hardware being open source is not its selling point nor a point of business, like other hardware manufacturers.
>Taking games off an optional storefront is not "censorship".
in the same lens that rating a game AO isn't "censorship", sure. Ewen though such a rating kicks you out of all major brick and mortar stores and doesn't let you publish on Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo. I agree the term is used loosely in the games industry, and I am using the term loosely here.
But really, there isn't much ACTUAL censorship in games period, so it's not really a plus to say "steam doesn't allow games it doesn't allow on its optional store". I am more criticizing its opaque rulings and its infamous non-communication to devs over such issues.
>It should be plainly obvious why other studios are burned and Valve is not.
because others can make money off the cosmetics instead of just AAA studios, sure. Makes sense. That's what Crypto promised but that also crashed and burned because the wrong leadership was behind it, so that boat has sailed. I think AAA should just eat the cost like Valve and even older games like Second Life and just make a normal marketfront. I think Blizzard kinda did this with Diablo 3.
That doesn't explain the paid mod kerfluffle, though. What's the difference between modding a hat to sell for $5 and collecting a hat in-game to trade for $5 to someone else? Hell, one of them involves work to actually create that asset.
>The marketplace itself doesn't prevent you from enjoying anything in any of their base games.
I guess it depends on framing. I don't play GaaS, but the only difference between Darth Vader DLC and Darth Vader Lootbox is a guaranteed transaction. You can argue neither is "in the base game".
But I guess players complained about on-disc DLC back in the day too. the difference in "base game" is much more ephemeral now that you can launch updates on the fly.