Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones | Hacker News Reader

Valve Responds to Developers Fearing AI Slop and Clones

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68 pointsHelloUsername87 comments

This isn't much of a response, what they said amounts to that you should work harder to cultivate a community that you can then funnel into their platform. "Launching isn't the finish line" is obviously true but what has been happening is that people are sniped before launch based on their demo and marketing material, so it's not all that relevant.

Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers. Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there. It's as much a threat to them as anyone else, and indie studios can figure out for themselves they need to market harder but can't necessarily embark on a lawsuit.

Valve doesn't have a case here to bring. It is not their legal fight to begin with.

The developer or publisher would bring the case. Valve would fund it.

It does not work that way. This is not the same when Thiel was financing the anti-Gawker lawsuit.

This has no direct precedents and the case and the lawyers involved need to be chosen carefully, because once the precedent is set it is used by the courts for ruling subsequent cases. You don't want a sloppy lawyer, and the case has to be bullet proof, the judges known in advance (hence why certain districts are chosen for certain types of cases) and so on.

A case of this sort would bring into question so many non-game related things, more related to recent AI copyright and IP theft, that it would far exceed what Valve would be able to bring forward in terms of an argument anyway. Computer game mechanics and game designs are already on thin ice in terms of copyright.

Valve isn't going to fund this, and it is not how legal works.

We're simply imagining different cases. I'm thinking about straightforward copyright violations I've read about recently in the games industry.

Regardless, I don't see why Valve couldn't fund a lawsuit based on a novel legal theory.

Share links to these violations, cases, case outcomes, etc.

I don't know why people are downvoting me. Folks, Valve aren't going to fund these lawsuits. It's a fantasy.

Edit: I keep trying to reply to you but you keep removing them before I can! It isn't personal in any way. I am simply looking to see what the arguments were and whether it was an already-released game having its assets stolen, vs. a game that is not yet released being knocked off with AI, vs. something else. I wanted to see what the cases actually played out like.

One of the threats that is highlighted in the article posted is that they want to extort games which are not yet released. Which is certainly juicy in its own right.

It's not personal for me either, but I am going to let you satisfy your curiosity on your own.

Absolutely nothing that you wrote precludes Valve from funding a lawsuit. You wrote a cost-benefit analysis.

> once the precedent is set

One case does not a precedent set. Sure one case is a precedent and whichever lawyer it helps will be sure the judge knows about it. However any opposing lawyer will find plenty of details that are "different" and thus the judge should ignore it.

In the US you need to go all the way to the supreme court to get a binding precedent. However the supreme court wants to see a lot of other judge's with lots of different things considered before they set a binding precedent. They are well aware that they don't want to get this wrong and so want to review the thinking of a lot of different judges in lots of different circumstances so they can get the precedent right.

the other way to get a binding precedent is if lots of different cases refer to it and all get the same result and so there is no controversy.

Of course there are variances and the legal teams will find everything they can. But we're not talking about hundreds. I wanted to keep it simple for the crowd here, and furthermore a judge can look through the legal bullshit which they often do. Think about for example the way that Alsup handles his cases compared to the way a "stereotypical judge" is portrayed.

As an aside, other posters keep saying how Valve can regardless finance or file or whatever a lawsuit. Yes. Anyone can. It doesn't mean they will win. Lawsuits happen all the time brought upon by people who are wasting their time and money.

in what world?

It seemed to me like they're hedging until they know which side is more profitable to support. We don't know yet if slop will be widely embraced by consumers. Valve will be happy to profit from AI if it takes over from real developers.

As far as I can tell, "slop" doesn't have a clear definition. It seems to just mean "AI used poorly or obviously". Nobody cares if a developer of a game uses AI as long as it's done well. They might not even know.

The idea that there is a future where game devs don't use AI, while the rest of the industry does, is absurd. We do know that AI will be widely embraced in gaming, because the alternative is, what? The honor system?

Valve has ignored the quality problem of submissions for years. Lazy asset flips of demo levels have been common for years. It's less of a hedge and more of a restatement of what their position has been since they opened the floodgates. AI just made the bad stuff look better than it used to, so people have to relearn how to filter.

> Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers.

Is cloning the games in this way illegal? Has there been a precedent set?

In the same vein that having the same name of functions is a copyright violation. People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product

You will not find a business willing to take such risks, so the net effect will be no products at all.

Patents and copyright are there to allow businesses to recoup investment in R&D

The end result of what you're talking about isn't that the innovator will be copied and consumers will benefit.. it's that the innovator will no longer exist and no-one will benefit.

No. Patents and copyright are there to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

Video games are a perfect example of how innovation all but stops when a few companies have access to all of the resources. Companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard all make mostly hot garbage these days because they 'innovated' themselves into making the same 4 games over and over. It's happening with movies too where everything is either a sequel or a remake because recognizable IP has been deemed more important than making something actually good.

Video games have always been about copying the other guy and making it better though. Blizzard famously akways just made the best parts of all other games in the genre packaged up with cool looking cinematics. Every single FPS borrows from every other FPS any time something new comes along. And thankfully when Nintendo tried to stop it with Palworld they (mostly) got egg on their face.

The one famous example that did stick that I can remember is warner bros patented the nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor. Nobody can use that actually rather cool idea until 2036 and it hasn't been used in a decade now. Real cool stuff and definitely pushed the industry forward.

> People don't understand that good things are meant to be copied so that consumers have the best product

I get how my comment comes off that way but I do agree and am broadly in favor of knockoffs. I think there's a distinction between a knockoff and a bootleg, where a knockoff steals ideas and a bootleg steals the execution. And a good game is a tasteful knockoff of a bunch of previous games, great artists steal and such.

Legal depends on details. There are copyright, patent, and trademark laws that apply depending on how the cloning was done. Ask a lawyer for details.

The idea of a game is not protected. The specific graphics, dialog, script, and code are protected. Save the princess in an 8 level game is generic but just a few more details copied and suddenly you are an illegal clone of the NES Mario brothers script...

If you are worried talk to a lawyer about preemptively registering your copyrights (cheap) and trademarks (more expensive).

It's a good question and the answer is mixed. Some of the problem has been directly bootlegging games in other markets like China, so stealing the code and assets outright. That's definitely a copyright violation most places, I would assume it is in China too, but the point is moot without Valve's backing because no indie is going to conduct a lawsuit in a foreign country.

A clean room knockoff isn't but I don't think the cases would necessarily even be brought or won. There's a lot of quick buck artists who see gaming as a soft target. Success is in convincing them there's risk involved rather than actually winning in court or extracting settlements.

That will still leave a lot of AI game development people feel is slop. That's probably the reality going forward. But reducing that to the people who are interested in making games (even if we are unhappy with their results) and removing the people who are revolving through the latest AI get rich quick schemes is probably achievable.

Valve is unlikely to raise a lawsuit in China even if someone releases Half Life 2: Electric Boogaloo. They have no hope of winning, and their position in the country is a miracle as it is.

As for the other cases, I don’t see a realistic path for Valve. Once they start kicking knockoffs they will have to draw a line, and it won’t end up being based on whether the action is actually illegal.

It’s not, but the commenter you are replying to wants it to be

I'd love to hear you justify it

Not in the least. You can make a 2D platformer and Nintendo can't sue you for copying Super Mario (they'd like to, probably).

The only defense against copies has always be the same, be better than the copies in thing the consumer likes. You can't copy a Mario game, you can't copy a Kojima game, you can't copy a game that has been masterfully done and polished. If slop is gonna eat your lunch, it's only because your game is as good as slop.

The issue is discoverability.

Sure if you made a name for yourself, you can bank on that. People will buy Slay the Spire 2 instead is cheap copycats.

However I you are a new indie dev and made a decent game, how can people find you? They can't under the sea of slop. They could scroll and scroll and never find you.

I heart from many game reviewers that they have an harder and harder time finding good games to review. Not because people don't make good games anymore, in fact more good games than ever are made but finding them is harder than ever. Indie devs don't have a giant marketing department.

If steam keeps refusing to curate game the gaming market is going to crash hard.

While OP discussed bootleggers, it's the extortion TFA mentions (quoted below) that's likely worth suing over. Indie devs can't fund a full-fledged lawsuit, local authorities don't have the reach to grief those responsible due to it almost certainly being outside their jurisdiction, and Valve may not have legal standing.

What could be done is forwarding the complaint to Valve, and ensuring that the bootlegged game put out by those attempting to make good on their threats gets removed, and the developer banned.

> The question regarding AI cloning stemmed from a specific threat. One developer shared that indie developers have recently been receiving extortion emails threatening, "If you don't pay, we'll clone your game with AI and release it first." While understanding the advice to showcase games prior to release, the developer noted that such threats could make creators hesitate and asked if Steam had protective measures in place.

> Tom Giardino expressed regret, noting that this was the first time he had heard of such extortion cases.

> [...]

> While drawing a line on the extortion itself, he kept communication channels open. He noted that such extortion is closer to an issue for law enforcement agencies rather than a game platform to solve

Yeah, this is a much better version of my argument.

> What could be done is forwarding the complaint to Valve, and ensuring that the bootlegged game put out by those attempting to make good on their threats gets removed, and the developer banned.

For Valve to remove a game like that could be seen as anti-competitive. They would also have to actually prove this with evidence and so on for it to make sense. And there lies the competitive fog of war which can have consequences among competing games. One competitor saying "I'll make a game if you don't pay me to not make one" to another is not extortion or a threat at all. It's just business. And it can be very scary to be faced with an adversary like that.

What do you think Facebook et al do? They rip each other off through planted employees, poaching, and other shenanigans to find out who is working on what so they can be there before their competitors.

This is why we have other methods (patents, copyright, and so on) that are employed for legal protection. But ideas? Not good enough.

The word "extortion" here is doing so much heavy lifting it's comical.

It doesn't need to be illegal for a lawsuit. They just need to make a convincing case they've been damaged.

Are the bootlegs illegal?

Valve could just not publish them, they don’t have to risk suing.

> Steam can only exist if indie developers feel confident they can publish there.

Why though?

Imagine, there will be an AI agent, which will produce new game everyday and Steam users will like it and keep buying. Steam can only exist if customers keep buying and are not annoyed by games.

> Why though?

Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.

Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.

Assuming that AI-driven game development ever becomes a real thing, they could literally lose every single developer they have now and still be fine.

They can take same cut from what AI agent is building and selling, as long as there are buyers.

I still don't get it

AI clones would be a race to the bottom in pricing because how else would clone #4 stand out from clone #3

Why would they need to take a cut in that fantastical case? They'd just own the agents and take 100%. Not to mention AI at this level of advancement would probably have a decisive lead in many areas leading to mass unemployment which would likely crash the game playing parts of the economy so might be it's own undoing. Valve need customers with disposable income.

I don't think it's a problem of copying, as much as the fact that the signals we use to identify quality are no longer working.

Clones always existed, kids chose pokemon rather than a dollar store dragomons because pokemon became a household name by the time bootlegs appeared, legitimate shops only sold pokemon and the cartridge itself showed a quality difference.

Nowadays the clone can reach people before the original, the store shows everything equally, and the sprites, videos and description can be good enough to fool people. Steam works as a platform for the purchase itself but not as a discovery mechanism, because there's no "seal of quality" you can consider (other than skipping indies entirely).

No one can review at the scale needed, and it's entirely possible for a great game to have devs that are awful at marketing and get buried. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think some kind of threshold is necessary for the shops, or at least for an optional filter.

the notion of "quality" equals very much luxury for many many people... and last time I checked some 90% of the peoples of the world were not concern with it (the lux), but with making ends meet. all opportunities arising would be taken immediately, and if some kid can play a game for 5EUR and likes it, even not the certified origins, his father would not rush to get the 80EUR one (and particularly if he can afford to summon, or like prompt, something workable into existence).

same for many forms of media, and for a lot of physical objects such as luxury items fakes. and we're talking utility here, so I bet lots of people use counterfeit electric equipment because it just works.

of course then comes ingenuity and community, but copyright is so dead, that it cannot be resurrected meaningfully at all perhaps at this moment.

People are not choosing AI due to money here. It's not the 80EUR, AAA games being copied, it's indies that are frequently in the same price range as the original.

What's actually happening is people buying knockoffs not knowing they're knockoffs, or no one buying those but the original being buried in the volume anyway.

As for the 'think about the non privileged', AI is a pretty poor answer for them. Once we're at a point where the person isn't able to pay for genuine stuff, they might as well go for piracy and emulators rather than a mindless knockoff. A world where the privileged are given intellectually stimulating material and the rest are fed empty slop is the worst possible scenario.

you make a very valid point. I will adjust my view of things and take into consideration all said here, as it really makes sense from particular perspective.

Agreed. Copycatting has existed all the way back to the early Atari days. In fact, Nolan Bushnell used to talk about constantly moving on to new products in order to “eat his own babies.” Swift style.

  Always wary of “the jackals” and convinced that the only way to stay ahead of the competition was to introduce new products, Bushnell wanted to discontinue the VCS and move on to the next-generation game console. Bushnell preferred moving to new technologies rather than spending time refining old ideas and letting his competitors catch up to him. He called his philosophy “eating your own babies” and said that if Atari didn’t (eat its own babies), somebody else would.

-- Steven Kent (The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon)

The issue today is the breathtaking speed with which people can rip you off by simply pointing an agentic coding harness at your original IP and laundering it into 50 copies in the span of a single weekend.

The slop has always been there, and Valve makes it easy to refund it. I don't see what more can they do. At the end of the day the players decide what they want to play and pay for. Ideas have always been cheap in this industry. Threes was cloned immediately and most people only know the clone.

"Valve ought to be funding lawsuits against these bootleggers." - yeah good luck on that. no legal framework exists and they actually benefit from it the same way Spotify and YouTube does. In a way they all welcome this move, and eventually may require you to pay on top for them to inform you of slop alongside banners. Otherwise you get the whole package and tis all business as usual.

I thought Valve was interesting as they essentially said the accumulated community around a good game will be something that is harder to copy, and developers should make their game unique and cultivate this.

So far, so good. I talk to indie devs all of the time. I remember a husband and wife setting aside a small budget for their passion project. These are people with very limited time and money, so they do not have the resources or expertise for the business and marketing side, and they may also get overwhelmed if somebody just makes a copy and starts spreading it on reddit or elsewhere.

I think Valve is still right in essence but the answer is really "it depends". To me it comes down to relationships and trust: Getting a few early, vetted players, not necessarily going for high volume e.g. 500+ on Discord or whatever. Having people who really care, support and co-create with you. This will probably look a little bit different for every game: Some might run curated spaces, others will just embrace that copying is a thing that may happen. I saw the Xbox Labs announcement lately with even another route: Remixing being part of what they explore as the future.

It's a very Valve answer, and it's likely the correct one. It feels very similar to their stance on piracy - it's a service problem. If you make the experience good enough people wont do it.

I actually think the games with the best communities are going to see an increase of play time, not a decrease, especially games with mod support or custom games. I had an international flight a week ago and I felt like playing CIV, so I had Claude make me a mod for it before I took off. It built a full new civ, new tile improvements, technologies, and 3d models, and it worked great.

The quality of games became so bad that I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis, scrolling through the catalog without finding anything I want to play...

I find myself going back to titles that are over 10 years old over and over again. Every new game I've bought in the recent years I have regretted buying shortly after.

Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore. I mostly play Indie games now, but even those are rarely anything special now. Back to Terraria I guess...

yeah i have same experience but not sure if its just me getting older. the youngest game i play regularly is still 5 years old

Might be age and depression for me to be fair. Don't want to talk down on game devs either, a lot of games look good, but ain't for me.

> not sure if its just me getting older

I think it is mostly temporal filtering (due to rosy retrospection and survivorship bias combined with Sturgeon’s Law) that we all naturally fall into.

Most games 5+ years ago were also bad, but you remember the small set that were good and completely forget all the bad, and this builds an impression that games in the past were so much better. The same applies to movies, music, books, etc.

Of course, in the age of AI, a lot more (in absolute terms) shovelware content is likely to be made than ever before, so it'll probably hyper-accelerate the impact of this phenomenon.

Maybe you would like Hardspace Shipbreaker? That's a good game with unusual mechanics. Or maybe Factorio if you enjoy Terraria. Maybe Ark Raiders or Valheim if you like action multiplayer games?

I think its easier to discover a game with a good story then a game with novel mechanics, but they exist.

I do enjoy Valheim and Cracktorio. Ark Raiders looks cool, but I hate PvP experiences as I suck at shooters and prefer to avoid online dick measuring contests. Also wouldn't get my friends to play it with me. Gotta check out the Shipbreaker thingy

Apparently arc silos players based on aggression so if you don’t engage in pvp it puts you with other players who don’t and if you do with those who do

https://arcraiders.com/news/notes-on-the-matchmaking-system

Some people really like it, some do not (I don’t play just have some friends who enjoy it)

> Cracktorio

I still can't determine if it was the long COVID or staying up until 5am playing this fucking thing that made my coworker act so erratically for months on end.

I woved not to touch that as I prefer to remain employed.

lotta reviews of shipbreaker, including lets-plays where it's just a guy streaming slow country music while welding apart starship parts.

easy to find one -- you'll know if it's your jam and worth buying after a few minutes

The average quality of games has always been bad. You probably aren't old enough to remember all the bad games on the Atari 2600.

90% of everything is crap; also Sturgeon might have been an hopeless optimist.

There's truth to what you're saying, but for some perspective: catalogers identify about 400 games published for the 2600 over its entire lifespan; Steam has about that many new releases every week.

That difference in volume, which improvements in AI workflow will keep accelerating, really does point towards personal curation being far more overwhelming than it had been.

With the 2600, you and your friends would probably have a ready working memory of pretty much most of the good stuff, most of the awful stuff, and some insight into the publishers and presentation/packaging cues that point one way or another for an unfamiliar title.

With Steam, if you want to be able to find very personal idiosyncratic gems, instead of just following social media buzz or AAA PR -- one of the most exciting benefits to today's massive catalog -- you have to wade through an increasingly unfathomable amount of slop.

i am old enough to remember the atari games and their crap. i played the "legendary" E.T. game on atari and could never figure it out.

there has always been a lot of shit, but most of it was at the margins, and you could easily find the real flagship games.

now the slop is never ending and competes on the front page against real titles

I've never used the Steam for browsing for games to buy. I've only bought stuff there after finding the games some place else (reviews, word-of-mouth). Using it for that has been a terrible experience since the day they opened the floodgates, since there's just too many damn games out there, even ignoring the slop (even without AI, there's still the Unity asset flip to flood the store).

Steam can't not have a store front, but it wouldn't matter to me if they removed 95% of it and just reduced it to a search bar with and a list with some basic results to know I'm actually buying the right game (think $Name, $Dev, $Date-of-release, $Probably-some-other-values-to-prevent-obvious-copycats). I'd use it in functionally the same way as I do know, and I wouldn't by any less because of it.

I don't want to say you're holding it wrong, but I question your tactics if your goal is to find new games you want to play.

This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)

Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?

> The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming

I think that's the problem, there are too many to choose from, where you end up overwhelmed and ends up choosing none.

No, I think the problem is that the person writing that:

- Has grown up and doesn't actually want to play games anymore (without realizing it)

- Is severely depressed and needs other help than the one games can provide.

>Given I am not a story based gamer, but a gameplay focused one, I just see no true innovation anymore.

Denshattack!, ballxpit, blue prince, balatro, outer wilds, pipistrello... There's plenty of quality there too!

It's true that the average quality we're exposed to is lower, because there's so many random pet projects and big players take fewer risks. Relying on word of mouth or gaming reviewers you trust is important nowadays. But I'm convinced it's a matter of discovery rather than existence.

See, ballxpit was a perfect example for me, for uninnovative gameplay, as you just shoot balls and the game mostly plays itself for you. I can see why people like it, I guess its just not for me.

I know the other ones, but they really do not appeal to me, except for maybe balatro.

>for uninnovative gameplay, as you just shoot balls and the game mostly plays itself for you

I'd disagree. The shooting itself is as old as space invaders, but there is a neat mechanic there worth exploring regarding the combinations of powerups and 'character powers' IMO. You have to choose what to fuse/powerup to keep the damage scaling well enough (though the amount of combinations isn't large enough to last more than a couple weekends, I'll give you that).

>I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis

I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that you're an outlier lol

I'm afraid a lot of the cloners will have much more time to devote to their community.

Cloners don’t give a fuck about anything other than profit. But they can pump out enough crap to drown out the legitimate games.

Valve's take of 30% is astronomical. The company is pure profit and the absolute dictator of how people should market and sell games. It's Valve's way or the highway.

They created the AI ghetto with their forced disclosure banner but are doing nothing about AI otherwise. They must do better than to basically tell developers that AI cloning is their problem. How about using a bill or two from their huge pile of cash to build a coherent strategy to handle the post-AI game industry?

what bollocks is this? plenty of competing stores, Epic, Nintendo, Sony, GOG, etc.

the big difference is that Valve is private and generally delivers.

what do you expect Valve to do about AI cloning? sue OpenAI?

What a bunch of nothing and hand-waivey statements. Valve has issues with cracking down on bad behavior, and this response is rather immature and poorly planned.

It needs to start hurting their revenue.

Arguably some mass market AAA games already were slop.

In a future with millions of games released every day discoverability or curation of the great games will be really important (even more than it is now).

So marketing wins again, I guess.

I can't figure out the sentiment of your comment. Are you trying to say marketing should not be necessary for some reason?

The contrary, marketing was already important on Steam since the indie boom of some years ago. Now it's something you cannot escape if you want to earn money from indie games.

I fear it'll be a slop market just like the Google Play Store. Yes there are millions of games, none of which are good.

True, even some orders of magnitude larger.

I'm hopeful that the jewels will rise to the top on their own merits, but with millions of games released every day it's gonna be difficult.

Maybe I'm a romantic but I hope there are some genius game designers in the world that now can release their dream games with the help of AI.

I think that’s getting harder by the day. If there’s a thousand new releases per day then what are the chances a critical mass of players discover your brilliant game in the pile of slop? It was already bad before AI could churn these out en-masse

valve isn't doing the best 'linux' job to say the least...

But they are currently doing 'anti-cheat' by far the less worse way and they should teach some others...

I am browsing 'upcoming' games (only native to linux), something happened, there is now many more diarrhea games than before. I suspect AI reverse-engineered slop.

Valve has been doing a lot for Linux lately, especially because of their new hardware. Is there anything in particular you think they could be doing better?

Yep, for their steam client (and games), they should craft 'correct' ELF64 binaries for broad "linux" distro support and long term support (which would not require the linux user namespace, like tons of "correct" games out there, for instance most, but not all, godot4 based games). Namely, _all_ the ELF64 binaries should statically load _only_ common glibc libs and that with an "old" glibc ABI version (I would target at least ~10 years, but there is no reason anymore to push forward the glibc version for this type of software, namely the next time they change something about the glibc requirement would be... no glibc is required anymore because we did manage to get rid of ELF for exe and dynamic lib finally).

Then, all their ELF64 binaries which require system interface shared libs would dynamically load them (libdl, dlopen/dlsym/dlclose). The system interface shared libs are libasound (the in-process audio software mixer + interface to external audio mixer daemons), the vulkan loader, and the legacy x11 client libs (with a properly tested wayland->x11 fallback).

All the remaining software should be statically loaded then, which probably mean symbol name customization to avoid collision (wayland/libxkbcommon, libz, libcurl, libressl/libopenssls, etc...)

All this does imply the usage of the following ubiquitous compiling/linking options (gcc and probably clang, tinycc? cproc/qbe? scc?): '-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ -Wl,--enable-new-dtags' (libgcc_s is private to the distro, additionnaly it has been proven again and again its ABI cannot be trusted in the last decade+, and libstdc++ is private to the application as the distro could use another version of the shared c++ runtime, another vendor, or even statically link it to avoid c++ ABI hell... or none).

For linux native games, they should have a program (a bit like the 'verified' one which is limited to the steamdeck and steamos) with automated tools to statically verify some of this 'correctness' (the static loading of shared libs, the ELF dtags like DT_RUNPATH instead fo DT_RPATH, the glibc ABI version) of the ELF64 binaries and guide the game devs on how to fix them. The hard part is the runtime test, basically the dynamic loading of system interface shared libs (with a bit of fallback, for instance wayland->x11).

The really hard part for game/game engine devs is actually 3D programming, which must be super conservative, that to satisfy most 3D driver vendors [and versions...].

Ofc, valve should work with the devs of the major game engines in order to achieve the broadest distro support on the maximum amount of time following those guidelines (godot4/unity/UE/etc).

(I don't talk about the ELF64 relocations handled by the linux kernel and the glibc elf loader which should be stable for forever now).

If things ever move again, it would be first for the removal of ELF for a super simple exe and dynamic libs format which our modern hardware actitectures can handle roughly without kernel help: one log2 aligned segment, one entry point offset for exes, one 'userland' syscall number resolution function offset for dynamic libraries (guarded by hardware try-lock logic, which would guard an in-process 'loaded dynamic lib' tracker too: yep no more external ELF loader). Oh and of course the removal of x11. (I use such simple format for many of my personal projects).

I talked about mostly C/c++ but it is the same ABI requirement for any other compiled language mostly for dynamic loading of ELF system interface shared libs.

(the interface for joypads is the input event devices from the linux kernel).

If am talking about "linux" here, but this applies to any OS.

And maybe in the future we will get a simple hardware programming standard for all GPUs with a shader standard ISA , and then most of the driver complexity will be gone.

My understanding is that Steam already ships with a static Linux runtime compatible with most distros. Is this insufficient in terms of the library compatibility you're talking about?

If you are talking about the massive 'steam runtime' which forces you (indeed...) to compile the 'user namespace' into you kernel, it is only a shabby/not reliable (and disgusting) way to avoid to have to generate 'correct' ELF64 binaries for broad 'distro' support and long term support. Basically, they ship their own full blown distro userland (yep...), but those who did that are hypocrit and dishonnest (not even of bad faith): they still depends on the user linux kernel and system interface shared libs (for instance userland drivers) which fails to load if not sastifying all the whims of "linux" valve devs: it does happen because GNU symbol version/glibc mistmatches and kernels without the weird features and SPECIFIC/EXACT ELF/file system configuration this valve userland wants). Additionally, and probably the worst: game devs will think they have "linux" support, but actually they only have some shabby and unreliable "valve userland linux _ONLY_" support and not a real and "correct" broad "linux" support: namely they ship for something else than valve, likely their binaries won't load anymore.

This is probably one of the worst "linux" ideas from valve, and by very far. This is basically the definition of accute "enshitification", which could be tainted with abuse of dominant position.

I did show how to do all that honestly and 'correctly' in my previous post. This is basically software development 101 for ELF based platforms...

As I pointed out, the real core of the issue is ELF which we know now is completely obsolete on modern hardware architectures for CPU exes and dynamic libraries and more of a kludge/bloat and issue generator than anything else (like microsoft PE+).

Holy shit, I had no idea that Steam Runtime is an entire container?!

In hindsight it seems like a fair compromise to avoid developers having to support every distro & distros having to support every developer, but it's actually mandatory (developers can't even choose to do this) which sucks. Factorio recently wrote about how they're forced to use it despite being statically linked: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-446

> Because we statically link our dependencies, we don't require steamrt in order for the game to run, but Steam does not allow games to opt out

That sucks, not gonna lie.

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