>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.
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.