I think it's pretty amazing that Valve managed to create something of this type (a store/launcher/software platform), targeted at an easily annoyed[citation needed] group of people (gamers), running for this long, that is mostly used by choice and not universally hated.
That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.
The fact that they’re a private company helps a lot. There’s less incentive to extract money from customers in new ways that are lucrative in the short term but damaging in the long run.
I think their company structure also helps, where employees generally don’t work on things unless they actually want to. This means that you don’t end up with designers redesigning UIs that don’t actually need it, etc.
I think about this a lot. I don't have _that_ much invested in Steam. (about 30 games) But if they ever go public, it's all over. I can't think of a public tech company that doesn't cannibalize its user base until it becomes unusable garbage. There's also the fact that Valve has done more for Linux gaming than anyone else. If Valve goes public, I'm probably done with PC gaming for the rest of my life.
Eventually the people that run it now will age and die, and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry. May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.
Eventually the people that run it now will age and die,
and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry.
May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.
There's gotta be a fourth verse here that completes it.
It's possible that the company could be converted into a worker cooperative, which wouldn't be much of a stretch given their current (largely hierarchyless) company structure. There is no reason it wouldn't work.
They're a storefront that charges ~30% and they're pretty dominant in their market.
They make enough money —they're practically printing it— to never need investment, and they don't seem to piss it away like your FAANGs.
Which is all to say, even down the line, why would they risk it all for more money? Might seem naive but private ownership allows them to maintain this course.
On the one hand it will be sad if Steam declines as it is overall a fantastic service for gamers. On the other, they definitely occupy a close-to-monopoly like position in the market so it might be good to have that opened up.
I think this has changed, at least in my view recently. I find a lot more of my time spent on games in Xbox Gamepass than on Steam these days and have a bunch more launchers as publishers have pushed games to their own platforms.
They also mostly tend to do things when the time is right rather than when they think other people think the time is right — they can be quite conservative both in tech and game design but that also means they don't ship broken crap too often which is surprisingly rare in the industry.
Steam controller. I waited for them to release a v2 with embedded battery and better build quality and it never came. I guess the Steamdeck benefitted from it, but I'd still like it as a controller.
Oh, very much so. Because of vision issues, I need to plug my Steam Deck into a monitor to play comfortably, but the USB-C connection isn't reliable enough while actually using the Deck as a controller. I need an external controller for my deck, but one that's as good as the Deck (non-negotiable requirements: gyro, back buttons). I wish I could just order a Steam Controller v2 (with two sticks, just like on the Deck).
I remember that, in the beginning, there were some concerns:
- "I need to download a lot of data, I want discs!"
- "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"
I think the first point got kind of obsolete, because broadband is readily available compared to 20 years ago. And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
It's still a very valid complaint, and will forever be as long as you're tied to Steam's server being up and willing to give you the content you paid for. That may not always be the case, for example if financial embargos prevent Valve from actually providing the service in your country. It's more like you're paying Steam to use their service rather than actually buying the game. Right now people are not worried about Steam exit scamming and thanking us for all the fish, because it's a very solid service that basically has a monopoly on PC digital game sales, plus the Steam Market being a money making machine on its own, plus the Steam Deck providing further leverage on game sales.
But there's a nonzero chance they can just ... close. Which was a very real possibility when they launched. Now, not so much, but the future has always new and exciting ways to fuck it all up at a moment's notice.
That's where GoG is still an important alternative... Even though for whatever reason, I don't enjoy its launcher as much. And steam deck has completely changed my weighing between GoG and steam :-(
Lutris really helps in that regard. For very minor additional janitoring, it can recreate much of the same plug-and-play, Windows-on-Linux seamlessness that you get with Steam.
> And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
People got comfortable, and that comfortability is great. Until it isn't, and then it's a travesty. Then it all repeats again and people never learn not to put all their eggs in one basket.
That's just the result of the flow of time. I remember a little over a decade ago when Blizzard was considered one of the best companies out there and that they always delivered quality titles. Stuff changes (and also, sometimes people can be very fickle).
> "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"
Not that this isn't a valid concern, it certainly is, but I guess what we've learnt is that you don't need to be bound to Valve for games to be bound to a big corporation.
Look at Minecraft, which was never on Steam. You could've brought that a decade ago, and now you're told you need to bind yourself to Microsoft to continue playing it.
The concerns weren't completely unfounded. My college apartment's internet was so bad I had to return HL2 to the store because it wouldn't decrypt it (the network was swampped with college gnutella traffic and the apartment complex had no idea how to handle it).
Steam shipped a version of counterstrike that glitched a lot less in windows whereas the cd version I got from ATI with my graphics card didn’t even work reliably. That was the gateway game for me.
I remember having those concerns. And Steam performance did take a few months to solidify if I remember correctly, so not everything was unfounded. Before it, only MMOs had login screens separating gamers from gaming ;-)
Nowadays, the only problems I have with Steam stem from my credit card's security mechanisms.
Their biggest achievement was getting other companies to sell through their store. This allowed gamers to build up their back catalogue on Steam. Their launcher has all the problems as the other ones but they're forgiven because most of us have large collections within Steam now. Even when the same game is on sale via Epic for a slightly lower price I'll usually get it on Steam because that's where most of my other games are. It is a choice, but a warped one.
It's kind of like Netflix vs other streaming platforms except Steam has a much better moat.
Big fan of Steam here but I wouldn't say it was _always_ amazing. In the beginning, it was a friends network that was almost always down and a launcher for games I already owned and played without a launcher for years. I hated it for a long time but it is a great platform right now.
Steam was universally hated when it launched, even more than other launchers are hated today (uplay)
The perception changed when Steam started allowing 3rd party games and had cheaper prices (through blink-and-you-miss it discounts of course, so they can still milk launch-day hype) than boxed copies and the indie explosion that digital distribution allowed
Stop using the phrase 'walled garden'. Its marketing jargon that promotes anti-consumer behavior while promoting ideas of delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.
>Its marketing jargon that promotes anti-consumer behavior
If consumers choose to stay in it, then that's their choice, no? I see it just as much as a scathing commentary as it is a flowery euphemism. No different from "golden handcuffs".
Regardless, I'm not too interested in going into a rabbit hole of word games. If "closed off software ecosystem storing 3rd party products you purchased" is a preferable terminology, feel free to substitute that phrase in.
>while promoting ideas of delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.
I'll admit, many years ago I was a lot more skeptical. I didn't like the idea of not physically owning my games, being able to install them whenever and however I wanted without some middle man who could deny me what I paid for. And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?
But years have passed and I've softened on it. Steam has been - overall - a great service. It does everything I need and never gets in the way.
Is it perfect? No. I would love a better game recommendation algorithm for starters.
But it's served me well and I have hundreds of games in it, so it's work out well for both me and them.
> And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?
Honestly? If that were to happen - just pirate it. Everything (well, almost) that's on Steam is also readily and easily available on the seven seas, if you know where to look.
Sure, that wouldn't be fair to you, but from a purely practical point of view you'd be able to access your games if Steam went belly-up, and still "own" them. (Although perhaps not legally, depending on where you live.)
I buy my games on Steam because it's convenient, to support the devs, and to support Valve's investment in Linux. But otherwise I wouldn't blink twice before pirating if I were, say, screwed over by Steam or by a game publisher.
I forget where I saw it but well over half of all pirated software has some sort of malware on board. I'm no longer a poor college student. I cannot afford to risk my bank / brokerage accounts and credit cards for the sake of saving $60 on a game.
The real question is, in a world of Wine/Proton, Linux emulating the Windows API, and offline games (because the company running the servers would likely be dead then too), can you sandbox a game enough to not care whether it has some old malware or not.
I wouldn't do my banking on that computer, but a dedicated gaming computer, where each malware can only see the files of its own host game and has no networking -- that might just be good enough.
I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago and I don't know how many hard drives have given up on me over that time.
Valve and the contract you have with them is actually more durable than stuff physically lying around the house, it just doesn't feel that way because we don't have a good intuition about how brittle digital information stored on physical media is.
Back when I first got an xbox, I got the Halo remastered collection or something like that on DVD. Wanted to fire it up again ... no idea where the disc is. Wish I had just gotten digital at this point.
I discovered that I could actually add many of the games I bought on physical media in Steam and/or other services by using the serial key inside the case. Still it doesn't help if you can't find the case either... and not all games could be activated this way.
Hmm - that's handy. After a move, I'm sure I have the disc somewhere ... it's just in some box somewhere. I will have to give that a try when I find it.
That's probably one of the reasons why Valve and Steam seem to never get involved in any of the usual political activism you see basically 100% of other big companies slash their userbase in half with.
>what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for?
In many cases it's possible to copy the game out of the Steam folders and have it still work. It depends on how much Steam/DRM functionality it uses and on packaging issues. At least for Linux-native games, I have found the games almost always work outside Steam (once any dynamic library issues are cleared up).
I remember first time I tried Steam. I asked a mate "what is this steam thing?" to which he answered "its the piece of crap you need to install to play counter strike". They have come a long way since then.
I remember Steam launching with counter-strike 1.6 and I was livid at the time as an avid 1.5 player. I straight up refused to play counter-strike until Source launched when I got it with the Orange Box.
Those early days of Steam were still rough but getting better over time. I think Valve still isn't perfect, but the options for a PC leader could be a lot worse (and absolutely were).
It always amazes me that features that Steam has figured out still haven't found their way to other digital game storefronts. It's not a perfect platform, but it's likely the best we got for now. Just glad that there are other places to go if Steam isn't your jam.
I'm on the same boat as you. I despised the very idea of Steam when it first launched, and was a firm believer in owning games outright without depending on a platform on which one had to log into (well, technically I still do believe in it, but I am resigned to reality). However, I have to say that Steam and its prophet St. Gabe Newell have truly stood the test of time and been a force for good in the PC games industry (all the more so as a Linux user).
In fact, Valve is a great representative of a conclusion I reached a while ago (not original by any means), which is that privately owned businesses whose owners give a shit about the value they create are of much greater social value than the paperclip-maximising entities that often result from publicly traded corporations. Another example, though defunct, was OKCupid when it was still owned privately by its founders before it was sold off to the Borg of Match.com.
When Adam Smith said that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” it was a description of reality, not a prescription to be maximised through layer upon layer of purely financial self-interest. Doing things for pure profit optimises the market and society benefits only as a side-effect. Doing things for profit, while actually caring for what you make, may not be market-optimal but can be much better for society.
I first learned to cover my internet tracks when my mom asked what "FuckSteam.com" was and why it was in the web browser history.
I quickly came to have an appreciation for Steam, as pausing/resuming downloads on my 56k dialup was very, very unreliable. Steam's client was my first exposure to reliable download pausing so they found my soft spot.
As my little ones have gotten older it is a little annoying my kid can’t play a game on the steam deck hooked up to the TV downstairs while I want to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my main PC. I own both games, what the heck?
Buy a $20 USB C dock with an HDMI port, start "Offline mode" on the steam deck, child plugs into TV and plays game just fine, you go upstairs and play game just fine.
Alternatively, turn off internet on your personal computer and play game, and let the little one use wireless streaming to your TV.
Basically, one of them has to be in offline mode. That is a stupid thing, but valve intends for "offline mode" to be a day to day use case of the Steam Deck
As in like multiplayer? No, you cannot play multiple multiplayer games on one steam account at the same time. This is not different from other platforms, where I don't think you can use the same Xbox account on multiple systems to play online games at the same time.
The simple answer is any game you can play without a wifi connection can be played in offline mode.
well, i mean any games that require online access even if they are not multiplayer.
i am just trying to understand how that would work.
as far as i can tell there is really no reason for this not to work as long as those games don't use steam services that require an active steam login.
i can run multiple steam multiplayer games in parallel on the same machine, so why shouldn't i be able to do this on multiple machines? the same as if i buy multiple games independently. steam, and any other platform is a game license manager. as steam allows me to use one license for a game on multiple machines, it should not be a licensing problem to play a different game on a different machine on the same account.
i don't have steam on multiple machines so i can't test it, but what i could test is that games are able to access the network even if steam is offline.
what doesn't work in offline mode is logging into games that use the steam account as identification, or that connect the game account to the steam account. but even those do seem to continue to work if the steam client goes offline after logging in. games that do not use the steam account should allow logging in even from offline mode.
so in summary: any game that does not depend on the steam client being online during play should be ok.
Maybe you can't play the same game (I haven't tried) but it is definitely possible to let your kid play other games. I have this very setup with my son and it works. An other advantage to this setup is that you can select which of your games to let your kid play.
I don't know, we've been doing it for years. Maybe it's a regional thing? One account for me and one for my kid. I authorize the use of my games for his account on his machine (I need to login with my account on his machine to authorize his machine, I did it just the other day as the machine authorization only seems to last for a while). Then he can install and play any game of mine I allow (or all) once he logs back in with his account.
I don't want to defend this in any way, but in my mind it plays out like this: You have a SNES and a dozen cartridges and so it's the same, as you only have one console.
On the other hand, multiple Game Boy consoles in the same household were more common.
So yeah, it should be better now that the physical limitation is broken. You have several games and should be able to play them at the same time.
But I literally have two computers? Why would Bethesda care that I’m playing Starfield while my kid is playing Stardew Valley? ConcernedApe certainly doesn’t care. If I’m trying to play Starfield in two places at once sure, I get why that wouldn’t be allowed.
I guess I just don’t get the business reasons for it.
People don't pirate PS5 games not because Sony's service is so good, but because the device is so secure that piracy is virtually impossible on it, so getting games the legal way is also the only way.
The PC was and still is, way too open for that to be achievable, though they have tried with various malware DRM, including Sony. With the PC being so open, it became a battleground to competition, which led to prices being so low.
Steam: Is kinda reasonable with keeping me logged in ON MY OWN DAMN HARDWARE.
Ubisoft Connect: Hi, it's you. You seem to have a different IP after your ISP's 24h disconnect. PLEASE LOG IN to play this single player game.
But then you have companies like Square Enix where their website process to buy a game was so convoluted that people went to Steam just because it was 5 clicks and not 50.
>Ehhhh I don't think DRM is why Steam is succeeding.
I never claimed that DRM was the only reason.
>making things easily obtainable is more important than making them free
No, it's because of competition. The PC being so open and not locked down to a single entity who can engage in rent-seeking like the console vendors, means not just piracy but an unlimited ways and sources you can get media on the device which means competition, which drives down prices.
Rent-seeking seems a silly term here. If you just mean "charging a fortune" then there are other consoles to buy. And consoles are luxury goods, so if they get too expensive people just won't buy them in the first place.
I beg to differ. Piracy and mod-chips on earlier consoles was rampant (in my country).
Anyone I knew with a PS2 had it 'chipped' and only had pirated games because the price of the console (which was also a DVD player) was more easily digestible than the price of original games which came at huge mark-ups to compensate for the console HW which were sold at a loss in the eerier stages.
If you still pirate games in 2023 then it's because free is more important to you than anything else. But back when Steam launched it was much more of a hassle to get a game:
First you needed to go to a physical store miles away and once you got there the game you wanted may have been sold out. And then there was seldom any sales, except the box of mixed five-year-old games no one wanted by the counter (only $1.99) that you could rummage through and hopefully find a gem. "Darn, they were out of Half-Life[1] but maybe this copy of Strike Squad[2] will be fun while I wait for two weeks for the next batch of Half-Life?"
Also note that while a five-year-old game today will barely look dated, back in those days it's the difference between [1] and [3].
Then when you came home to finally install the game, the CD was scratched and the game wouldn't install. And typically the installer didn't notice this until it had reached 95% after 45 minutes of waiting. The StarCraft CDs were notoriously bad in this respect and you needed to treat them like delicate flower petals. "Eh, my StarCraft CD no longer works, can I borrow yours? NOO!"
So for those of us, who pirated StarCraft after the third authentic CD had broken down, Steam was a godsend.
There are plenty of people that know where to go to pirate games and still choose to pay for them, and not even just out of principle.
I like that if a patch comes out which fixes bugs and adds features, I'm guaranteed that it works immediately. I don't have to wait for a new version of the crack to come out that cracks the new version.
I like that multiplayer always works.
I like that I can access the Steam Workshop.
I like never having to worry if the latest crack is going to include malware.
None of that is guaranteed if I pirate the game.
As a side note, I just discovered that GameCopyWorld not only still exists, it's still using the same style as it did 20 years ago.
I'm still a bit overwhelmed that I don't really own any of my games anymore. I can't lend them to a friend or relative. It makes me so sad that when I die, so much of what I bought will just stop being useful; I can give my account to someone yes, but the odds of having someone who likes all the games I liked seems slim. The technological unwinding of first-sale doctrine is a huge blow to me, one that I feel so regularly, and which makes every purchase more than just a little bit sad.
So far the upside of Steam has been incredible. Installing, removing, & keeping games updated is incredibly easy. Saves go to what has so far been a reliable cloud. Matchmaking & lobbies don't die after a couple years, when games use the Steam SDK. The fancy controller mapping built-in is great. Steam Remote Play is a (mostly: please, better support killing unresponsive games Steam) just-works delight.
There's so much I'm thankful for. But it still is so shocking to me how much less flexibility & capability I have. I resisted buying Steam for many many years, but it has over time become my primary gaming experience & I've accrued many hundreds of games. And that has always made me a bit sad. Now it seems like a huge number of games require either Steam or something like it; we no longer seem to even have a choice about Steam or it's ilk. It's a sad fate for such an open ended freeing thing, gaming, that we've all been ensnared in.
First Valve single-handedly saves PC gaming, then advances Linux gaming further than anyone has done in 30 years. Their work on Proton, and integrating into the Steam client is incredible.
>then advances Linux gaming further than anyone has done in 30 years.
I guess if people count "throwing a Windows runtime environment into Linux" as "Linux gaming", then so be it. It's not the direction I'd hope for Linux to go but I'm not surprised that our continued reliance on proprietary technology seeps even into Linux itself.
I take the same game runtime (open source, so the argument about being proprietary is not the main argument) and compare the Linux and Windows versions:
Descent D2X-XL.
Linux version: can't install the binaries in my distro, they are not in the repository of packages. Can't compile it as the dependencies are obsolete. I would need to run a 15 years old distro just to test it. It is probable the distro doesn't support current hardware.
Windows version: It just runs on Wine. No problem at all. Runs better than on Windows. Win32 is the only truly backwards compatible API on Linux.
I would say this is a completely self-inflicted issue in Linux world. We rely on proprietary technology because the open desktop and libraries and GPU drivers disregarded backwards compatibility, while Win32 worked hard to preserve it.
>We rely on proprietary technology because the open desktop and libraries and GPU drivers disregarded backwards compatibility
Interesting angle to take it. Maybe the desktop and libraries have some core compatibility issues to resolve, but GPU drivers are ultimately working off what GPU manufacturers give to them. And it's unfortunate because
1. the GPU is a very important aspect, but also one closed down by nature.
2. Unlike the CPU (which is also closed down, and can have its own issues), GPU software especially sucks, even on Windows. You ever see updates like "fix issue with Overwatch"? Yeah, it is easier for Blizzard to call up Nvidia and fix their drivers specifically for their game than to fix whatever core issue made Blizzard struggle
And as such it's no coincidence that many of the portability issues that come up with Linux happen to be related to shader issues. I'm being a bit unfair here given that I just established that the GPU is more important for games (so of course you'll uncover more and nastier bugs), but it's some food for thought on a major chip that may spread into software not choosing to support Linux.
----
Getting of my tangent:
> I would say this is a completely self-inflicted issue in Linux world.
To some extent, yes. But it is mostly an issue of support, and Windows has better support when similar issues arise. Ideally, a developer shouldn't need to rely on an outdated dependency that requires 15yo hardware and should be able to deploy to most major pacmans (a whole other rant, but I've talked enough). I'd say those challenges are hard to resolve, but not as hard as the effort of ensuring an entire proprietary runtime works on a different OS.
> Win32 is the only truly backwards compatible API on Linux.
Microsoft doesn't have any control over wine. It's a way of *breaking* microsoft's control, not extending it.
The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update, and steam controls the updates. It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.
>The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update
(un?)fortunately, games have long update tails now. Just ask Android/IOS how those older games work. The popular stuff makes money and will continue support, but abandonware is inevtiable.
> It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Sure, but I'm worried about future games, not current. I'm sure you can play the current 20 years of back catalog for the rest of your life if need be, but many people will be moving on to the new shiny thing.
>Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.
ehh, give it maybe 20-30 years. "Forever" in software is never that. You still need people who care about Wine, older games, and backwards compatibility. And have the skills and time/energy to keep that maintained.
This isn't even a critique on Windows/Linux. Just accepting that at some point, for technological advance, we will need hard breaks, and people may not always care about getting over those breaks. We haven't had a hard break in Windows for decades, but we are on the cusp of various technologies and different product models, interesting and greedy alike.
I don't expect my copy of Skyrim to work on whatever is the new hardware in 30 years. I'll probably just buy Skyrim Quantum Cloud 2040 or whatever.
answer to points 1-3: Valve controls the update process, linux has a stable ABI, and wine has had no problem adapting to library changes in general. They ship their own windows DLLs.
As for hardware changes? There really isn't going to be anything you can do there on windows or linux.
I used to weigh into arguments with positions like this, or that "Game Devs should just make Linux/Mac builds of their games" before I got into the industry. Targeting a platform, even when you have an off-the-shelf engine that does the lions share of the work for you, is not easy work. Microsoft puts in zounds of dev time to make the wild west of hardware that is the PC landscape work, and in many ways, has to hold hardware manufacturer's feet to the fire in order to make that possible. Sony, Microsoft for XBOX, and Nintendo, all have much more significantly simplified architectures to support, and put in zounds of hours of work to make that work smoothly for their respective platforms.
The amount of effort to make a comparable API that game devs could target as a platform just... doesn't exist in the F/OSS world. I'm not trying to minimize the work that folks like the SDL team do in order to make this as possible as they can, as they do spend significant efforts to try and do this. It's also not like there aren't reasonably good F/OSS engines like O3DE, based on the Lumberyard source, which was in turn forked from a version of Crytek, which would keep this kind of support close at heart. For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great.
It feels pretty rock-meet-hard-place to expect an ecosystem like Linux, one that embraces diversity as hard as it does to provide the level of stability and commonality that a large scale game project needs. Altruistically, yes, I wish there was a fantastic community supported platform target that game developers could use that provide the same level of stability and commonality that DirectX does. The adages about the chicken-and-egg problem of "nobody plays games on Linux, so no one is really interested in making a solid development target for games on Linux" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.
>Game Devs should just make Linux/Mac builds of their games" before I got into the industry. Targeting a platform, even when you have an off-the-shelf engine that does the lions share of the work for you, is not easy work.
No worries, I'm no seasoned veteran with 30+ years experience and a grey beard. But I've put my time into industry and have worked for two major engine platforms at some point. I know the "should make" is fleeting platitudes and that part of it is due to how horrible the historical guts of each engine is. I just hated being powerless to fix it despite seeing the code right there. But I guess I would have lacked the talent even if I got the go ahead.
Frankly, I've accepted that cruft and hope instead of moping about the state of modern middleware that I can focus that energy in making sure something like Godot or any other up and coming engine can avoid those same pitfalls (especially with Unity announcing those "per download" pricing and online check-in today... sigh. Maybe it was a good thing I got laid off). No matter the platform, my history tells me it's less about being some technical wizard and more about simply making sure care is taken in the foundations, and rules (and as a result, debt) aren't broken for so long that you lose that care.
>For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great.
And as you mention, those titles trying to deliver striking experiences simply lack the time for that care. If only because business pressure don't allow for it. I'm not trying to make sure Diablo 5 runs on Linux and is open source. But if I can make it easier for future indies to target Linux and not rely on a Windows wrapper, or get crap out of the way for the like-minded devs that already put in the work to target Linux, that's good enough for this single person's mission.
>At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.
Sure, I know I came off negative but I don't see WINE as a bad thing (I have feelings about Valve, but that's another story). I'm simply thinking a bit farther ahead on the next steps, pitfalls, and tribulations. I'm not sure if Valve is and is instead fine relying on selling Linux hardware until they can't.
If Windows pulled off its own M1 chip tomorrow and it just broke 30 years of compatibility, would Valve double down on a Steam Deck 2 w/ Linux and throw all its talent onto fixing the myriad of issues with Proton? Or would it simply relent and throw Windows on it, maybe hoping in 5+ years WINE can get something working? I feel like it's the latter and then all that market share gained will drop like a rock. I want to mitigate that if I can help it.
>I don't really care how it works, just that I don't have to run Windows.
you don't have to care, but pretending you're not beholden to Windows and how it decides to develop its future versions is exactly my point. Microsoft isn't making Windows 12 or maybe even Windows Cloud 2035 with WINE compatibility in mind. It's a ticking time bomb and I hope Linux gamers have a contingency plan if/when the bomb goes off.
It *doesn't matter* wtf windows does in the future. you don't have to run it, you're not beholden to it.
Once a game works on wine it will continue to work FOREVER. Steam controls the update process so there's nothing microsoft can do to break it.
Beyond that, I don't give a shit. If I can't make a new game work on my steam deck, I won't buy it, and that's clearly where valve (who still control most of the windows gaming market) are pushing things.
>Once a game works on wine it will continue to work FOREVER
Sure, once a game works. I'm thinking about the future. And unfortuantely that future is bound by Microsoft's whims. Valve doesn't control window and that's what most games target.
>If I can't make a new game work on my steam deck, I won't buy it
that's fine, 97% of the market will. Valve isn't going to be hurting by this. They won't give a shit either, just default back to the status quo.
Valve has the steamdeck, a successful product in a market all it's own that runs exclusively on linux. Want your game to run well on it? Target linux.
They would never have gotten to the point of selling thousands of linux devices without wine to make their existing catalog work.
>Valve isn't going to be hurting by this. They won't give a shit either, just default back to the status quo.
You might not know this, but the steam deck is the culmination of over 15 years of work by VALVe to become independent of microsoft. They recognize the threat of living on someone else's OS and they've been working on that threat for very a long time.
Valve tried *exactly* your plan (bribing devs to care about a non-existent market) ten years ago with the Steam Machines, and it failed miserably. Their investment into WINE and the development of the steamdeck is the result of the lessons you refuse to accept.
>They would never have gotten to the point of selling thousands of linux devices without wine to make their existing catalog work
Sure. But they never HAD to sell linux devices to begin with. I wonder how many PC's valve would had sold if they took Sony's old "Gaming on the Go" marketing and actually pulled it off.
I'm glad they didn't go that route, but food for thought.
>They recognize the threat of living on someone else's OS and they've been working on that threat for very a long time.
Yup, they have backup plans. And when the plans petered out from Microsoft (thankfully) Valve relaxed. I unfortunately still see other looming threats, but those threats aren't as catastrophic as what came before. So I understand if Valve does not care as long as they can keep their software on Windows.
>Their investment into WINE and the development of the steamdeck is the result of the lessons you refuse to accept.
My solution doesn't involve hardware so I'm not sure what you're getting at. All I'm saying is "make it not a pain to port to linux, and incentivize devs to do it" and you make it sound like I'm trying to launch my own console.
Linux runs on pretty much any and everything, so I don't care too much about taking the Nintendo route and providing exclusive blockbuster titles to pull users into my own walled garden. That boat sailed before I was born; even Valve can't do that today (despite doing that 20 years ago when they made games) and I won't pretend to pursue that venture myself.
Fortunately that is not the only way to gain market share these days, so I'll take advantage of alternative methods.
Current games that work on current Windows versions shouldn't suddenly start to become a problem. Future games would for a while have to support current/older versions of Windows, so those shouldn't become a problem for a while either.
Hopefully when/if it becomes a problem, there will be enough Linux gamers for Linux to be a real consideration, even if this consideration is no more than targetting a specific version of WINE or Proton.
>Hopefully when/if it becomes a problem, there will be enough Linux gamers for Linux to be a real consideration, even if this consideration is no more than targetting a specific version of WINE or Proton.
Hopefully. Microsoft has been really good with Backwards compatibility on both their PC and gaming console, so that's probably part of why people don't seem to worry as much about this. But if they were ever going to do their equivalent of Python 3, or even go as far as a new architecture like Apple... it sounds like rough times on Linux due to a dependency that (IMO) shouldn't have existed.
> Microsoft isn't making Windows 12 or maybe even Windows Cloud 2035 with WINE compatibility in mind.
WINE started out targeting Windows 3.x, survived MS in its most blatantly anti-competitive form, and has not merely survived but vastly improved over the ensuing 30 years. Maybe Windows compat is a time-bomb, but eventually you gotta live your life.
>Maybe Windows compat is a time-bomb, but eventually you gotta live your life.
I still need to use windows for professional work so it's not like I'd be dead in the water. But as someone who wants to strive to keep as much ownership over my software as possible, and wants to ensure users own their own software... WINE doesn't sit well with me.
Others may not care, and that's fine. But I have already made it a part of my professional career to care about little things like that.
It’s actually weaponizing Microsoft’s backwards compatibility promises. It’s a great idea, well executed. Treat Windows ABI as yet another Linux ABI. Stop thinking that it’s Windows, because it isn’t just Windows anymore.
>If devs aren't developing for Linux, what are they supposed to do?
Then you...Encourage devs to develop for Linux? Easier said than done, but I don't know what answer you're expecting, nor why we're phrasing it as if Valve had some legal obligation to use or support Linux. They are also free to do nothing and target the 97% market share. That's not a decision I would blame them for either.
They made a decision and I simply wish they made a different one. Their decision isn't bad, I simply have my own reservations about that direction and reasons to prefer my direction. But if you want my insignificant crackpot theory on how I'd leverage such a position as a market leader to support linux:
- Reduce platform share rates from 30% to say, 15% if you choose to implement native Linux support into your game and maintain parity with the Windows platform (I know that AAA games selling over X million already have reduces share rates, this may need to be under negotiation).
- Talk and work with AAA developers to properly port to Linux. This may or may not involve having some developers onhand to send out to such studios and work directly on such ports. These can be extra services Valve provides.
- Work with major 3rd party tools/engines to fix the cruft in their linux deployments. To be honest, this alone may be the biggest fix if we somehow pull it off.
- Make a not crap version of AppImage to help allievate package management issues between different distros, and bundle in a fork of that into Steam (similar to what they did with Proton). Or fix AppImage, whatever is easier.
These inevitably make less money but luckily I as this alternate Universe Gabe Newell am not beholden to shareholders forcing infinite growth. So may as well leverage that power while I have it.
Oh yes, because writing a strongly worded 5-page letter to devs to support the insignificant minority of linux users will work. That's totally how you get people with profit motives to "make different decisions."
"Talking with people" has has been a disaster for the FSF for going on 20 years. They had much more success when they DID STUFF, like say, implemented a clone of unix from scratch in the 80's.
Here's VALVe (and the WINE project) doing stuff. they've implemented a very capable clone of the windows ABI, creating a massive market for tens of thousands of games on linux out of thin air.
Do you really think devs would even give enough of a shit to talk about about linux without those 10,000 windows games that run on the steam deck?
>writing a strongly worded 5-page letter to devs to support the insignificant minority of linux users will work.
we're talking about a billion dollar platform leader, not Richard Stallman (bless his soul). the difference between the latter's net worth and Valve's is a billion dollars. don't underestimate the scale of money here.
And you are absolutely right. Talking doesn't work (at a massive scale). That's why I in this alternate universe am making it worth the dev's while. Offering incentive, talent, and tools to help out. It's pretty much what Stadia did but Valve's games wont be stuck on a cloud server.
>Do you really think devs would even give enough of a shit to talk about about linux without those 10,000 windows games that run on the steam deck
if they can get 15% of their revenue back, yes. Porting to linux is harder than it needs to be, but it's not that hard these days. Even in this alternate universe, if the plan fails I as Gabe Newell just get more money out of the devs.
Did you read my actual post or are you simply reacting to the "Encourage devs to develop for Linux" part? I don't know how I write that and someone simply responds "you're writing a strongly worded letter".
Even in a hypothetical world where you have lots of money, you don't get to boss people around. VALVe would have to pay every single developer their perceived linux development costs for every game, just to port them to linux. Plus additional money on top to make it worth considering, since with near-zero linux gamers there's no profit to be had.
It's a really stupid move to simply throw money at someone to do something which they don't have any other reason to do. They'll charge as much as you're willing to pay them and do the bare minimum the contract allows. Let's not forget that stadia was a massive failure that burned unthinkable amounts of cash to produce *absolutely nothing.*
Tools? Talent? Enablers with *zero value.* You don't need the extra tools/talent if you simply ignore linux.
WINE, by comparison, is a fixed cost that doesn't depend on the number of games it enables. It also doesn't require buy-in from *anybody* outside VALVe. With zero outside help from gamedevs VALVe now has a linux gaming device that's sold like hotcakes and comes with thousands of games.
In your world they'd be several million in the hole, have maybe a few dozen low-effort linux ports for all that cash, and the steam deck would be the same gameless failure the steam machines were ten years prior.
I read your post all right. It's just really naive.
Linux desktop users are simply not a big enough market to bother spending money on. Until THAT changes, the only good solution is making it so that developers don't need to spend any money to cross-release. Which means Proton and Wine.
Well that's what I want to change. There was once upon a time where Android was in the same position. Considered as crappy alternative phones for people who couldn't get an iPhone. By some miracle Google didn't throw out the baby with the bathwater like they would do for 80% of their other products in the next 13 years, and now IOS has real competition.
>Linux desktop users are simply not a big enough market to bother spending money on.
And it won't change with that mentality. I don't consider WINE a solution so much as a workaround. Maybe a good workaround, but it doesn't change the "Linux Desktop users market" issue.
And I'll just pre-emptively address the constant response I get to this: It's fine if "you" (royal) don't care and simply want to a) be on Linux OS and b) play modern video games. I'm not going to shame anyone using WINE to play their games. Sometimes you need a quick fix and this is the "quickest" fix for that. It's part of my personal mission to care, though.
You might be well-intentioned, but your plan is garbage.
Gamevevs will milk you for all the money you have to develop for a non-existent market, assuming they even go along with you in the first place. Better to create that market with a fixed-cost translation layer so you can offer them something real.
VALVe now has thousands of gaming handhelds in a market all to itself, all of which are running linux. Want a slice of that market? your game will run better if you support linux.
They'd have been lucky to sell any of them at all without wine-enabled games.
I sure wouldn't getting YC funded with that plan. But it's not a profit motivated plan to begin with.
>Gamevevs will milk you for all the money you have to develop for a non-existent market
Yup, that's the goal. Even from an altruistic perspective, I'd probably creep up the savings in this alternate universe as Linux market share improved. Or cancel if after some 5 years no one bites. Still, nothing ventured...
>Better to create that market with a fixed-cost translation layer so you can offer them something real.
I wager if it was between 15% revenue gains for a native port and "make sure if works on proton for a million more users", that the medium-large studios would target the 15% rev gains 7 days out of the week. But maybe reality would disappoint me even here.
>They'd have been lucky to sell any of them at all without wine-enabled games.
on the contrary, they'd probably be called the new Apple if Valve targeted Windows and passed the licensing cost to users. $500 would still be undercutting a lot of the portable PC market. I'm under no illusion that Linux c. 2020 was some profitable market to take advantage of.
I guess that's what makes the Steam Deck this interesting, half-altruistic model to work in. Instead of just making a Windows PC, they took the time and effort to maintain a fork of WINE and integrate it into their store, and then spend years on making tweaks to the point where 3 years later they can claim 75% compatibility. Where an out the gate Windows platform would be 98%+ day one.
It's still technically a walled garden, but it's not the most profitable walled garden. Certainly not something any other hardware manufacturer would have done.
> It's part of my personal mission to care, though.
Why? What difference does it make? The way I see it, Proton makes life for developers and it makes life for Linux users better. Fighting the status quo should be focused on actually improving things.
Security and peace of mind? Weathering myself/ourselves from the whims of billion dollar corporations? It's personal, I never said it was rational.
I've worked on all kinds of tech in industry hampered because it didn't make money fast enough, or because a change of management happened and they didn't care how beneficial the work we were doing was. I've seen changes in-house I absolutely hated that fractured support for making portable software, because portability isn't profitable. Call it bitterness and rebellion that I want to focus my long term bets on software I can control. Or software others can control should I go mad or get hit by a bus.
> Fighting the status quo should be focused on actually improving things.
And I feel like I am. WINE isn't in the way of my mission and if there are plenty of games choosing to run both natively and via WINE, that's great. Choice is nice. If there's some weird point where WINE runs better than native, that's an issue I want to fix. But the native ports need to exist first.
If it's peace of mind you're after, it seems like encouraging developers to target older versions of the Win32 API is a far more effective goal. Linux with Wine can have support for those forever, and Windows, with their almost pathological commitment to backwards compatibility will be able to run them them, too.
Linux APIs, in contrast, are far more varied, and change a lot more. So the "peace of mind" argument actually favors Win32.
> it seems like encouraging developers to target older versions of the Win32 API is a far more effective goal.
Perhaps, but I don't know how long that will last, and how hard that goal will be to migrate future windows to older windows. I don't see much point basing my goals on the uncertainties of proprietary software.
>and Windows, with their almost pathological commitment to backwards compatibility will be able to run them them, too.
Likewise, Windows does this for now. Microsoft isn't immune to changing course, and their track record isn't even great to begin with when we consider the 90's. I don't want to rely on the assumption that a trillion dollar corporation will always value legacy content. Enterprise tend to be pretty good at legacy support, but it still has a shelf life (unless you're COBOL I suppose. But I don't think Microsoft deals with as much safety/mission critical software as banks).
Realistically, there needs to be a pretty big incentive for developers to go through the arduous process of achieving Linux compatibility. That means charging Linux users more substantially more. Of course, that shrinks the pool of potential customers even more. Sure the purchasing power of the average Linux user blows the average windows user out of the water, but the willingness to actually purchase anything is dramatically lower.
Or, you can just make it so that the developer needs to do no extra work to maker their game Linux compatible. Option 2 is much, much better.
My Steam account is turning 20 today at 4:58pm (CET) and I cannot help but feel a bit old for the very first time. I still remember all my friends hating it so much in the beginning because it would slow our PCs down and cost us valuable FPS in Counter-Strike. It's amazing what Valve has achieved with Steam since then. Happy Birthday Steam!
Heh, Steam for me was first just a new UI to Half-Life and my beloved CS. I hated the design but I liked where they were going with it. Being able to find mods, install mods, “shop around for mods” made steam what it is today. That, and beloved CS.
Also, if you can find it, in the Counter-Strike Beta, a lot of the levels had hidden community graffiti tags by the authors. It was awesome to see so many people. I miss the days of people coming together like that, building something they themselves want to play. Now everything is “how do I get rich off this?” loot boxes and shallow rewards for dopamine’s sake.
Disjointed UX when the original text-sprite menu with the HL activate sound was killer. It was like Quake or Doom's "thunk". Which makes sense since it's all built on Quake2.
While it's amazing they've got as big as they have, I have to say I'm utterly disappointed with the quality of the steam interface.
Trying to watch friend's streams breaks half the time, files often get corrupted for downloads, and feels like every other week they change the UI layout.
I don’t care about streaming, I never had a corrupted download and have been using steam pretty much since it existed, and the recent UI change (not a fan, though, it’s now slower than before) was the first big one in years.
You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either? Wow, you must be lucky - 3-4 of the friends I play with have to do that quite often.
Funny enough, as we speak, I am downloading an update for a game. It failed for some unknown reason the first time and tried redownloading now. Time will tell if it will finally "just work" or if I'll have to redownload the entire game. Before you ask, yes I am on an SSD with plenty of space and I have a pretty decent fiber internet connection.
That is fascinating to me! It challenges my assumption based on personal experience - I think I had to repair a game once in more than a decade (dirt rally 2, and it's possible I did something to muck it up).
I did have to reinstall cyberpunk 2077 on GoG multiple times but that was largely because I tried some mods.
But steam on any of my PC's, laptops and now steam deck has never failed me. sorry to hear about your experience and Thx for sharing!
It's been years since I last had corrupted downloads, and I think that was back when Steam used its own download protocol, off colocated Valve-owned mirror servers. As of some years back it's all HTTP-based[1] now and off Akamai CDN IIRC. (I don't mean to say "works on my machine" but trying to theorize why it's so common for you while saying why it's generally more stable nowadays)
Have you ever tried to reproduce this on a different ISP or even hotspot? Wired vs wireless? Maybe there's some transmission corruption going on over the wire that's only caught during final validation? (And thus having to redownload chunks much later instead of inline)
Even chunks are checksummed. Or at least they are in third party implementations. [1]
One thing that happens is some games keep config files in their game directory instead of using a host OS user directory and thus those games will fail validation after any configuration change.
Combine that with mods that break games, but the mod files aren't in the manifest and thus invisible to validation, can create scenarios where users are doing repeated full validations and still having issues.
> You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either?
I've been using Steam for a long time, I do not recall any time that I have had to do this except when I was manually messing around with files and needed to reacquire the originals.
Steam downloads are so terribly slow. I can suck down 100Gb during a cup of coffee using my browser, bittorrent or even the (yuck) Epic Game Store. But with Steam it takes multiple hours. I have tried to diagnose the problem but as far as I can tell it's because Steam uses really aggressive compression and they process each block as it is downloaded. This causes the download to stall and wait for the CPU to catch up.
If anything, it looks pretty damn good for something 20 years old. Facebook, Reddit, and Google haven't aged well. HN isn't even 20 and feels much older.
It was the beginning of the end of pure, complete offline software ownership. They normalized it so thoroughly that a whole younger generation no longer really understands what's been lost.
That would have happened regardless because of companies like Adobe. There are way too many non-game-related services that were going to become online-only or even also subscription-only very quickly as the internet improved.
And honestly...what does it matter? I get the philosophical argument, but in all practicality you're playing the same games either way. Steam (at least in my experience) has never prevented me from playing something I wanted to.
Ever since steam started pulling games and locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest, I've been working to re-buy my entire library on GoG. Haven't regretted it since.
Steam has always been DRM from the start. People forget about the early protests, which VALVe quashed by holding Half Life 2 hostage.
>Ever since steam started pulling games and locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest
Name the game that you mean. Activision pulled "Transformers Devastation" from steam some time ago. It is not in the store, it is not for sale, and in my library it doesn't even have the background image, because it was pulled before that functionality existed.
However, I bought it before it was pulled. It is still in my library, I can still download it, and can play it whenever I want.
So again, provide a link to this story or don't spread rumors.
"locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest" Can you please elaborate? Is it like the publishers permabanning people from games then denying a refund? Or how does it look like?
Ah steam. I remember getting into the beta and playing some of the first games on Steam instead of WON [1]. I suppose I was in on the first day, it says my account was created Sept 12, 2003! I've used this piece of software from 14 to 34.
Using the opportunity of this thread to share a neat trick I discovered lately.
If you have a gaming Windows desktop and a MacOS laptop, you can get any game to be playable on your Mac by installing the game via Steam on your Windows then use a program called Steam Link [1] to stream it on your Mac.
I've been playing BG3 from my bed with this method and it works surprisingly well!
Steam will stream between any combination of Windows/Mac/Linux, I believe! At least between Linux <-> Windows here, using the main Steam client on both machines.
I have seen Steam turn into videogame Facebook over the years. Not my scene but there are people who care a lot about their "profile". Valve is genius.
I'm not on any of the social media apps or sites so it's fun for me to occasionally scroll community pages to see what goofy things people are producing. Todd Howard or Commander Shepard memes never get old.
I still have a steaminstall_cs.exe in my game directory from 10/23/2003 and remember signing up for the beta when it was required to play Counter-Strike.
Wish I still had access to the original account I created in 2003. Back then I wouldn't have guessed Steam would stick around this long and missed my opportunity for a completely useless "20 year" badge on my profile.
Ever since steam started pulling games and locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest, I've been working to re-buy my entire library on GoG. Haven't regretted it since.
Steam has always been DRM from the start. People forget about the early protests, which VALVe quashed by holding Half Life 2 hostage.
20 years, more or less a monopoly in the space (GoG is a pretty decent service but only a marginal rival), and they still can't fix their accessibility issues, even as more games for the visually impaired, etc. are coming out.
The Steam app is a jumped-up web app, just fix it already.
For me, joining the Steam coincided with the start of my adult life - I started uni in 2007, exactly when Orange Box and Witcher 1 were released. After careful deliberation on what to spend my first student stipend on, I went with Orange Box. The 16 years since then Steam didn't let me down, I can't imagine Steam disappearing in another 20 years.
Ah The Orange Box - probably one of the best gaming purchases I ever made.
Bought just so I could play Portal, then ended up trying this random game I'd never heard of called Team Fortress 2 - and happily losing over 1500 hours of my life to it. Eventually called it a day when the loot crates and cosmetics got too out of hand.
Valve released the server binary one day before the client launch, and you could use that to register with steam. I knew someone with a two digit steam id from that.
You can change the contact email associated with the account (where correspondance goes), but I'm pretty sure you can't change the email address that was initially used to register the account. You can set a public-facing display-name, so in practice it's only used as a login username, but it also shows up in the UI in a few places.
My account is roughly 19 years old. Registered for Half-Life 2. I bought it on disc but a steam account was required play. It was a very controversial move on those days.
That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.