Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders
There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
Plenty of countries have corporate laws that are less shareholder focussed than those of america. In the Netherlands for example boards are obligated to take into account broader sets of interest such as employee in their decisions and this is enforceable in court.
The comment you replied to was just pointing out that, like how a founder-held company can get stuck pursuing the founder's obsession, a stock market held company can also single-mindedly pursue quarterly gains to the detriment of long-term health.
This model, unfortunately, often leads to a "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issue. Whenever you have money without oversight, you always face a moral hazard.
If the company makes a profit and there aren't shareholders there to keep the stewards in check, excesses can and do develop.
I get the first point, but having shareholders doesn't solve that in any way. Shareholders would just give themselves payouts instead of letting the execs take everything as bonuses. And unlike the execs, whose bonuses could be limited by charter and who could be chosen on the basis of trust, shareholders are "whoever has the most money to throw around", so there's no mechanism to align them with company values.
So it's not perfect, but it sure as hell beats having shareholders.
Precisely, in the form of the #1 trend of public companies, stock buybacks! I've seen aggressive buybacks take a company with a ton of money in the bank and a profitable business and drive it right to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in just a few short years.
I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars.
I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.
The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO.
This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
Steward-ownership is a philosophy more than an actual structure, my understanding is that each such company is in practice structured somewhat differently.
For Patagonia a trust owns 100% of the voting rights, while a charity collects 100% of the dividends. I don't doubt that there are ways the structure could be subverted, but it's a far cry from "money without oversight".
Do you have examples of Steward-owned companies that ended up with "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issues?
(I personally think Steam should go in that direction, otherwise I'm afraid enshittification is unavoidable once Gabe Newell is no longer at the helm)
Huh, fascinating.
The Patagonia structure is actually strikingly similar to the Bosch model - non-profit owning the shares, but no voting rights, trust having voting rights but no shares - just taking it to the logical 100% conclusion without the residual influence of the Bosch family (having retained a few percent in both).
The model has worked well for many decades for a 100 billion$ revenue company like Bosch, good to see others taking a cue from them.
(Also goes to show that even constructs like these are not safe from corporate fuckups - see the emissions scandal...)
I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own like 90% of stocks, and the top 1% own 50%. While the poorest 50% of the population own about 1% of the stock market.
So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.
Could you link to how that measurement was taken? Because I very much want to know whether it counts things like mutual funds, or whether it only measures direct ownership of stocks. E.g. I have a bunch (though not all) of my retirement savings in an index fund that owns partial shares of the top 500 US companies (as listed by Standard & Poor's). So depending on how that S&P 500 fund is measured in those statistics, I either own shares in the top 500 companies, or I'm counted as not owning any shares. The latter would produce a very misleading statistic, because I am very much not the only person who invests in the stock market via mutual funds.
So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would likely be in the top 50%).
Well, considering that it doesn't seem to be an accurate statement, it shouldn't be so amazing that people don't "get" it.
By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
What? "Doesn't seem to be an accurate statement"? What part? Those numbers are actually conservative. According to Yahoo Finance[0], it's actually 93% of the stock market is owned by the wealthiest 10% of American households. And the bottom 50% of Americans own ~1%. You "seem" to be mistaken and you're talking out of your ass.
The article you're citing doesn't link to its sources, but seems to be talking about direct stock ownership by households, and not explicitly stating how it's accounting for investment funds.
Have you considered the possibility that 401ks and pension funds etc are included in those numbers?
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
Not sure what does that mean.
Americans poor and wealthy are in the top 10% of the world wealthiest and own a huge part of the world stock value accordingly.
That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
Is that a bad thing? Why would I want someone who can't even manage their own money to manage my life savings?
If anything I'd expect a company where the decisions are in the hands of 99% John Smiths and 1% Warren Buffets to be even more short sighted, *especially* when it comes to splurging on dividends.
"The major reason is they are a private company with good business..."
This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.
The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.
>The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment
Ok, but this “at the moment” has lasted at least since 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a pretty great company delivering value and not being annoying.
> The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment
Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
Are they doing good things for Linux? Absolutely. As a long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
Monopolies need to be restricted by regulations. In micro economics there is a term marginal cost, and economy of scale. In the software as a service era, the cost of serving one extra customer is minimal, so it make economic sense for such companies to grow infinitely. This is why our current system do not work. As the best strategy is to become as big as possible and capture the entire market.
There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU country; Russia.
I think there should perhaps be a law that any corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the employees. Everybody with an employment contract with this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less; whether they're the janitor or the CEO.
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
How much is a vote worth in dollars? Because there would be a market for those votes, not just a spot market for dollars or internal market using vacation days, it would be reflected in salary and benefits and company policy etc.
Couldn’t you just make the voting anonymous to make sure that buying votes isn’t possible? Why wouldn’t I just take your money and still vote however I like?
A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.
It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
I think you’ll find that won’t actually work in practice. Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but actually employees of a different company who contracts the work out as a whole.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
You can at least in part blame Milton Friedman for this mess. His reframing of ficudiary duty as profit maximisation in his "shareholder theory" has done a tremendous amount of damage. The wariness of people when it comes to public companies is a direct consequence of this.
My understanding of the contemporary argument against publicly traded companies, though I'm not completely convinced of them personally, are that the fiduciary obligations inevitably drive those bad behaviors, and/or that shareholders often demand short term returns at the expense of long term value.
As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
> (There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
Share classes can be very varied(such as preferred shares that get what's left after bond debt is paid off on bankruptcy) but generally what he's proposing(a coop-style one-head-one-vote class) is not common. Not sure if it's legal for US corporations or not(I could swear it is but in any case it's exceedingly rare).
The usual principle is one-share-one-vote.
Not really. Most people have terribly low time preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed explanation). Public company ownership is much better because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but still susceptible to much of the same management problems, specially in a society that already favors lower time preference by other means.
I do not deeply disagree with your statement but I do not see the two as exclusive.
I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.
Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
fwiw, Hoppe has become a darling of the extremist authoritarian "alt-right" (curtis yarvin, etc) but has been rejected by more mainstrean thinkers including most libertarian factions.
It's a common pattern. If you're in their service area compare both the food served by, and the employment practices of In-n-out Burger (private) vs McDonald's (public).
>and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.
Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.
If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
Yes, exactly. It's kind of a wink-wink nudge-nudge at this point. A company citing "public good" under the guise of "shareholder value" is not actually supporting the public good at all.
Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.
But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect the greater good just as much as a public company. The rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just there to support that transfer of wealth.
>We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.
We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).
While AI is an example, it's an extreme one - the uniqueness here is that the AI companies have very large spend commitments that exceed expected cash generation, even under presumption of no faults and very strong revenue assumptions because infrastructure costs outpace revenue by a significant margin.(1)
This differs quite a bit from a typical venture-backed or boot-strapped entity, which has a realistic pathway to profitability.
Please just talk about capital and leverage like an adult. Do you expect a CFO and their team to look at the math and say, "Well, we figured out that we can speed up adoption and bring forward billions of dollars of revenue by spending fewer billions from capital injection and debt deals this year" and then not do it?
Adults tell jokes too, especially gallows humor, and to great effect.
Ergo I propose grandparent commentator inject more humor in their clear understanding of leverage and debt to widen your, my, and their audiences' understanding regarding debt and leverage beyond your proposed metaphor of the toddler CFO failing the marshmallow challenge.
What doesn't work are the predictions of Uber's collapse, of which there were many, cheered on by a great deal who still gather here looking for the next things to see through.
I am personally betting on Uber’s collapse for the obvious reason: it won’t compete with robotaxis and AV companies would rather have customers on their own apps rather than Uber’s platform.
If you want to be specific that general idea could be elaborated as "private ownership by people that only need the C-suite salary, instead of needing a C-suite plus a fat % RoI on the company's entire valuation because that's how much they just put down as a sunk cost."
In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
Furthermore, PE ownership generally means (a) achieving ROI as quickly as possible (including by dismantling the company and/or mortgaging its assets), (b) installing leadership who has no ties to the business, and (c) cutting costs to the bone.
It's not just functionally equivalent to an IPO... it's an IPO if all the buying new shareholders were sociopaths.
(Yes, there are the PE companies who run businesses better like Berkshire, but that's far from the most common type of PE)
Private ownership is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to have a business which has a healthy relationship with its customers. You also need the owners to be people of reasonably good character who understand that the best way to run a business is a win-win approach on both sides, not people who see nothing wrong with extracting maximum profit from the business no matter whom it hurts. The PE horror stories you hear are cases where the owners are in the latter group.
You hypothesis then is that there is not a _single_ public company that has a healthy relationship with its company? Not one, in the entire global public space?
When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy customer relations from birth?
The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some companies that are more likely to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA, sometimes Apple. But I don’t trust any of those companies to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or Verizon.
Sure, but very modestly due to scale, not core institutional morals. Go to your average small business with 10 or so people and ask the staff how they are treated and paid, and you'll get an answer not much different than the level of employee satisfaction for Fortune 500 companies. Look a their customer reviews... are small restaurants for instance an order of magnitude different that megacorp chains? In an economy with regulatory capture and highly unequal distribution of wealth, the wealthy set the tone across the board.
From what I can see, it's often when the founder loses control of the company (either voluntarily (e.g. retirement) or not) and it falls to the board (representing the shareholders) to appoint the CEO. At that point it's at best a toss up whether they'll appoint someone who actually intends to create value or someone who intends to extract value.
> The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing to protect society from the negative externalities it causes. For example:
- Mandating worker representation on company boards. So shareholders still have some power, but less.
- Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller companies which generally have less problematic externalities.
It's not instant (well, sometimes it is), more of a slow but inexorable push down a hill. Some public companies are farther along the path than others, but if the company continues to exist and profit it's inevitable. For example, there are no S&P 500 companies with healthy customer relationships.
It's not impossible to run a publicly owned company in the US that isn't insanely hostile towards it's customers or employees... it's just really damn difficult because of bad legal precedent.
Dodge v. Ford is basically the source of all these headaches; the Dodge Brothers owned shares in Ford. Ford refused to pay the dividends he had to pay to the Dodge Brothers, suspecting that they'd use the dividends to start their own car company (he wasn't wrong about that part). The Dodge Brothers sued Ford, upon which Fords defense for not paying out dividends was "I'm investing it in my employees" (an obvious lie, it was very blatantly about not wanting to pay out). The judge sided with the Dodge Brothers and the legal opinion included a remark that the primary purpose of a director is to produce profit to the shareholders.
That's basically become US business doctrine ever since, being twisted into the job of the director being to maximize profits to the shareholders. It's slightly bunk doctrine as far as I know; the actual precedent would mostly translate to "the shareholders can fire the directors if they think they don't do a good job" (since it can be argued that as long as any solid justification exists, producing profit for the shareholders can be assumed[0]; Dodge v. Ford was largely Ford refusing to follow his contracts with money that Dodge knew Ford had in the bank), but nobody in the upper areas of management wants to risk facing lawsuits from shareholders arguing that they made decisions that go against shareholder supremacy[1]. And so, the threats of legal consequences morph into the worst form of corporate ghoulishness that's so pervasive across every publicly traded company in the US. It's why short-term decision making dominates long-term planning for pretty much every public company.
[0]: This is called the "business judgement rule", where courts will broadly defer the judgement on if a business is ran competently or not to the executives of that business.
[1]: Tragically, just because it's bunk legal theory, doesn't change that the potential and disastrous consequences of lawsuits in the US are a very real thing.
It is not broadly believed in corporate governance circles that there is a legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. Nor will you find court judgements that require it.
If anything Milton Friedman is more responsible for this idea that shareholder maximizing is the corporate goal. That is an efficient market argument though not a legal one and he framed it long after the dodge suit. He needed to frame that argument because so many firms were _not_ doing that.
But just because a Chicago school economist says something about governance doesn’t mean it’s broadly applicable in the same way an Austrian economists opinions about inflation aren’t iron rules about monetary policy.
Could also consider: employee ownership and public ownership
People complain about the latter because they have higher expectations because the institution is supposed to serve them and often has all the diseases of true scale without being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry skates by because people assume it's out to screw them and they can cherry pick.
The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making games as their calling.
No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
This is the problem of governance by “the good king”, and no, there isn’t a clear succession plan, so things will probably get worse in a post-gaben world
If you IPO but the founders still have more than half the voting rights, you can fully ignore the public in all your decision making and there is nothing the other shareholders can do.
Only kind of. The most obvious examples are big tech companies such as Meta or Alphabet. But they pay their employees in RSUs. If the stock price falls employees make less money and can be lured away.
But thats the point, Valve IS maximizing profits. If they treated their customers like Epic does, do you think people would still be using Valve when Epic is generally a bit cheaper?
The entire point of this thread is that there are many things that Valve could do to increase its profits over the short, intermediate, and long terms... that it doesn't (presumably because that's not the kind of company it wants to be).
As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL").
In more realistic terms, they could have built proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are funding a lot of development, apparently) to give themselves a unique advantage.
If they were a publicly traded company, they probably would be doing all these things.
I don't see a problem with the first, if they want to outsource HL3 go ahead. Consumers can decide if they want to buy it when it releases, that's just normal economics.
As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers despite giving away hundreds of games.
Developing open source emulation is essential to their success - no developer would build and verify for Steam OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer is what makes them successful.
> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
Because it is "common wisdom" even if the wisdom is short sighted and doesn't always amount to increased profits.
See Netflix removing the ability to cast, because fuck you. How much of the current growth is borne out of that crackdown on people using all their profiles they pay for?
There currently isn't a "good guy" so they can keep turning those screws and force some extra growth. Being anti-consumer would be beneficial for Valve because they are currently the only good guys.
That doesnt explain their surge in growth only in recent years, its not like gaming is new. No, its all the new features they are offering and goodwill they have engendered.
I think the point was about publicly traded companies becoming inevitably evil due to shareholder expectations, not about private companies being inherently ethical.
This is a pretty serious problem, since we would like lots of companies to participate in public markets so that regular people can gain some of the upside and so there is transparency and increased oversight.
I find it so weird that you say public companies being 'evil' (which is to turn a profit) is a problem, yet you also say you'd like for companies to exist on the public market so that the public can access some of the upside.
Attributing it to private company behaviour really minimises what Valve chooses to do. Per your counter example: Epic Games has been having a very public meltdown this week regarding Steam's inclusion of Gen-AI labelling - here we have two private companies, with two very different priorities.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1)
Epic also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds, going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches to optimise it.
I don't really get it myself. I personally don't give Steam credit for weakly saying 'hey you need to label something'. Let me know when really enforce it. Heck, let me know when they at least add a filter. That's when you can really impact the behaviour (or prove consumers really don't care).
But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.
Yeah we also need to get out of the dichotomous thinking that companies are either all good or all bad.
Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*
It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.
*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a veto to ship Steam with half life 2.
It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles of money.
this is widely known (been discussed on here many times) that the employee handbook was marketing apparatus and doesnt reflect how the business actually works day to day, and never did
Really? It aligns with what I've been watching employees say in various interviews, such as the recent half life anniversary series of interviews. Would love to read more if you could point me in the right direction.
They're the #1 most profitable per employee. There are plenty of companies more profitable than Valve, but they have more employees. Valve could hire more employees.
Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar).
Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/
There's an argument that loot boxes that give you cosmetics just aren't that big of a deal, at least if we're talking about adults.
Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.
It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.
>There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"
Aren't people upset about both? The whole "gamble for features" is pretty much why the mobile market and console market are divorced in audiences (or at least, community).
People are "more" upset about Valve here because this is in the console space. They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm sure a few people are, but typically no. People are aware that trading card games can be a monetary black hole, but Magic and similar games usually don't take the same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper.
> They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm not talking about the mobile market. Are you not aware that Magic the Gathering is a physical card game? (though it does have some digital implementations too)
Yes, I'm calling that questionable. Says who? TCGs have entire formats designed in opposition to the high cost random booster shit. I think that's pretty good evidence that there's high negative sentiment.
Valve is simply larger and took legal heat for people misusing the API.
Oh you're talking about trading card games? I thought we were comparing to the gacha/lootbox market.
I think the simplest fact is that most people online don't think about offline product. Out of sight, out of mind. It's also an interesting market where WotC and Co. Actively try to avoid the resellers market. They don't want any risk in valuing individual cards themselves, so they stick to boosters.
For digital stuff, you are inherently the market itself. So it's hard divorce yourself when you are the one who implemented trading and controlling rarities and drops.
Very few people have a problem with just paying for cosmetics in a game. The main issue here is that it's gambling for cosmetics, rather than straightforwardly purchasing specific items.
Most people do have an issue with it, because every game that's replaced loot boxes with discrete cosmetics purchases has to then massively increase the price of them. For 20 bucks in Overwatch 1, you got (afaik) 10 loot boxes which all had 4 random items. In Overwatch 2 20 bucks barely gets you single good skin.
It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my experience, having been part of communities of both types of games.
> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
The closest I've heard to something compelling is that the digital goods aren't the same as actual physical goods, and that somehow that makes it worse, but I still don't find it particularly compelling; I've heard people (often lovingly) refer to trading cards as "cardboard crack" explicitly to joke about how ridiculous it is to be paying for stuff that's essentially just ink and paper.
> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"
Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.
> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.
For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.
I'm using "gambling" the same way it's typically used in these discussions. If you'd like to convince the rest of the internet that it should only apply to more traditional things like Poker or slots, where the house has some edge, be my guest.
I'd guess that there's markedly different margins on lootboxes versus running the entire steam store.
I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).
It was getting out of control when tiktok "investment guides" were instructing people who don't even play the game to start buying CS skins to make a profit.
Disagreed. Games like Fortnite and League of Legends went down this road and ended up at even more unfathomable $500 microtransactions. The only issue with skin trading is that people will take it more seriously than it is, which is a problem with all cosmetic systems.
Valve selling skins is just so trivial relative to dopamine-inducing doom-scrolling, social media in general, the toxicity of the news cycle, I can keep going.
It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.
We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.
Sure but it's just being morally lucky. They found themself in a situation where there was temporary and situational alignment, why give them any credit for that? They didn't create that situation.
It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to closed source quicker than you can blink, because the reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do good.
No, it's not. They're choosing the path that builds user trust and positive sentiment for long term success, rather than choosing to fleece their customers and not worry about whether people hate it.
Other corporations in a similar spot for games and game platforms could choose to make the same type of choices, but they'd rather boost next quarter's profits, even if that means pissing off their userbase with consumer-hostile policies.
No one forced Valve to have a great form of family sharing. No one forced them to have generous policies around generating Steam keys. No one forced them to invent remote play together. They do these things because they're nice features that are useful for players and make people stay engaged on Steam, and more positively inclined towards Valve.
I am “morally lucky” because every decision I make is to ensure I can always be morally lucky, 10 years later. I take certain kinds of jobs in certain kinds of industries.
It’s my same approach to reducing stress or getting things done. I never get a parking ticket not because I’m amazing — it’s because I know if I have to go out later and move my car, I’ll forget, so I’ll just park right the first time. 10 years later and no parking tickets and no stress — if someone tells me “oh you’re just lucky,” I can only chuckle.
I don't see it as an "approach", I see it as a description. If the FSR upscaler becomes better than DLSS, then my description leads to the prediction that AMD will make FSR closed source. The prevailing camp that says AMD are exercising their moral compass will predict that AMD will keep FSR open source. We'll see who has a description that aligns with reality if that day comes.
Why not give them credit for that? There is no moral rule that to be virtuous, it has to be self-sacrificial. If you narrow a commendable course of action to some sort of ascetic vision of martyrdom and self-punishment, then yes everybody and everything is evil.
So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight and their culture will push them to stay the course on the long term, where other companies will do the reverse. Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive, including the worst imaginable?
Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts of decisions based on values and visions that are more than just economical, especially companies not beholden to shareholders that only care about short-term profits. Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and often done from some kind of cultural bias.
Valve predates Google by two years (at least per the wiki), and was started by Microsoft employees who didn't particularly like Microsoft's operation. Hoping Valve has a long future ahead of them :)
Valve has had all the triggers and opportunities to change for the worse and it didn't. Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I don't see what would ruin it now.
You can argue they did, depending on what you value. If you loved valve as a premier developer discovering unique experiences and narratives, thars been gone for 14 years now. If you valued not having your software locked down to middlemen or preferred physical media, Valved killed those off in the PC market. If you are a dev and wanted to set your own prices, Valve is current under litigation for price parties.
Its not all sunshine and windows.
>Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I
In the same way Bill Gates did not force you to use Internet Explorer, yes. Both are free applications with alternatives. Let's not forget our history.
Sure, Valve may turn bad after Gaben. It is also possible that he thought of something for the long term that will prevent enshittification. Some companies have managed.
Your argument doesn’t make any sense. What does this have to do with supporting Arm chips? It’s not like AMD and Intel are waging a war against Valve. If anything Steam helps them by strengthening the PC gaming market, leading to higher CPU/GPU sales.
Slowly getting their stuff independent of wintel gives a lot of flexibility. And the big gaming market's on phones / tablets. A steam controller could find itself paired to an iPad running steam in a year or two.
The only play I see here is a legitimate Valve console to take on XBOX and Sony. Plus Arm on a Steam Deck would improve the battery life considerably (assuming they are able to integrate with some powerful GPU solution).
> Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)
Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?
> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?
> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!
Microsoft's a competitor. And they have a reputation for being the first ally to stab you in the back (e.g. SGI / DirectX). You don't want to depend or trust them when they like the market you're in.
I don’t see it. Stricter kernel access is pressure on game devs, not Valve. And I don’t see MS booting steam off windows any time soon.
It’s more about Valve having complete control over the stack and being able to vertically integrate, something they will never have with windows, especially as it continues to enshittify
GOG has a strong anti-DRM stance, but unfortunately not all of the games GOG sells are truly DRM-free if you consider things like online services and online service requirements and live patching/live service. Often considered the worst offender is Sony published games with some of the worst root kit anti-cheat installs still bundled in the GOG edition, with mandatory online "data collection" for the game to run, even for single player games.
GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.
I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).
I still put them in the same box as Apple until they fix the price parity and/or adjust their cut. Even Apple is finally having their hand forced there.
They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
Technically 3. Not much different from the Desktop situation. Just replace Microsoft with Google because Microsoft had the grace to bow out early.
Similar to desktop, I choose the middle ground between true freedom and walled garden. At least you Can de-googlefy 95% of Android. More than you can de-microsoft Windows.
They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious
We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take Valve over any of the other players in their market all day every day without even thinking twice.
EDIT: You're absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.
I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?
Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.
It's an interesting case study. They're essentially another 'App Store middleman' raking in a huge 30% cut for selling games digitally. But they do enough really good stuff to keep both gamers and developers generally very happy.
The difference between Valve and the other app stores with an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.
To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.
With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.
So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.
I have plenty of complaints about them.
The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games,
the extortionate cut afforded them by their dominant market position
or the very rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas).
But they do make some very nice open source contributions.
If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even police this.
The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying to read or watch something.
On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
They are also surprisingly effective because they often show things that I might actually buy (especially when it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for it).
No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher to play your games. If the store was completely separate then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in the store there.
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.
"We will make linux a viable gaming before we increment that number to 3!"
But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).
I strongly feel it’s because Valve is not a publicly traded company where they’ll eventually give up their values to meet Wall Street analyst quarterly targets.
It genuinely makes me see the value in private companies. Public companies must grow. They're accountable to so many different interests. Private companies can be happy sitting at whatever profit level they want. They can take time to tinker on something that they care about. If it doesn't pay off, that's fine.
I think I would say it this way: private companies can be good or bad, but public companies must ultimately become bad.
That's more a property of the community than of the company. If the community were differently inclined then the comments would be about how Valve is making money by addicting children to gambling and so on and so forth.
That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].
I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing almost all the effort on the project.
If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).
There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was discussed here just this past week.
I wouldn't hold my breath. I've been trying to get them to switch for the better part of a year, and even Windows Update completely bricking my mom's computer [1] (look at my post history if you want more details on that) wasn't enough to convince them. I'm not sure what else could happen outside of Bill Gates personally leaving a flaming bag of dog manure on their porch.
[1] I'll say it again; if anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider getting out of the software game and maybe consider a job in the exciting world of janitorial or food service, because you are exceedingly bad at the whole "software thing" and you should be ashamed of yourself and how much damage you have cost the entire world with your utterly incompetent software.
Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely had more issues with games with native Linux builds than Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to use Proton over native to get better performance.
Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never.
Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
Not if you as a developer don't touch the footguns. Avoid those, and your game works fine with no problems, no intervention from Proton or Wine needed.
It's the Pareto principle doing its thing. 80% of games were fixable by not a whole lot of fixes to Wine (I mean, it's still a lot of work, but once the work is done, you don't need to redo it for 1500 other games), while the remaining 20% are out there doing weird stuff and needs manual fixes of some kind.
If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and everything works as it should. With developers noticing SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80% starts growing to 90%.
Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable though, which pulls the percentage down again.
I fail to see why? It was pretty short sighted of developers to build Linux verions of their games back when they did, since most either perform poorly today, or just crash on more modern versions. I don't expect those games to get fixed any time soon. Far from it, I expect Linux versions to degrade as more and more of their dependencies change and Linux changes over time. I don't expect the situation to be different for native Linux ges made today.
Wine meanwhile works perfectly with 80+% of games, and those 20% that don't are all newer stuff or stuff that's never going to get a Linux version short of the Linux desktop actually getting of the ground.
I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not.
No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
> like Apple: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model.
Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an exploitive company
More than a little irritating that the only real contenders for smartphones is either Google or Apple, two companies with more-than-a-little dubious business practices.
I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.
Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with me everywhere anyway.
I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably be different companies.
You also need to include (digital) purchases made inside of apps because Apple also takes a 30% cut there. That is likely the bigger amount because it includes all of the in-app microtransactions for games.
Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad.
That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked.
You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
Blame the bosses for wanting DRM rather than Valve for making it a default. Blame lawmakers for not regulating DRM out of existence. Valve's playing the game while still being the most consumer friendly option on most fronts, and a solid second place in everything else. Credit where credit's due.
If Steam didn't have nominal DRM, I'd imagine they wouldn't have been able to grow to the point they're at now, and we'd instead have many stores each with their own exclusives, but most of them have worse terms than Steam. That world is worse than the one we have now.
And if you really care, there's always GOG, or the skull and crossbones.
Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement
Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)
Does Valve engage in a lot of unfair or anticompetitive behavior? If you were to apply some anti-trust enforcement what would you actually do? Split off their game studio (that makes like one game a decade) from Steam?
They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.
Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…
There is no lock-in. It is normal to have accounts on multiple storefronts, and have multiple storefronts installed on your gaming PC; one can access multiple digital libraries on the same PC!
Steam wins because it provides a superior product for the end-user, not because of lock-in. Games purchased through Steam can be vetted with user reviews, supported with user-created guides and steam input configurations, streamed across devices, shared with family members, and even modded; all within the Steam experience.
Valve is not a monopoly/part of a duopoply/oligopoly. They're also not behaving like knobheads. It's the combination of monopolistic practices and causing harm to consumers that should invoke antitrust enforcement.
There are plenty of other stores to get games from. They're just consistently worse than Steam.
One wonders why other, well funded games stores can't compete on features and sales pricing with steam?
Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...
I use Heroic Launcher to play Epic Game Store games in the SteamOS interface in my Jovian box. I'm able to use the custom controller stuff with it without much problem, but it doesn't fix the other problems.
You need friends for a lack of friend systems to matter :)
> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement
So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.
Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.
Valve is not building all this Linux Compatibility out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to avoid being shutdown by Microsoft, who effectively had a monopoly on the OS people used to play games.
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
Sure, none of that is untrue, but they could still engage in rent seeking behavior. They could start requiring subscription fees for stuff that previously didn't require it (like start capping download speeds unless you're part of "Steam+" or something), or blacklist any distro that isn't SteamOS, or make it difficult or impossible to install games from third-party stores (like GOG) on Steam Decks or their upcoming Steam Boxes.
I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.
A "company" is just an organizational model employed by people to pursue the intentions that those people have. It goes without saying that large endeavors involving many people will have a mixture of good and bad intentions.
Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more than a little bit pointless.
Well, no one is literally worshiping companies, so I interpreted this as a hyperbolic way of saying that people shouldn't express approval for activities done by companies.
But companies themselves are just organizational paradigms used by people to pursue human intentions, and the reason you offered as to why we shouldn't "worship companies" was based on the possibility of people acting on bad intentions within those organizational paradigms.
But the possibility of people acting on bad intentions is present in all contexts of human activity, regardless of what organizational paradigm people are using to coordinate their activities.
So if "worship" resolves to "express approval for", and "companies" resolves to "organized human activity", based on a failure modality that's always present in all cases, then you are actually saying that people should not express approval for organized human activity.
It’s fine to express approval for something a corporation does, but I think you are wrong when you say people don’t worship companies. The cult of Apple is very real.
I mostly meant “let’s look at this stuff with a healthy amount of cynicism”. This isn’t to say we can’t like the good things.
I just wonder if it's an inherent symptom of massive success. I'm not talking Valve level of success, but more like Google and Apple and Microsoft levels. Eventually every company has downturns in the market, and whether or not it's fair the investors/board of directors will think it's because of the current strategy, and they'll engage in terrible rent-seeking behavior.
I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.
To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.
Valve already owns the market. There is nothing left to strangle. Every attempt to break through has been a failure and none of those failures can be attributed to an anti-competitive action taken by Valve. They could have engaged in rent seeking a long time ago if they wanted to. They are managing their market position well by not abusing their customers or giving customers a reason to complain to lawmakers.
Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly that nobody even knew they tried.
GOG has managed to do pretty well in their own way. Nowhere near as popular as Steam, obviously, but they hold their own, and they've managed to do it without DRM. Humble Bundle has also managed to do something as well (though admittedly that's largely through selling Steam keys).
I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve hasn't abused their status yet, and maybe they never will, but all it takes is a change in management for that to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to squelch, they still might just decide they want more money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games, and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years, I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about it and take out my credit card and just pay it.
Stuff like this has already happened with other companies (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).
I'm not saying that it will happen, but at this point Steam has so much of the market and so many people have their entire game collections on there that I don't think we should discount the possibility that it could happen.
I think an important differentiator is that of all the companies you just listed, Valve is the only private company. That seems to explain a lot of this.
These rumors come from Tyler McVicker who regularly gets things wrong and makes stuff up in order to get clicks on youtube. I have no idea why anyone still takes him seriously in 2025.
Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.
They decided to make it a prequel for fear of not living up to the name, the decision was made much earlier. If you're at all familiar with the contents of Alyx and the Half-Life franchise it wouldn't have made any sense to call it HL3.
In a narrow sense, it did move along the story point at the end of HL2 (I won’t explain how because there’s no way to do so without massive spoilers). But yeah, it would be weird to call in HL3 just because of that.
I don't think that's how the people at Valve think. These people usually have lifetime dreams to work at Valve well before they do because they admired those early games so much, which if you know the story were held up to very high standards internally and repeatedly. They spent their lives being hyper critical of their own craft and admire Valve because they don't a release subpar product as a rule. So collectively they'll have a LOT of collective ego tied up in whatever that product is, but it's not like "I own this", that would be highly anathema.
Did they? AFAICT what they actually said was not to expect a faster Steam Deck any time soon, which was true, because the OLED version had basically the same performance as the original and in the two years since they still haven't released anything faster.
I believe for the next Half-Life, latest rumors indicate it is actually back to 2D. During the press event last month, they were also pretty clear that no VR game is currently in development at Valve.
A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a theater sized screen is nice enough.
I'm sure they've tried making it hybrid, aka VR optional. I'm curious if they'd be able to make it work. If not, I don't expect a VR only HL game again.
Some rumors from ~1yr ago indicated they were looking into making it an asymmetric co-op game where one player would be Gordon Freeman on PC and one would be Alyx in VR. Of course, they could have dropped that by now.
> Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?
>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore.
It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to dethrone Duke Nukem Forever.
There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up. I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from releasing an another new entry in the series that uses revolutionary new technology or whatever.
They claim they will only release when the game has something innovative to offer.
But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve releasing virtual card games today?
Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now, they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.
They could publish Episode 3 and then publish Half-Life 3 afterwards. I never understood why people keep insisting they can release only one game. It's not like they don't have average or mediocre titles in the series anyway (Blue Shift and Episode 1 are examples of this).
Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual business.
> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.
So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
> So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive.
No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be.
> Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work".
The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be.
It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.
Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.
Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? As far as I can tell, even indie games require steam to run.
DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?
> Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG?
To download and update Steam games you obviously need Steam, but once DRM free games are downloaded you can keep playing them without Steam.
Heck, we even shared some drm-free games someone bought in my friends-group over a personal torrent among us, so we could play coop with each other to test the game out before we bought it ourselves.
When I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in positions of power today.
I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
I think as long as Valve remains a private company, they can continue Gabe's way of doing things. It's when it's a public company will the leader have the pressure of satisfying shareholder returns as opposed to doing what is right and what got them a loyal base of customers in the first place.
Maybe that's why he stays most of the time away from valve? It's his way of training the company into functioning without him, only intervening occasionally when necessary.
Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can.
I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
well we don't know exactly how involved Gabe Newell is with the actual running of the company now a days or how do they going about their governance.
From what I see it seems like the culture of the company is shared between the leadership roles so it might be possible for the company to continue doing as it has been doing after Gabe.
I think the people at valve are smart and they understand their business and the company very well and that this issue is being taken seriously too.
Good governance exists, it's just that for most companies there's not really an interest in having that because it gets in the way of personal interests of people that are already entrenched in power.
And Valve has been deeply rewarded as a result. The stance that you must abuse customers to maximize economic success will be looked back upon as the stupidity it is.
half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2 and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits.
it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.
there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future.
Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to.
Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translation layers rather than signed blobs.
These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
That's easy to say. But they do prevent some cheating. Don't believe me? Consider the simplest case: No anti-cheat whatsoever. You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency. That's the worst case. Now, we add minimal anti-cheat that convolutes the binary with lots of extra jumps and loops at runtime. Now, someone needs to spend time figuring out the pattern. That effort isn't free. Now, people have to pay for cheats. Guess what? Visa doesn't want to handle payment processing for your hacks & cheats business. So now you're using sketchy payment processors based out of a third-world country. Guess what else? People will create fake hacks & cheats websites that use those same payment processors, and will just take people's money and never deliver the cheats. You get to try to differentiate yourself from literal scammers, how are you going to do that? You can't put the Visa logo on your website. Because you're legit, and you don't want to get sued. Then, the anti-cheat adds heuristic detection for cheat processes. The anti-cheat company BUYS the cheats and reverse-engineers them and improves the heuristics. then the game company makes everyone sign up with a phone number, and permabans that phone number when they're caught cheating. Now some gamers don't want to risk getting banned. Saying that these factors simply don't exist or are insignificant is certainly one of the opinions of all time.
100% agree. This is exactly the kind of big picture thinking that so many people often seem to miss. I did too, when I was young and thought the world was just filled with black and white, good vs evil dichotomies
That is not always possible for genres with fast gameplay like most shooters. It's quite common for player movement to be able to put an enemy in view before the light could've round-tripped from the server.
This is generally the anti-cheat problem. Certain genres have gameplay that cannot be implemented without trusting the client at least some of the time.
This is correct, the correct amount of over-sharing by the server is non-zero, because otherwise you give a HUGE advantage for slight ping differences.
It's even worse, the lowest theoretical latency possible based on speed of light alone is not low enough for the speed of movement in many shooters, if the server hid all immediately invisible information.
What do you do with footsteps and other positional audio? On multiplayer shooter games that's very vital information to let you know an enemy is somewhere behind a wall but cheaters can use it to draw visual markers to pinpoint the enemy player.
I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to play those games because of it. There is a benefit to making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it impossible.
I don't think that analogy holds because the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.
The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient, unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, the act of bypassing kernel-level anti-cheat will become commoditized just like every other anti-cheat prior.
No. The same way piracy has been diminished in the mainstream by years of lawsuits and jailtime against the loudest most available sources, the strongest anti-cheats have suppressed the easiest and cheapest paths to cheating on AAA games. Piracy hasn't gone away, but the number of people doing it peaked last decade.
Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating completely, they just need to capture enough cheating (and ban unpredictably) that average people are mostly discouraged. As long as cheat-creators have to scurry around in secrecy and guard their implementations until the implementation is caught, the "good" cheats will never be a commodity on mainstream well-funded games with good anti-cheat.
Cheat-creators have to do the hard hacking and put their livelihoods on the line, they make kids pay up for that.
> the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.
I would beg to differ. In the US at least, there does seem to be a hidden arms race between safety features and the environment (in the form of car size growth)
I don't know why you brought up VAC as an example. It is a horrible AC, so bad so that an entire service (FaceIT) was built to capitalize on that.
VAC is still a laughing joke in CS2, literally unplayable when you reached 15k+. Riot Vanguard is extremely invasive, but it's leaps and bounds a head of VAC.
And Valve's banning waves long after the fact doesn't improve the players experience at all. CS2 is F2P, alts are easy to get, cheating happens in alost every single high-ranked game, players experience is shit.
That sounds like it does prevent cheating? But maybe doesn’t prevent ALL cheats. Or do you mean they work so poorly that it doesn’t make any difference at all?
It makes cheating harder and the timeline to a cheat product gets longer than the iteration speed of anticheat. Kind of like fancy locks don't prevent break ins, just take longer to pick and require more specialised tools.
They are wrong, though. Locks also stop people who would happily commit an opportunistic theft but who lack the necessary tools or skills, people who would trespass if they could retain some plausible deniability ("oops, I didn't see the signs" vs. "oops, I didn't realise I wasn't supposed to cut that padlock"), and so on.
The honest people are a larger group than the dishonest people.
And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness or self-preservation. Only a select few are truly committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their accounts on the line.
Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western countries).
I mean it works by someone saying look for DotaCheat4.exe and it searches for it. That’s basically it. Also if your engine has the ability to be hooked into (ahem, gta) it will detect that a process has been attached. It may do some memory scanning if they implemented the allocator from the sdk. What I’m saying is, it’s a crap shoot out there whether the devs did or not. Executives use it as a blanket as to not get sued. “We have anti-cheat”. They can claim it was “circumvented” or whatever. They are all garbage. BattleEye, EasyAntiCheat, Vanguard. If you don’t know, here LL giving a run down.
Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it.
If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security.
You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far.
But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
> But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
Ok, they prevent known cheats that the company has found online behind some subscription site run in the basement in Jersey. True. They do raise the bar, but they aren’t the barrier.
Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected is the challenge.
Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)
The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.
For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.
I remember reading that Microsoft is trying to crack down on kernel level anti-cheats. Just like anti-virus, they mess with the operating system on a deep level, redirecting/intercepting API calls, sometimes on undocumented and unstable internal APIs.
Not only does this present a huge security risk, it can break existing software and the OS itself. These anti-cheats tend not to be written by people intimately familiar with Windows kernel development, and they cause regressions in existing software which the users then blame on Windows.
That's why Microsoft did Windows Defender and tried to kill off 3rd party anti-virus.
Apple has gone a similar way with effectively killing kernel extensions for the same reasons. In theory all the kernel extensions use cases have been replaced with "System Extensions" but of course not the same.
The basic explanation is that it prevents binaries that are not signed by default from being loaded during the boot process. It only restricts the booting process in the uefi stage. If an executable has been modified, then it will not load due to secure boot. Technically there is nothing stopping you from modifying say winload.efi and signing it with your own key then adding that key to your bios keystore so that it will pass secure boot checks and still use secure boot.
I think the biggest thing is that the anticheat devs are using Microsoft's CA to check if your efi executable was signed by Microsoft. If that was the case then its all good and you are allowed to play the game you paid money for.
I haven't tested a self-signed secure boot for battlefield 6, I know some games literally do not care if you signed your own stuff, only if secure boot is actually enabled
edit: Someone else confirmed they require TPM to be enabled too meaning yeah, they are using remote attestation to verify the validity of the signed binary
Disclaimer: This is only an educated guess based upon public info. Also, it's impossible to make something truly unspoofable, but it isn't that hard to raise the bar for spoofing pretty high.
There are two additional concepts built upon the TPM and Secure Boot that matter here, known as Trusted Boot [1,2] and Remote Attestation [2].
Importantly, every TPM has an Endorsement Key (EK) built into it, which is really an asymmetric keypair, and the private key cannot be extracted through any normal means. The EK is accompanied by a certificate, which is signed by the hardware manufacturer and identifies the TPM model. The major manufacturers publish their certificate authorities [3].
So you can get the TPM to digitally sign a difficult-to-forge, time-stamped statement using its EK. Providing this statement along with the TPM's EK certificate on demand attests to a remote party that the system currently has a valid TPM and that the boot process wasn't tampered with.
Common spoofing techniques get defeated in various ways:
- Stale attestations will fail a simple timestamp check
- Forged attestations will have invalid signatures
- A fake TPM will not have a valid EK certificate, or its EK certificate will be self-signed, or its EK certificate will not have a widely recognized issuer
- Trusted Boot will generally expose the presence of obvious defeat mechanisms like virtualization and unsigned drivers
- DMA attacks can be thwarted by an IOMMU, the existence/lack of which can be exposed through Trusted Boot data as well
- If someone manages to extract an EK but shares it online, it will be obvious when it gets reused by multiple users
- If someone finds a vulnerability in a TPM model and shares it online, the model can be blacklisted
Even so, I can still think of an avenue of attack, which is to proxy RA requests to a different, uncompromised system's TPM. The tricky parts are figuring out how to intercept these requests on the compromised system, how to obtain them from the uncompromised system without running any suspicious software, and knowing what other details to spoof that might be obtained through other means but which would contradict the TPM's statement.
Perhaps, I have yet to experience anything like what the older games had though.
It might just be the game too - I do think the auto aim is a bit high because I feel like I make aimbot like shots from time to time. And depending on the mode BF6 _wall hacks for you_ if there are players in an area outside of where they are supposed to be defending. I was pretty surprised to see a little red floating person overlay behind a wall.
Anticheat devs could REALLY benefit by having some data scientists involved.
Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
Is it ever? No.
Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human.
In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly) legitimate player data.
> Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.
You mustve missed the part where i spoke of consistency?
Ive played at the pro level. Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency.
I dont care if it takes 50 matches of data for the statistical model to call it inhuman.
Valve has enough data that they could easily make the threshold for a ban something like '10x more consistent at pre-firing than any pro has ever been' with a high confidence borne over many engagements in many matches.
Then youve immediately made the cheater worse than the best players to blend in with them. Mission accomplished, cheater nerfed significantly. You wont even know theyre doing it.
There's well analyzed video of a pro player streaming who got temporarily banned for something like this. It might not even have been pre-fire, but post-fire at a different enemy retreating at the same position
Valve need to tweak the model so that it requires a higher confidence level before a ban, and to reduce false positives in their data capture methods. This is a mistake but doesnt kill the idea.
We used to track various timings in some of our games to detect cheating. Cheaters find out and change their cheat engines to perform within plausible human reactions. Which is a benefit - now the cheating isn't obvious to everyone, but it still happens. I don't know if you could sprinkle data scientist dust on the problem and come up with a viable cross-game solution though.
Good! Thats actually one of the goals. Reduce the advantage cheaters can gain to within human bounds. They can cheat to feel like a good player, but not a god.
>Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter
A human can't really, which is why you need to bring in ML. Feed it enough game states of legit players vs known cheaters, and it will be able to find patterns.
Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two.
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data?
There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.
Throwing in ML jargon and going straight to modelling before understanding the problem reduces your credibility as a data scientist in front of engineers and stakeholders.
As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting good features and data. In this case one difficulty is measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with.
In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if someone is around the corner and start shooting when they come close. For far away targets, lots of people camp at specifc spots and often shoot without directly sighting someone if they anticipate someone crossing - the hit rate may be low but it's a low cost thing to do. Then you have people not hiding too well and showing a toe. Or someone pinpointing the position of an enemy based on information from another player. So the question is, what is the starting point for you to measure the reaction?
Now let's say you successfully measured the reaction time and applied a threshold of 80ms. Bot runners will adapt and sandbag their reaction time, or introduce motions to make it harder to measure mouse movements, and the value of your model now is less than the electricity needed to run it.
So with your proposal to solve the reaction time problem with KL divergence. Congratulations, you just solved a trivial statistics problem to create very little business value.
Appreciate the feedback, you're right - armchair speculation is different than actual data science. Without actual data to examine, we're left with the latter and that can still be a fun exercise even if it doesn't solve any business problem. We're here to chitchat and converse after all.
Cheaters don't have to play like normal people to avoid detection. They just have to make it expensive to police them. For example, the game developer may be afraid of a even a 10% false positive ban rate, and as a result won't ban anyone except perhaps a small number of clean-cut cases.
Most cheaters are playing well outside of human limits and doing huge amounts of damage to the legitimate player experience. A 10% safety margin beyond human play sounds reasonable. A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment.
Like another commentor mentioned, I think that only works for a specific cheat(engine) - as long as they don't adjust (and randomize more for example). If it could be solved with some statistics, I think it would have been done already. I ain't a statistician though, but if you feel confident, I think there is quite some money in it, if you find a real world solution.
/r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely don't know how people manage to get as far as posting without noticing where they are.
It’s probably because the “create a Reddit post” form doesn’t require you to even visit the subreddit you are posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but apparently many aren’t seeing that.
"Banner blindness" applies to the rules/sidebar. The user sees it, notices it's not what they're looking to interact with, and ignores it. The same thing happens for modal dialogues where the user will click whatever button makes the message go away without bothering to read the message, only the button text.
Likely a case where Google figured out which one you meant through the telemetry of what you clicked on and how you refined your search, now that personalization is automatic. In my case, I get four regular results, which are the financial standard, the programming language, the wikipedia page for the programming language, and an ISP; then I get a "top stories" block that is all about the singer.
More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where either one could be valid.
It's telling that Valve uses a user space anti-cheat (VAC) for Counter-Strike 2, but the competitive community overwhelmingly rejects that and ops to use a third-party Windows-only kernel mode anti-cheat (FACEIT).
I think even the "Major" tournaments that are officially sanctioned and sponsored by Valve, though organized by third parties, usually run on FACEIT or similar.
Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct.
Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there (which is not as common as people make it to be on high trust factor).
You think tournament organizers or pro players know the first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing just like everybody else.
The marketing works because online games get destroyed by cheats. Losing in online games can be full of “feel bad” moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit.
I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.
To me the "web of trust" element frankly seems like the only viable solution. And in fact, its almost here already: https://playsafeid.com/
I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike using facial recognition technology to allow for permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95% of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres, and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially implement when you can guarantee that one account = one person.
Arc Raiders is a great example of a modern and popular multiplayer game that works with proton. I haven't heard about it having a problem with cheating.
Marvel Rivals, Age of Empires 2 DE, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys are other such examples. In fact, Marvel Rivals even explicitly mentioned Bazzite in one of their changelogs! I can't recall an instance when a major game name-dropped a (relatively) minor Linux distro like that.
I think a big portion of that is the rather poorly made anti-tamper solution they are using called 'Theia' most cheat developers are too unintelligent to correctly reverse engineer this kind of binary obfuscation
Valve is the only company I'd let inject anti-cheat software directly into my veins if it meant I could play CS and be sure others were not cheating haha.
As a former cheat developer, I think it is impossible since it is digging into some specific stuff of Windows. For example, some anti-cheat uses PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine and PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine to strip process handle permission, and those thing can't be well emulated, there is simply nothing in the Linux kernel nor in the Wine server to facilitate those yet. What about having a database of games and anticheat that does that, and what if the anticheat also have a whitelist for some apps to "inject" itself into the game process? Those are also needed to be handled and dealt with.
Plus, there are some really simple side channel exploits that your whitelisted app have vulns that you can grab a full-access handle to your anticheat protected game, rendering those kernel level protection useless, despite it also means external cheat and not full blown internal cheat, since interal cheat carrys way more risk, but also way more rewardings, such as fine-level game modification, or even that some 0days are found on the game network stack so maybe there is a buffer overflow or double-free, making sending malicious payload to other players and doing RCEs possible. (It is still possible to do internal cheat injection from external cheat, using techniques such as manual mapping/reflective DLL injecction, that effectively replicates PE loading mechanism, and then you hijack some execution routine at some point to call your injected-allocated code, either through creating a new thread, hijacking existing thread context, APC callback hijack or even exception vector register hijacking, and in general, hijack any kinds of control flow, but anticheat software actively look for those "illegal" stuff in memory and triggers red flag and bans you immediately)
From what I've seen over the years, the biggest problem for anticheat in Linux is that there is too much liberty and freedom, but the anticheat/antivirus is an antithesis to liberty and freedom. This is because anticheat wants to use strong protection mechanism borrowed from antivirus technique to provide a fair gaming experience, at the cost of lowering framerates and increasing processing power, and sometimes BSOD.
And I know it is very cliche at this point, but I always love to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". I therefore only keep Windows to play games lately, and switched to a new laptop, installed CachyOS on it, and transfered all my development stuff over to the laptop. You can basically say I have my main PC at home as a more "free" xbox.
Speaking of xbox, they have even more strict control over the games, that one of the anticheat technique, HVCI (hypervisor-protected code integrity) or VBS, is straight out of the tech from xbox, that it uses Hyper-V to isolate game process and main OS, making xbox impossible to jailbreak. In Windows it prevents some degree of DMA attack by leveragng IOMMU and encrypting the memory content beforehand to makd sure it is not visible to external devices over the PCIe bus.
That said, in other words, it is ultimately all about the tradeoff between freedom and control.
companies will go where the money is. If Valve enables, say EA, to have their yearly franchise and in-game-stores on mobile devices, they will find a way.
I honestly don't know why so many people say that anti-cheat with Proton or SteamMachines won't work. SteamOS is an immutable Linux - especially with their own SteamMachine they can enable SecureBoot and attestation that you are using the SteamOS verbatim efi boot file, kernel, and corret system fs image - all signed by Valve. Just as Battlefield 6 does on windows (relying on SecureBoot). That would still allow you to install other OSes on your SteamDeck/SteamMachine, but it would fail the anticheat attestation. I personally see the push in hardware from Valve particular so that they can support anti-cheat on linux.
I think if Linux gaming becomes popular someone may come up with a solution where you run a native linux kernel-mode anticheat. That somehow connects to the wine-hosted game.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's what I think will happen.
I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-win situation, users can escape themself from a bloated Windows and Valve has the pioneering advantage.
> they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits.
part is wrong. From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Plus, they're building a moat collectively and from an open source stack. So, given the stack gets enough momentum, having Valve or not as a company won't matter anymore.
It's trying to get the elephant out of the bag, and once it's out, then there's really no way to put it back, because it's being out is better for everybody. Game companies and gamers alike.
> From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Yeah that's what I mean too, that's why I put the "accidentally" in a double-quote.
This sounds like what Red Hat is doing, they created an open-source software, prove the importance of it in the community then sells the support package to enterprise who interested in using it.
Hope that they will not close the door when Microsoft, AWS or Oracle making their own GabeCube and call it SatyaCube, BozosCube or LarryCube
Microsoft already has the XBox and despite being backed by one of the biggest tech companies in the world it's a rather weak product. To add to this, with every major studio acquisition they have done there has been a noticeable increase in game monetization and decrease in quality.
AWS has tried to get into the gaming market and only succeeded in creating giant money sinks even if some of their products were technically appealing.
Oracle making anything consumer-facing, much less something that isn't a total nightmare, seems inconceivable.
Valve is able to completely outmatch competitors in a chosen field because of what they are like as a company. No shareholders that expect quarterly growth. No massive bureaucratic corporate structure, just highly skilled engineers for the most part.
Microsoft is also moving more and more away from hardware exclusivity. Even their Xbox Game Pass service is now not tied to the console.
More broadly, AAA gaming as a whole is also moving away from hardware exclusivity. Third-party developers (like Square-Enix) have been making recent releases for all major platforms, and even some first-party console titles are now coming to PC (eg, the Horizon games from Sony).
I'm optimistic about the future of non-locked-down gaming.
You are absolutely correct. Valve's linux push was driven by developments in the windows platform, specifically around the release of windows 8. Microsoft was pushing a windows store similar to Apple's app store, and Valve was unequivocally stating that they were worried Microsoft would basically lock down the platform and only allow software sales through their own store, destroying their steam business. Gabe said it plainly himself (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377):
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
> This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.
Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e. https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since has been an effort to protect his company against that existential threat.
GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX, GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.
I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.
Well actually they tried with Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 10 S but failed miserably. Even Apple didn't even try to lock their macOS from installing 3rd party app.
Valve's Steam platform is well liked and actually wanted by gamers. Gamers move their games to the steam launcher and often wait for games to come to steam (e.g. with Anno games from Ubisoft).
This is in contrast with EA's Origin, Microsoft's Xbox PC and Ubisoft's Connect, which everyone hates.
I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone.
And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capitalism is bullshit and that makes Valve stand out.
I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and I always dreamed of working there, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain. Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.
Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.
My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.
They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?
Valve cuts 30% of your revenue no matter how much you earn. They also cut 15% of the transaction by being the middleman on the market.
They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).
They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.
I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.
> acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone
I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.
Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.
It’s funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.
oh that's funny. do you have a link to where he had said that?
i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some basis. but then again, what an organization is internally and how the organization behave as a whole can be different.
They are a significant actor in the market, and as a non-pc-gamer I am glad that their business goals align with Linux users. I don't believe that they do it out of kindness, but that's actually a good thing for a long term investment.
The trick is to get your egoistic interests to align with what is good for the world.
Environmentalists also only do what they perceive as doing good (and may as well be objectively good) because not doing so won't jive with their self-image. But that in itself doesn't devalue the thing they did.
If Valve shows anything it is that not being a pushover and trying to align your business interest with your values (and not vice-versa!) can also pay of economically.
Yep. I know Apple has little motivation to support such a project but it would be great to see them work with Valve on this. Having the majority of Steam games "just work" on modern Macs, like they do on the Steam Deck, would be fantastic.
Apple leadership cares more about "games on the Mac App Store built for Metal on a Mac" than it cares about "games on the Mac". This won't change until leadership changes.
Valve is all-in on Linux and their own hardware. They have no reason to invest tons into a platform with an uncooperative vendor who culturally DGAF about gaming. Why run from Windows only to jump into a more hostile ecosystem? You can still run 32-bit x86 games on Windows ARM, you know.
Apple's real goal isn't even the 30% from the Mac App Store. Their vision is to build a library of games that run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and potentially Apple TV and Vision. You can connect a controller to all these devices, so any game would work (without clunky touch controls). That's why they're pushing Metal and will never adopt Vulkan. They want to make their ecosystem as strong as possible against competing ecosystems.
It's also why they've been pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst, why they don't care for web apps, why the Mac and iPad have gotten closer (they want each device just be a form factor that lets you access the same apps and files, though I expect they'll always keep the Mac as open as it is now), and why they made all their platforms adopt one design language. They probably ported Preview to iOS/iPad, and Home and Clock to the Mac, because they went through the Springboard/LaunchPad and asked themselves: "which of these apps could we bring to every OS?".
It's also why Google is dropping ChromeOS and switching everything to Android. One platform, one app ecosystem. They did it only to keep up with Apple. The tablet/desktop-ish side of their ecosystem lags far behind.
And it's why Valve is going all-in on Linux. Kickstarting an alternative ecosystem.
> They have no reason to invest tons into a platform
Maybe not 'tons', but they've got a solid reason to consider some investment: additional sales from millions of Mac users able to access a huge library of games they were previously denied.
Steve Jobs certainly didn't. I hope it changes because so many coders (Who are also gamers) now use Macbooks or Mac Minis as their development platform.
I remember a friend of mine, gloating about how he could play Unreal Tournament on Mac, and I looked at it, and man did it ever run natively. But I could see a lot rendering wrong and a lot of stutters.
I think the pentium compatibility stuff in the powermac was also supposed to attract gamers, but I recall not being able to progress past the installer for Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, which would have been the game that made me change my mind. Ran the installer tho, which was something.
I think it's more than "little motivation" if we're being honest. Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably) cut them out. Their very clever approach has been a full end-run around the OS by using Proton, which I'm sure genuinely thrilled Apple... as long as Valve is only doing that to MS.
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
Especially looking at Apples recent gaming history.
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
App stores for desktop computers have pretty consistently failed except for Steam.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
Not sure if that counts, but homebrews cask is some kind of appstore. Yes, command line based, but I can install closed-source software using "brew install --cask <software-name>"
Apples biggest weakness is games. But it has a pretty large install base when compared to Linux (not counting phones or servers here).Seems like a win/win. Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
> Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched? IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at Apple.
They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point
This is really the endgame, I think. A modern smartphone with a controller attached is effectively the same as a Steam Deck or Switch 2, just with a different OS. Apple has been pushing higher-end games on phones lately (this year has seen iOS versions of Hitman 3, Sniper Elite 4, and Subnautica), and reports are that the new pro phones run them well (the limiting factor being thermal load).
A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.
Games are not a weakness for Apple. They have all the gaming revenue they seem to care about with mobile. They just don't have proper/immediate motivation to apply that effort to desktop. I'm not sure i even care anymore. I'm a valve fanboi at this point, until Gabe leaves and they go corporate.
Mobile overlapping consoles in revenue and Apple had a good way years of taking a 30% cut on top. They are indeed behind fine with sticking as a middleman for gambling simulators that make billions.
It may work out all the same because Apple's attempts such as with Game Porting Toolkit and Metal, boost Valve's attempts with Proton and we may see a convergence where Valve is able to make a majority of Steam games work on Mac without Apple explicitly wanting it.
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
> Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
Main issue is the lack of Vulkan support on macOS. Currently, solutions like MoltenVK have to be developed to add Vulkan support, which isn't as clean as just supporting it.
For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.
This isn't an "issue" so much as a feature. Apple had some vulkan support until move to the full A1 architecture had them only make Metal a first class citizen to the GPU. Concurrently happening was a pretty nasty breakup of Apple with the Khronos group.
This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.
No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.
Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one.
There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.
No. For best performance, you have to batch your calls/memory access patterns with TBDR in mind. Dropping in a Steam PC game (indy, AA/AAA) game render pipeline, specifically optimized for Nvidia/AMD/Intel, to a TBDR GPU, is going to give poor performance. That's the context of this discussion. Round pegs DO fit into square holes, you just have to make sure the hole is bigger than would normally be necessary. ;)
Steam frame is more for streaming PCVR than running existing PCVR games natively.
The entire reason vulkan didn't ship with dynamic rendering and instead had its entire renderpass system is because it was to support tile based rendering.
I'm aware it supports tile based rendering. I put it in quotes because support doesn't mean performance. Good TBDR performance requires the developer/engine have the concept of TBDR in mind. 99.9% of the PC games out there do/did NOT have TBDR in mind.
Are you looking for Crossover? It's a bit annoying to not run Steam natively (no cmd+H to hide, etc) but it's got a lot of support. Performance is decent on my M2 mini, and even cross-platform stuff like Baldurs Gate 3 is comparable performance to native.
Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.
Nah, nothing like that. We explored shipping Proton for macOS early on, but decided it wasn't where we wanted to spend our time, so we removed it[1] to focus on Linux. There's only so many hours in the day, and supporting two platforms is a lot more work than one.
Some crossover games perform better than the native ports. I play Path of Exile on Mac using the Windows client with a translation layer, and it plays better than the native release.
Sadly, that's not true—for instance, I was trying to run the Shadowrun Returns series the other day, and while it launches, it will hang indefinitely when you try to actually start a game. (M4 Max)
I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
Valve employed Alyssa Rosenzweig while she developed the graphics stack for asahi linux. That's a very simple statement that masks the size of the achievement and its impact on the world. No, we haven't entered a golden era of gaming on macs, but the world has been shown the way. And no, the software challenges are not insurmountable.
bummed she left for intel she was next level. asahi lina commented after she left that there's currently no one doing graphics work anymore on asahi. projects kinda got some uncertainty to it now
The last time I can remember a collaboration between Valve and Apple was for the SteamVR support on macOS back in 2016. Sadly it fell apart a year(-ish) after that.
But… one can dream!
Unfortunately, this will not happen. Even if they have it all working:
Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome, especially because it really is. Running x86 games or compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
Currently, someone interested in an iPad and needing the power of a MB, will have to buy both.
If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would only have to buy an iPad.
And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I would worry that removing the iPad limitations would increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news to me.
I used to understand/agree with this point, but over the past few years i've transitioned to my ipad pro for mobile usage and it has become my daily driver for mobile computing. When i need macos for anything, i typically will use Jump to connect and do something real quick, but that's rare. I'm starting to not understand why i wouldn't just want an ipad pro running a touch friendly (and i mean it would have to be VERY touch friendly) version of macos. again, i would have normally agreed with you, but that line is starting to blur for me...
AIUI they intend to retire support for x86 macOS apps in a few years, but Rosetta will remain as a low-level component so that things like Crossover and Parallels can continue to work. Maybe not forever, but there's no immediate threat of it being EOL'ed.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now, and way worse working WINE. No, there was never time when we could run whatever software we want on a machine of our choice.
> I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now
Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.
Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.
i’m not sure how end-of-life it will actually be because rosetta is used in apple/container and seems to be a large part of the virtualization stuff apple’s built in the last few years
It would be neat if Valve would fund having Steam Client run on Apple Silicon without Rosetta 2 so arm games like Baldur's Gate 3 can be fully supported.
I think it's a pretty reasonable wish for more macOS + Apple Silicon support of games, including more native FEX & Proton ARM support within the steam client. (We're lucky Steam works, it's a better games client than the Mac App Store dreams to be, but that's also not saying much either.)
Apple Silicon has no UEFI support except as provided by Asahi, so that would be needed at a minimum to boot Windows 11 natively. Then there's the whole issue of having native Windows drivers for the Apple Silicon-specific hardware.
You’d run FEX with WINE/Proton, no windows needed. If you did use a VM, I’d think it would be a Linux VM. But, Linux VM on macOS could already use Apple’s Rosetta2 for x86_64-to-arm64 translation.
Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.
GPTK is mostly a bunch of developer tools for converting to Metal, and the closest it gets to anything like Proton is an "evaluation environment" that is nothing close to Proton's performance. Proton is mostly Wine, and Wine on macOS uses MoltenVK, so it's probably easier to just port Proton.
A funny detail is that Microsoft's mostly fruitless ARM efforts unintentionally ended up being a boon for Valves ARM effort. From MSVC 2019 they started augmenting x86 binaries with undocumented metadata specifically to assist the Windows x86-on-ARM emulator, but then the FEX team figured out how that works and implemented the same optimizations in their emulator, greatly increasing the performance of most recent Windows games on ARM Linux.
I don't understand what you mean by this. My wife's HP laptop has an ARM processor with Windows and it.. just works? Like everything works. The computer is super fast, quiet, great battery usage, ultrathin and even scary affordable for what you get. All software works. I've not found x64 programs to run noticeably worse, at least not the ones we use, and plenty programs have an ARM build.
As a Windows user you don't even need to know that it's an ARM computer. Just use it like you'd use any other Windows computer.
Don't just say stuff, man. This is not Twitter. Try to at least figure out whether you're vaguely directionally correct before writing snarky comments.
I think they meant that by most metrics, Windows on ARM has not yet had a market impact. Not that the product doesn't work.
That being said, the mindshare well of "Windows on ARM" was poisoned by Windows RT, then later the objectively terrible performance of Windows 10 on ARM at launch.
The key difference is that Valve isn't trying to make Windows work, just desktop gaming, which I'd imagine is a large part of why Microsoft's efforts failed. As much as Linux desktops haven't particularly had much polish over the years, there's still an advantage to taking something bare bones and trying to flesh it out in a way that's works well compared to taking something that's already pretty bloated and then trying to retrofit it into something new.
It's mostly because Microsoft have lost focus & interest in the desktop OS market and have shifted priorities to cloud service (Azure). Right now Microsoft is a sleeping giant that doesn't see the writing on the wall regarding Valve's efforts.
Oh I think they see it, the problem is that they can’t execute anymore. They are pivoting in the same direction but nobody wants to use the XBox Store on Windows and nobody trusts Game Pass anymore.
It turns out the best API for gaming on Linux and gaming on ARM was Win32 and x86_64. Who knew?
Well, compiling ARM game binaries is actually super duper easy and just totally fine. The issue Windows actually has with ARM is GPU drivers for the ARM SoCs. Qualcomm graphics drivers are just super slow and unreliable and bad. ARM CPU w AMD GPU is easy mode.
I think the problem is that, until recently, there was little impetus to actually run Windows on devices where ARM actually has a meaningful advantage over x86. The Windows ARM laptops out there today don't impress, not just because of the software, but because the hardware itself isn't "better enough" than Intel or AMD to justify the transition for most people the way Apple Silicon was, especially for games. That is to say nothing of desktops, where battery life isn't even a concern.
Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable" devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first" headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even said not to expect a great experience playing Half-Life: Alyx locally (a nearly 7 year old title).
It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging their bets.
> At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip
I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The next Steam Deck might already switch to ARM looking at what they announced last week.
x86 is on the way out. Not in two years, perhaps not in ten years. But there will come a time where the economics no longer make sense and no one can afford to develop competitive chips for the server+gamers market alone. Then x86 is truly dead.
I sure hope it takes a bit longer than that. It would not be fun having only Qualcomm chips to choose from as a CPU. Either that or Intel/AMD start making their own ARM chips
My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores.
Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the Steam Deck conversation is the fact that AMD graphics performance is well ahead of Qualcomm, and that is extremely important for a gaming device. I'm willing to bet that the next Steam Deck goes with another custom AMD chip, but the generation after that is more of a question mark.
RISC-V is another wildcard that could end up threatening ARM's path to total dominance.
> like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
This is only one of many factors, but I know that high performance instruction decoding doesn't scale nearly as well on x86-64 due to the variable width instructions as it does on ARM. Any reasonable performance OoO core needs to read multilpe instructions ahead in order for the other OoO tricks to work. x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions, and the complexity and power required to do that does not scale linearly since x86-64 instructions can be anywhere from 1 byte to 15 bytes making it very hard to guess where to start reading the second instruction before the first has been decoded. Arm cores have at most 2 widths to deal with and with ARV v8 I think there is only one leading to cores like M1 firestorm that can read 8 instructions ahead in a single cycle. Intel's E cores are able to read 3 instructions at two different addresses (6 total, just not sequential) that can help the core look at predicted branches but doesn't help as much in fast optimized code with fewer branches.
so at the low end of performance where mobile gaming sits you really need an OoO core in order to be able to keep up, but ARM really has a big leg up for that use-case because of the instruction encoding.
> x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions
Intel Lion-cove decodes 8 instructions per cycle and can retire 12. Intel Skymont's triple decoder can even do 9 instructions per cycle and that's without a cache.
AMD's Zen 5 on the other hand has a 6K cache for instruction decoding allowing for 8 instructions per cycle, but still only a 4-wide decoder for each hyper-thread.
And yet AMD is still ahead of intel in both performance and performance-per-watt. So maybe this whole instruction decode thing is not as important as people are saying.
> My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
It's a distinction without a difference. x86 is not currently competitive in anything smaller than a laptop. Even in a laptop, the only reason it hasn't eaten the market is Microsoft is uninterested and Apple doesn't tell the Joker where it gets its wonderful toys.
Market forces are at play here, exactly like they were in the 90s with Intel's massive gains. ARM is making money hand over fist while x86 is getting squeezed. There will come a time where it won't make economic sense to invest in x86, technical merits be damned.
> like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
It doesn't matter if there's an inherent, fundamental flaw in the ISA, if Intel can't, for whatever reason(s), develop an x86 chip that actually beats ARM on performance per watt in a broadly-applicable way.
You don't notice you're on ARM at all. Everything "Just Works."
And you're seeing 20+ hours battery under normal workloads (i.e. not spec sheet "20 hours" but day-to-day). I've been mainlining a Windows ARM laptop for six months, and am yet to run into anything I couldn't do.
I run WoA on my daily work laptop and everything I run other than some of the junky IT-pushed apps (outlook extension to report phishing, etc.) are ARM64-native and run as expected.
That's good to hear, I remember that "holy shit" moment when I first moved to an Apple Silicon mac, I guess Microsoft are getting there but in a more hap-hazard "we'll make eventually" sort of way
That actually makes me think of the transition to high-res displays - Apple had like a year of pain when they introduced retina displays and non-updated assets would look blurry, whereas MS (and third-party devs) took years to get Windows to the point where mostly everything looks right at higher scaling levels.
Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026.
Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:
* Lenovo Legion Go S
* Asus ROG Ally
But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.
It won't be for a while, since Valve is releasing the Steam Machine next year and has commented that they are waiting until they can build a Steam Deck successor that is significantly better than the original.[1] My guess is 2027.
Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the game.
> Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do
I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you literally can just use the system however you want as a desktop OS as a bonus...
I would assume Steam Deck 2 isn't dropping before at least H2 2026, if not later, if they didn't bring it out with the announcement of the other devices.
Valve's only official statement as far as I know is that it will come when they see a significant enough hardware upgrade to warrant a new system. If they don't move to ARM, AMD's Medusa APUs are their next architecture with major upgrades, so I would guess that Valve would order another custom AMD chip but based on Medusa, which won't release until at least 2027. I would guess at least H2 2027 but probably early 2028 for an AMD-based Steam Deck 2.
I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon, because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did.
Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.
Does ARM support PCIe, by the way? Or has no one combined ARM with a dGPU because it's ridiculous to combine a low-voltage CPU with a space heater from Nvidia?
The PCI bus has nothing to do with the instruction set. Usually it is just a block a designer can add to a chip, and connect to an internal bus like AXI, give or take a few other adjustments on the chip.
You can have PCIe buses without proper CPUs, even: it's quite common to find them paired with FPGAs.
For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-raspberry-pi5/ (random link).
Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller, buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.
I recently bought a Legion Go S because the primary way I game nowadays is streaming from my desktop to a handheld, and the higher quality display (1900x1200 resolution with 120 Hz over the 1280x800 and 90 Hz on the Steam Deck OLED) seemed worthwhile given that my desktop can easily provide enough throughput to play with relatively high graphics settings. It came with SteamOS preinstalled, and from a software perspective, everything does seem pretty close to identical. The only things I've slightly missed from the Steam Deck are slight hardware nits with the Legion Go S; the placement of the equivalent of the two SteamOS-specific buttons (not sure exactly how to refer to them, but they're labeled "Steam" and "..." on the Deck) just above the Start and Select buttons while looking and feeling the same mixes me up sometimes in a way that never happened on the Deck, and I miss having four unmapped buttons on the back of the device that I can set up however I like in games rather than only two. I also tend to prefer having symmetrical thumbsticks higher up on the device rather than having one high and one low; I've noticed that my hands aren't quite as comfortable when using the D-pad for extended amounts of time, which is unfortunate given my preference for it when playing stuff like emulated GBA games (incidentally one of the few things I tend to do locally instead of streaming; the low power profile setting already is an easy battery life win when streaming, and in practice it make the battery life when GBA emulation also much more tolerable, along with keeping the fans much quieter without seeming to impact performance of the emulation, given that even with this setting the fast-forward function can go far faster than I'd ever need it to).
If you're considering getting an alternative handheld, a better OS would be either Bazzite or CachyOS Handheld edition. SteamOS is not bad, but it uses an older kernel+graphics stack which doesn't make it very ideal for running on recent hardware. Plus, dedicated gaming distros like Bazzite have additional hardware support (like thirdparty game controllers) which may not be supported in SteamOS.
Currently, AMD Strix Halo based handhelds are the most powerful portable gaming devices out there, with the top three being the GPD Win 5, the OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex, and the AYANEO Next 2. Of these three, the GPD Win 5 has already started shipping. Problem is they're stupid expensive.
Personally, I will wait until I can run FSR4 natively on these portables, because FSR makes a pretty significant QoL improvement on these handhelds.
FWIW it's fairly straightforward to set up FSR4 with Proton-GE nowadays, assuming you're comfortable with editing one config file or manually specifying an env var for the game[1]. I'm not sure if using an alternate version of Proton would be considered "native" though, or if you mean for the default version of proton (or for Linux builds of games specifically), but setting it up is a fairly straightforward process even for people who might prefer not to use the terminal if you use something like ProtonUp to manage the installation for you. I imagine that the process for using a custom Proton isn't much different on Bazzite and CachyOS, although I'm not sure whether it would be something commonly done on CachyOS given that they have their own Proton distribution.
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Valve don't want to sell hardware, they want to sell games. They only make hardware as flagships for new markets, then they want other hardware manufacturers to take over.
the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
Valves moving into hardware more than ever right now, not moving away from it. They've already sand multiple times a deck 2 is on the cards, but only when theres enough of a hardware bump to make it make sense as a product. Slapping a tiny bit newer cpu in there and calling it a Steam Deck 2 isn't what Valve are about.
They definitely are working on it. They announced the steam machine, steam controller, and the valve frame (standalone vr headset with seamless screen sharing from a PC), and in their reveal video the first thing they rather coyly say is “we’d love to share information about our next Steam deck, but that’s for another day!” and announce a bunch of other cool stuff.
Valve has said they want at least double the capabilities, while still fitting in a similar power envelope. Unsaid is that it also needs to fit in the same price budget, but I tend to believe that's their intent. It's gonna be a while. Valve got a stellar deal on some somewhat unusual Zen2 APUs, orginally built for Magic Leap; finding a similar good deal is going to take time. I sort of hope Valve isnt going to put out a $1600 Halo system (but probably would buy such a next-gen Gorgon Halo system). Maybe Gorgon Point is good enough for them, in which case yeah 2026H2 is reasonable.
Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over? There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
Can someone tell me how much more power efficient is ARM actually? Like under load when gaming, not in a phone that sleeps most of the time. I've heard both claims, that it's still a huge difference and that for new AMD Zen it's basically the same.
I think that's still highly debatable. Intel and AMD claim the instruction set makes no difference... but of course they would. And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips?
Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact" would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. And there's no way the ISA makes 20% difference.
But today I'd say "marginal impact" is less than 5% which is way more debatable.
> And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips?
Where are the power inefficient x86 chips? If you normalize for production process and put the chips under synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for wide SIMD/vector workloads, but more efficient at idle.
AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash cows aren't in manufacturing mobile chipsets, and neither of them have sweetheart deals on ARM IP with Softbank like Apple does. For the markets they address, it's not unlikely that ARM would be both unprofitable and more power-hungry.
Intel spent years trying to get manufacturers to use their x86 chips in phones, but manufacturers turned them down, because the power efficiency was never good enough.
Well, they were targeting Android, and the apps were emulating ARM on x86, and they were going against a strong incumbent. Accounts on the web of this failure seem to bring up other failings as the main problems.
Well, apps tuned for performance and apps using native code have more than a little overlap. Even back then there were a lot of apps besides games that used native code for the hot code paths. But games of course are huge by themselves, and besides performance you need to have good power efficiency in running them.
You're basically reiterating exactly what I just said. Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex designs at that point.
Yes, it cost Intel their smartphone contracts, but those weren't high-margin sales in the first place. Conversely, ARM's capricious licensing meant that we wouldn't see truly high-performance ARM cores until M1 and Neoverse hit the market.
> Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex designs at that point.
Maybe, but the fact remains that they spent years trying to make an Atom that could fit the performance/watt that smartphone makers needed to be competitive, and they couldn't do it, which pretty strongly suggests it's fundamentally difficult. Even if they now try to sour-grapes that they just weren't really trying, I don't believe them.
I think we're talking past each other here. I already mentioned this in my original comment:
ARM is typically [...] more efficient at idle.
From Intel's perspective, the decision to invest in x86 was purely fiscal. With the benefit of hindsight, it's also pretty obvious that licensing ARM would not have saved the company. Intel was still hamstrung by DUV fabs. It made no sense to abandon their high-margin datacenter market to chase low-margin SOCs.
It's workload-dependent. On-paper, ARM is more power-efficient at idle and simple ops, but slows down dramatically when trying to translate/compose SIMD instructions.
You seem to have conflated SIMD and emulation in the context of performance. ARM has it's own SIMD instructions and doesn't take a performance hit when executing those. Translating x86 SIMD to ARM has an overhead that causes a performance hit, which is due to emulation.
Both incur a performance hit. ARM NEON isn't fully analogous to modern AVX or SSE, so even a 1:1 native port will compile down to more bytecode than x86. This issue is definitely exacerbated when translating, but inherent to any comparison of the two.
Hypothetically, if Valve made a strong push to make SteamOS compatible with all Windows programs, not just games, could they make a serious run at knocking down Windows?
And why would they care? Not even Microsoft really cares about Windows licensing for consumers and businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows.
That’s not how Big Enterprise works. “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”. Can you imagine the reputational risk of whoever decided that when something goes wrong they didn’t go with Microsoft? No one is going to trust a gaming company when it comes to their entire IT infrastructure.
Besides businesses have an all in one contract with Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL Server, Office, a certain number of seats for MSDN for their developers, Azure DevOps (separate from Azure - it’s the modern equivalent of Team Foundation Server), and the list goes on. They don’t care about saving a couple of dollars on Windows license.
I don't think they'd target businesses. I think they could totally ride the current gamers "Switching to Linux instead migrating to Windows 11" wave. Those users would definitely appreciate better compatibility with Windows apps.
> I think they could totally ride the current gamers "Switching to Linux instead migrating to Windows 11" wave. Those users would definitely appreciate better compatibility with Windows apps.
Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay for it?
I guess improving compatibility with general-purpose Windows apps might help them sell a few more Steam Machines, but it's hard to think that it's really going to move the needle.
> Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay for it?
Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the store. SteamOS is presumably free to install on your own hardware once it has a general release.
It's also possible they'd strike a deal and sell the software via Steam platform. I don't see why would developers object that, after all it would be a new market for then previously out of reach. Doubt Microsoft would agree, but smaller devs for sure.
The big thing is that the current SteamOS image is incomplete and missing a lot of key features that the Steam products have, since it's optimized for that. That's been the one big sticking point for it as of now.
Business don’t “dislike” Microsoft enough to go with a game developer and revalidatd all of their software over their entire organizations. The people making the decisions don’t go around worrying about nerd wars.
They definitely aren’t going to trust the long term viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing operating systems and supporting business for almost half a century.
$20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you support every Windows APi forever. You’re not going to tie your horse to valve
* The most skilled workers are the most undervalued
* Make products to serve the customer
* Management is a skill, not a career path
* The only people they consider themselves to be unable to compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient way of producing things.
Have we seen a commercially available high performance 64-bit RISCV chip at production scale yet?
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
It’s not even close. Samsung alone ships around 400 million phones a year, that’s 400 million ARM devices a year from a single manufacturer. The number of total consumer ARM devices sold each year is in the billions.
RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.
Until there's a common, well-supported, and sufficiently performant family of RISC-V SoCs or CPUs with support for existing well-supported GPUs, RISC-V support will be a massive pain in the ass of a moving/fragmented target.
This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU support.
RISCV is at least a decade, if not two from being useful enough for mainstream adoption. Neither the hardware or software is anywhere close to being ready.
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. It's roughly as Western as West realistically gets, short of being made in Hawaii.
> That's a geopolitical question
Sure, but that's not actually about where RISC-V is from. It's that it's a purposely open platform -- so much so that its governing body literally moved to Switzerland.
The reason it's a geopolitical question is more to do with what we did to their supply chains with sanctions on companies like Huawei and ZTE, and what COVID did to everyone's supply chains independently of that. Both of those things made it really evident that some domestic supply chains are critical. (On both sides -- see: the CHIPS Act)
Where RISC-V comes back in is that open source doesn't really have a functioning concept of export restrictions. Which makes it an attractive contingency plan to develop further in the event of sanctions happening again, since these measures can and have extended to chip licenses.
(Edit: I'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with valid concerns about Huawei, raised by various other sources. I'm less familiar with ZTE's history, but my point in either case is more of a practical one.)
That doesn't matter any more than, IDK, the first maid cafes being American. China is where RISC-V is getting adopted, they're the ones who are running with it.
I suspect that many projects—such as BOOM—have stalled as a consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved, including stakeholders in Western countries.
RISC-V the ISA is open; RISC-V implementations need not be. There's no reason to believe that any truly high-performance implementations will be usefully open.
There are also many high-performance Chinese implementations that are open-source (e.g., XuanTie C910, XiangShan, etc.).
While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5 is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source collaborative effort could, in the long run, significantly change the situation. For example, current versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz (early where at ~9).
> PC gaming is going fast to requiring controller support.
Hmmm I don't know. I did play Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a controller but I also played Baldur's Gate 3 on mouse and keyboard. I also play VR games with controllers or hand tracking. Basically I play with whatever the game recommends.
To me it's like saying PC game is dead because mobile phone is so popular. Sure a LOT of players, and thus money, goes into mobile gaming but that doesn't prevent proper AAA and indies games on PC to have interesting mechanics.
PS: if you are into these kind of things checkout exotic controllers in events like Amaze. I remember a collaborative where you had to blow in pipes to push a rocket in the right direction and plenty of weirder stuff. Really cool but totally niche.
The one very visible trend in the last 30 years of game development was about reducing input complexity. It has nothing to do with complexity of games themselves. Now instead of fighting clunky controls like in good old times you fight game challenges, where the input tries hard to be as transparent as possible
With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)
And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.
I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
I genuinely think you're hallucinating this threat to keyboard/mouse gaming input for anything other than AAA console-first releases and for specific genres like action/fighting games. Keyboard/mouse is still by far the dominant input scheme for PC gaming and PC gamers are broadly quite firmly set on this choice.
Depends entirely on the genre of the game, the resources available to the developer, and the pressures they're facing from management. Most of the games in my library either have controller support as an afterthought or not at all. Controllers have been the minority choice in PC gaming since about forever and I haven't noticed that changing. What has changed is the gaming industry has created de facto standards and idioms for how PC games should handle. Play early shooters with their default setting and you'll get to experience all kinds of key mapping that send modern gamers looking for mods to fix it or another game to play. These days you can pretty much count on WASD for movement, the mouse for looking. Nobody ships a game with movement bound to the arrow keys or modal mouse look. Game developers now meet gamers where they are, and for PC games that is almost always mouse and keyboard, except in those genres where gamers expect controllers.
Controllers provide analogue controls (eg. thumbsticks and triggers) that most keyboards don't have.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
Trying to play with 2 players on the same keyboard was a nightmare. On mine WASD seemed to cope better than the arrows, so there was always a rush to pick sides of the keyboard. Ah, good times.
I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.
I suppose this will is in order to be able to push lower powered hand helds to penetrate further into global markets. Not everyone can afford an X64 Nvidia usd5000 gaming workstation.
Given how expensive PC gaming is, between GPU and memory price explosions, I imagine everything Valve is doing, including recently announced hardware, is all in service of keeping Steam relevant.
> When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment.
At which point does this pay off the emulation overhead? Fex has a lot of work to do to bridge two ISAs while going through the black box of compiler output of assembly, right?
afaia emulators like Fex are within 30 to 70% of native performance. On the fringes worse or better. But overall emulation seems totally fine.
Plus emulator technology in general could be used for binary optimization rather than strict mappings, opening up space for more optimization.
> and that’s when the Fex compatibility layer was started, because we knew there was close to a decade of work needed before it would be robust enough people could rely on it for their libraries.
In a recent Linus Tech Tips video, Linus Torvalds (original Linus) was asked, "if you could go back in time and start the Linux project from scratch, what would you do differently?" He had two answers, one was "nothing," and the other was "if I knew how much work this was going to take, I never would have started this project."
It makes me wonder, is there some kind of blissful ignorance required to kick off a project that will take you years to see through? How many times have I self limited myself, stopped myself from starting something, because I put on my lead hat and did some estimations and thought eh, not worth it?
Does anyone know what the limfac is? The machine code produced is of course different on different CPU arches, but isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.
Because this works for the enormous back catalog of games that already exist, many of which I bet companies no longer have the code or a working build system for, and for new games it doesn't require the developers to do anything because many (most?) of them wouldn't bother
They may provide an option for developers to distribute a native ARM build (which some are already building for Quest titles that can be brought over to Steam Frame) but one of Steam's main advantages is their massive x86 games catalog so they certainly don't want to require that
So Valve won't need to convince developers to do anything expensive and old games will also work. Most games on Steam Deck aren't tested by the original developer at all.
Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in commercial engines.
You need to convince all developers that all 117,881 Steam games need be recompiled for ARM. Hopefully they have a working build environment, have appropriate libraries built for ARM, still have the source code, and are able to do the testing to see if the same code works correctly on ARM.
Think back to the x86 32->64 bit transition, but much worse, since ARM is more niche and there are more arch differences.
You need all your 85 3rd party middlewares and dependencies (and transitive dependencies) to support the new architecture. The last 10% of which is going to be especially painful. And your platform native APIs. And your compilers. And you want to keep the codebase still working for the mainstream architecture so you add lots of new configuration combos / alternative code paths everywhere, and multiply your testing burden. And you will get mystery bugs which are hard to attribute to any single change since getting the game to run at all already required a zillion different changes around the codebase. And probably other stuff I didn't think of.
So that's for one game. Now convince everyone who has published a game on Steam to take on such a project, nearly all of whom have ages ago moved on and probably don't have the original programmers on staff anymore. Of course it should also be profitable for the developer and publisher in each case (and more profitable & interesting than whatever else they could be doing with their time).
It's a chicken and egg problem. Lack of ARM PCs due to software support, lack of software support due to negligible market share.
Same argument can be applied to Linux. Why not just compile the software for Linux. Not that the most companies couldn't do it, it's just not worth the hassle for 1-3% of userbase. Situation with Linux also demonstrates that it's not enough to have just the OS + few dozen games/software for which hardware company sponsored ports, not even support for 10 or 30% of software is enough. You need a support for 50-80% of software for people to consider moving. Single program is enough reason for people to reject the idea of moving to new platform.
Only way to achieve that is when a large company takes the risk and invests in both, build a modern hardware and also builds an emulation layer to avoid the complete lack of software. Emulator makes the platform barely usable as daily driver for some users. With more users it makes sense for developers to port the software resulting in positive feedback loop. But you need to reach a minimum threshold for it to happen.
Compilation for ARM isn't the biggest issue by itself. You also need to get all the vendors of third party libraries you use to port them first. Which in turn might depend on binary blobs from someone else again. Historically backwards compatibility has been a lot more relevant on windows, but that's also a big weakness for migration to new architecture. A lot more third party binary blobs for which the developers of final software don't have the source code maybe somewhere down the dependency tree not at the top. A lot more users using ancient versions of software. Also more likely that there developers sitting on old versions of Visual Studio compared macOS.
If you compare the situation with how Apple silicon migration happened.
* Releasing single macBook model with new CPU is much bigger fraction of mac hardware market share compared to releasing single Windows laptop with ARM cpu.
* Apple had already trained both the developers and users to update more frequently. Want to publish in Apple Appstore your software need to be compiled with at least XCode version X, targeting SDK version Y. Plenty of other changes which forced most developers to rebuild their apps and users to update so that their Apps work without requiring workarounds or not stand out (Gatekeeper and code signing, code notarization, various UI style and guideline changes)
* XCode unlike Visual Studio is available for free, there is less friction migrating to new XCode versions.
* More frequent incremental macOS updates compared to major Windows versions.
* At the time of initial launch large fraction of macOS software worked with the help of Rosetta, and significant fraction received native port over the next 1-2 years. It was quickly clear that all future mackBooks will be ARM.
* There are developers making macOS exclusive software for which the selling point is that it's macOS native using native macOS UI frameworks and following macOS conventions. Such developers are a lot more likely to quickly recompile their software for the latest version of macOS and mac computers or make whatever changes necessary to fit in. There is almost no Windows software whose main selling point is that it is Windows native.
* Apple users had little choice. There was maybe 1 generation of new Intel based Apple computers in parallel with ARM based ones. There are no other manufactuers making Apple computers with x86 CPUs.
...because there are thousands upon thousands of games that will never be compiled for ARM?
Just look at all the "native macOS" games from the 2010s that are completely unplayable on modern Macs. Then look at all the Windows games from the 1990s that are still playable today. That's why.
> isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.
But game devs (at least of a certain type) are notorious for thinking about low-level hardware performance right from the start. As a class I'm pretty sure game devs use godbolt much, much more than your typical developer.
Sadly, nowadays very few, if any, game developers care about performance or optimizations. Look at recent headline about "Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB" and it was done by simply deduplicating assets. Gone are the days of finding inredible ways to use less opcodes that game would feel smoother.
As far as I can tell, there was no actual low-level optimization being done. In fact, it appears they did not even think to benchmark before committing to 130gb of bloat.
Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
This reads to me as "we did a google search about HDD loading times and built our game's infrastructure around some random Reddit post without reasoning about or benchmarking our own codebase at any point, ever".
I think we can all agree that performance is often an afterthought to game developers, particular in bigger productions, but HD2 is sort of a bad example for that.
The best thing Valve could do is nuke Wayland/X11/Xwayland from orbit. Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs. X11 is ancient and screen tears. Xwayland is the worst of both worlds.
Is the problem in this relationship Wayland of Nvidia? It is a shame that GPU's are pretty much the one big part of your computer that doesn't really conform to the general "ownership" model.
I don't use Linux on laptops or desktops, only servers. I've been through all that pain. The userland has a long way to go to be a good OS everyone can use.
Nope, it still sucks. It's no good as an OS for general users. The average user has no idea what it even means to have an NVIDIA GPU, let alone be able to diagnose why their screen scaling is all fucked up or understand why they see stuff about 'killing child processes' when they press the power button.
You're basically confirming the parent's suspicions. Nvidia has supported Wayland since their 550 series drivers, for the last two years desktop Linux has run fine on damn near every supported card.
You're not speaking for the "average user" here, you're speaking for yourself. We have a benchmark for what the average user thinks about Linux, and it's called a Steam Deck. You know what those users never mention? X11, Wayland, Xwayland or any of the stereotypical 2012-era boogeymen you're complaining about.
It's almost as if... you haven't used Linux in years. I won't accuse you outright, but my suspicions are mounting. (posted from an RTX 3070 on Wayland)
And that only created a problem by making the impact of that rift worse. So we don't need even more of such effects. Ubuntu tried going there with Mir, but luckily they figured out it was a really bad idea in time.
I find it kinda ironic that they phase out 32bit at the same time. I’d guess it would be easier to emulate 32but x86, although the difference perhaps goes away with a JIT.
There's no point in emulating just 32-bit x86 when modern games are all built for x86-64 plus several extensions. If they could make devs target an arch of their choice, they'd ask for aarch64 and skip funding FEX.
I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for the options here to expand and improve. I want to say much as Proton has accelerated things, but man, I am pretty lost now tracking which projects Proton encompasses and the history of where Valve backed/helped these efforts.
I still really want to believe it's collaborative. That good work is going to flow upstream, to collaborated Valve + crowd spaces.
RISC-V SoCs are still underpowered for the job, and the software ecosystem hasn't matured compared to ARM, specially for Windows/x86-64 emulation. The focus on RISC-V chips is simply too recent and has lacked enough demand for it. Your question is at least a decade too early.
Unless I misunderstand something (not quite awake fully yet...),
that's good right? Aka "play games on any platform" as goal. A
bit with the inofficial goal of scummvm, to rescue old commercial
games from vanishing for young, future generations.
What Valve hasn't announced yet, but which has leaked, is "Lepton", a fork of Waydroid they're working on to enable Android gaming for Steam—in particular, getting Oculus Quest games going on the Steam Frame.
The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans notwithstanding.
I cannot speak for the Steam console and I don't care about playing PC games on my phone: it's not the form factor for me.
But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.
Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).
I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at the edge anyway.
One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2. Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.
Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_ and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has been working on this since.
Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.
Back when iOS and iPad were eating Microsoft's lunch in mobile, Microsoft freaked out and released Windows 8 with that new tiles UI framework ("desktop and tablet are going to converge so we need to dumb down the interface") and the Windows Store that was supposed to be their response to the App Store. Microsoft wanted all future Windows software to be released through the App Store. Of course, this was an existential threat to Valve/Steam, so Valve vociferously pushed back.
The Windows Store and its apps were so bad that Microsoft eventually scaled back their ambitions, but Valve has not forgotten.
He made some critical comments to the media about the Windows app store and Microsoft's position of trying to turn Windows in to an iOS type situation with everything locked down. Remember that Microsoft had just released Windows RT and later Windows 10 S which could only run apps from the Windows app store.
This could have pushed Steam out of the market if it had succeeded. Valve then spent the next decade building up Linux gaming almost from scratch to reduce their dependance on Microsoft.
valve is just as ambitious as microsoft or google, they just appear to be the good guy for now because theyre trying to gain some ground on evil corp, and linux is one of the only openings they (or anyone) has got.
Did they at the same time announced that they had been funding open source ARM compatibility for over a decade? Maybe it was mentioned somewhere, but the article had new details for me at least, even if I consider myself somewhat up-to-date generally.
Agreed. I saw the Steam Frame announcement, and plan to get one as soon as it's available.
I saw the mention of Fex then too, but absolutely nowhere, before now have I seen any information that they'd been working on this for the best part of a decade.
I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility.
> force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility
How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't they just avoid doing that?
They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for them to 100% opt out of being on that platform.
Your argument is illogical. If devs don’t want to support it, they simply will not support it—as evidenced by the thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified, but either run just fine, or don’t run at all with the devs not giving it a second thought.
Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows, then I’m all up for it. It’s a win for everyone.
It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs. stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions, X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa, PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.
I never said they were forced to support, but that they are forced to fund such a thing for their game as opposed to their being an option for Valve to fund it.
Valve is known for never funding games which is why my original comment expressed surprise. Of course they aren't forced to fund content on their platform, but I had thought they had changed their strategy.
> Practically every other company with an application platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform.
the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows Phone and the Epic Store
Have you ever heard of terms like "Playstation exclusive" before? Companies benefit from having good content on their platform and they typically are willing to pay for it.
I probably will play them, once they're ported to PC and sold for $10 like TLoU and Death Stranding were. I haven't even played Tsushima yet.
Neither one of them is a system-seller though. I don't think anyone feels FOMO because they missed the Day 1 release of Gran Turismo, or didn't play Astro Bot with 7.1 Surround and HD haptics. Bloodborne was a magnum opus, Persona 5 had people lining up outside Best Buy to reserve a copy. The PS5 exclusive library is down right impoverished by comparison, to say nothing of the PC exclusives it lacks.
I don't really know if the concept of "system seller" is a thing anymore. Or at least, all those titles belong to Nintendo now. Sony's only had Gran Turismo and then made up for it with a consistent stream of first party titles. Not Nintendo level, but competitive. Xbox has 2 series and utterly bungled one of them. If you're not a racing sim fan, you're looking at the forest instead of the trees.
All those true "seller" series were always 3rd party and they've all pretty much abandoned console deals mid Gen 8. Bloodborne was truly the lasst of its kind.
The real "system seller" for the ps5 is a bunch of Japanese games that will never really be on Xbox and can't run on switch. So that depends on your taste. Japan's mostly come around on PC though, so it's not truly "exclusive" outside of the shaky optimization.
It is typically neither free nor open to develop on consoles. As in, you pay to access developer tools.
iOS and Android less so (even if there is a one time charge for Android and a yearly charge on Apple). OTOH I have not heard of them usually reaching out to more than a handful of devs for promotion purposes.
You pay, but you get actual support from console makers. They kind of need to given how closed off it is otherwise. The competition also means larger profile studios (indie and AAA) will usually get some good deals to work with.
The one time model from Apple/Android really is just a tax that gets you nothing but access in comparison. It's a full advert model where the biggest players throw millions at Apple/Android for visibility.
Valve's somewhere in the middle of the two. No "p2w" adverts but it's not doing too much to draw devs (except reducing the tax for AAA devs). It doesn't need to. A lot of its community models are "we're having a party, you bring the food and drinks".
The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.
A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.
Why the vitriol? This is one of the rare cases where a company actually puts money in open source development. Of course they ultimately do it for business reasons but everyone benefits from it as a whole, so I fail to understand the issue here.
Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.
It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper support for ARM to make out the most performance on the most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games, but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.
But why would Valve do that, Steam is a game market place, that happens to provide a really powerful comparability layer to allow you to run many windows games on not windows. It’s not a platform in any meaningful sense. The Steam deck is a platform, and the Steam frame, and if they can get existing games running on them, without involving the original devs what’s the problem? Dev get a new market to sell their games into, Stream gets a new market to extend their store front onto, how is that not a clear win-win?
Also Valve does fund plenty of games, such as all of the first party games you might have heard of, like Half Life, and its long tail of sequels and spin offs.
But is the disadvantage worth the relatively high overhead of specifically adding arm support? I doubt that. It is better game devs focus on what they're better at - x86 - while valve and open source devs focus on what they're better at, than trying to split funds across competing solutions to the problem.
The solutions have distant tradeoffs. When you want to run the latest PC games on mobile hardware using a battery, every cycle matters. Using translation layers for x86 will never be as good as as a native port.
Yeah. Also, software written for a wide gamut of hardware configs, even those under the same CPU ISA, will always be slower than software written for a unique hardware stack and only shipped for that hardware. Does it follow that all software should be written for specific hardware? I think not, because the performance overhead you take on allows saving on massive economic costs. It just isn't realistic to use development resources in that way. Even if devs are better at making ports for their games than fex, that takes precious time and money away from making the game, adding features, polishing, etc. It is much more realistic and sensible to focus on the comparative advantage than the absolute advantage [1].
It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that can result in reputational damage.
Then developers should fix their games and make sure the software they are selling actually works as advertised. End of discussion.
I don’t quite understand the logic behind your argument. Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up? That’s ridiculous, utterly consumer-hostile.
I don't think that's the end of the discussion. Let's try to talk separately about developers and publishers. I'm sure game developers would love to spend time making the game run on everything. But publishers work with a budget and schedule and have to consider the returns. If the potential new customers bring more support load and bad reviews, it's not worth it. That, I think, is the end of the discussion for the publisher.
They are advertising that it works on Windows. Developers in an ideal world shouldn't have to worry about unsupported configurations. I'm advocating that developers should only have their games judged by supported configurations.
>Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
Other platforms could be profitable enough that developers could target and support them on their own volition.
I don’t think anyone can seriously hold up the PC gaming platform as a paragon of “supported configurations”. The stupid number of tiny things that can cause a PC game to fail on a supposedly “supported configuration” is beyond ludicrous. To the point where I’ve personally given up running Windows completely because it’s less reliable at actual running the game I care about than Proton is.
And that's why Linux market share is a tiny drop in the pool. Devs have enough on their plates and being forced to do support for an attitude like this isn't in their budget.
>Are you advocating pro-monopoly?
Quite the contrary, I'd love for Valve to be taken down a notch.
> Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
If they want to be profitable, yes. If gamers really cared, they had 20, 30 years to put their money where their mouths were. Reality is often disappointing, though.
My future endeavors actually want to have a Linux-first development stack. To make a properly Native linux game, not this sham of compatibility not-emulation layers. But I know that will take some adjustment and me not using the two most popular game engines to help. I'm definitely not doing this because I hope to maximize revenue. I simply am tired of being trapped in the confines of billionaires who have actively made my society worse. But that stand has an opportunity cost, one a business like Valve won't truly make.
Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders
There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership
Plenty of countries have corporate laws that are less shareholder focussed than those of america. In the Netherlands for example boards are obligated to take into account broader sets of interest such as employee in their decisions and this is enforceable in court.
One of the issues with founders is that they get really into one specific idea and sink the company, rather then to switch strategy.
As opposed to shareholders, who ravenously seek to maximize short term profits and sink the company.
That's why there are no publicly-traded companies more than a decade or two old. Oh, wait...
The comment you replied to was just pointing out that, like how a founder-held company can get stuck pursuing the founder's obsession, a stock market held company can also single-mindedly pursue quarterly gains to the detriment of long-term health.
There are old companies in either model.
It didn't say can. It stated it rather definitively, which I wanted to point out the absurdity of.
This model, unfortunately, often leads to a "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issue. Whenever you have money without oversight, you always face a moral hazard.
If the company makes a profit and there aren't shareholders there to keep the stewards in check, excesses can and do develop.
I get the first point, but having shareholders doesn't solve that in any way. Shareholders would just give themselves payouts instead of letting the execs take everything as bonuses. And unlike the execs, whose bonuses could be limited by charter and who could be chosen on the basis of trust, shareholders are "whoever has the most money to throw around", so there's no mechanism to align them with company values.
So it's not perfect, but it sure as hell beats having shareholders.
> Shareholders would just give themselves payouts
Precisely, in the form of the #1 trend of public companies, stock buybacks! I've seen aggressive buybacks take a company with a ton of money in the bank and a profitable business and drive it right to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in just a few short years.
It's not as if public companies don't overspend on executive compensation. I think one CEO recently asked for a trillion dollar compensation package?
I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars.
I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.
The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO.
This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
Steward-ownership is a philosophy more than an actual structure, my understanding is that each such company is in practice structured somewhat differently.
This article explains roughly how Patagonia is structured: https://medium.com/@purpose_network/the-patagonia-structure-...
For Patagonia a trust owns 100% of the voting rights, while a charity collects 100% of the dividends. I don't doubt that there are ways the structure could be subverted, but it's a far cry from "money without oversight".
Do you have examples of Steward-owned companies that ended up with "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issues?
(I personally think Steam should go in that direction, otherwise I'm afraid enshittification is unavoidable once Gabe Newell is no longer at the helm)
Huh, fascinating. The Patagonia structure is actually strikingly similar to the Bosch model - non-profit owning the shares, but no voting rights, trust having voting rights but no shares - just taking it to the logical 100% conclusion without the residual influence of the Bosch family (having retained a few percent in both).
The model has worked well for many decades for a 100 billion$ revenue company like Bosch, good to see others taking a cue from them.
(Also goes to show that even constructs like these are not safe from corporate fuckups - see the emissions scandal...)
I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own like 90% of stocks, and the top 1% own 50%. While the poorest 50% of the population own about 1% of the stock market.
So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.
Could you link to how that measurement was taken? Because I very much want to know whether it counts things like mutual funds, or whether it only measures direct ownership of stocks. E.g. I have a bunch (though not all) of my retirement savings in an index fund that owns partial shares of the top 500 US companies (as listed by Standard & Poor's). So depending on how that S&P 500 fund is measured in those statistics, I either own shares in the top 500 companies, or I'm counted as not owning any shares. The latter would produce a very misleading statistic, because I am very much not the only person who invests in the stock market via mutual funds.
So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would likely be in the top 50%).
These figures seem to include ownership of mutual funds.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01122
It's amazing to me how many people don't get this.
Well, considering that it doesn't seem to be an accurate statement, it shouldn't be so amazing that people don't "get" it.
By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
What? "Doesn't seem to be an accurate statement"? What part? Those numbers are actually conservative. According to Yahoo Finance[0], it's actually 93% of the stock market is owned by the wealthiest 10% of American households. And the bottom 50% of Americans own ~1%. You "seem" to be mistaken and you're talking out of your ass.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
The article you're citing doesn't link to its sources, but seems to be talking about direct stock ownership by households, and not explicitly stating how it's accounting for investment funds.
I think it's accounting for indirect ownership as well. That would be very misleading and irresponsible reporting if it weren't.
“Just”? As if there aren’t pension funds and 401(k)s and IRAs serving >100 million Americans via investment in public companies?
“Open for the elite” how?
:)
You still don’t have a say and the investor is also the customer. How is it democracy or keeping companies to being good for society.
Have you considered the possibility that 401ks and pension funds etc are included in those numbers?
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
Not sure what does that mean. Americans poor and wealthy are in the top 10% of the world wealthiest and own a huge part of the world stock value accordingly.
That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
So it’s more like the top 0.001% who have the voting majority in this wonderful democratic system we all have our life savings dumped into.
What was your attempted point? Or did you not understand the issue that was brought up?
Is that a bad thing? Why would I want someone who can't even manage their own money to manage my life savings? If anything I'd expect a company where the decisions are in the hands of 99% John Smiths and 1% Warren Buffets to be even more short sighted, *especially* when it comes to splurging on dividends.
"The major reason is they are a private company with good business..."
This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.
The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.
It's not that being private guarantees that the company will behave well. But it does make it possible.
>The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment
Ok, but this “at the moment” has lasted at least since 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a pretty great company delivering value and not being annoying.
> The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment
Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
Are they doing good things for Linux? Absolutely. As a long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
> But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
I hear that for every major Windows release. And after 6 months everybody is fine with it.
It seems different this time. Windows is worse and Linux is better than at previous defenestration opportunities.
> ...they're family owned
Well that's your problem there.
I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
Companies doing things for the common good because they feel threatened by competiton is the whole idea behind Capitalism.
Except when Capitalism has favoured monopolies for decades and is actually closer to Feodalism.
Monopolies need to be restricted by regulations. In micro economics there is a term marginal cost, and economy of scale. In the software as a service era, the cost of serving one extra customer is minimal, so it make economic sense for such companies to grow infinitely. This is why our current system do not work. As the best strategy is to become as big as possible and capture the entire market.
There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
Very insightful, thanks for that comment!
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU country; Russia.
I think there should perhaps be a law that any corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the employees. Everybody with an employment contract with this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less; whether they're the janitor or the CEO.
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
How much is a vote worth in dollars? Because there would be a market for those votes, not just a spot market for dollars or internal market using vacation days, it would be reflected in salary and benefits and company policy etc.
Couldn’t you just make the voting anonymous to make sure that buying votes isn’t possible? Why wouldn’t I just take your money and still vote however I like?
A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.
It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
I think you’ll find that won’t actually work in practice. Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but actually employees of a different company who contracts the work out as a whole.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
You can at least in part blame Milton Friedman for this mess. His reframing of ficudiary duty as profit maximisation in his "shareholder theory" has done a tremendous amount of damage. The wariness of people when it comes to public companies is a direct consequence of this.
My understanding of the contemporary argument against publicly traded companies, though I'm not completely convinced of them personally, are that the fiduciary obligations inevitably drive those bad behaviors, and/or that shareholders often demand short term returns at the expense of long term value.
As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
> (There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
Share classes can be very varied(such as preferred shares that get what's left after bond debt is paid off on bankruptcy) but generally what he's proposing(a coop-style one-head-one-vote class) is not common. Not sure if it's legal for US corporations or not(I could swear it is but in any case it's exceedingly rare). The usual principle is one-share-one-vote.
And, famously, Berkshire Hathaway
>On paper it should be a good thing
Not really. Most people have terribly low time preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed explanation). Public company ownership is much better because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but still susceptible to much of the same management problems, specially in a society that already favors lower time preference by other means.
I do not deeply disagree with your statement but I do not see the two as exclusive.
I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.
Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
fwiw, Hoppe has become a darling of the extremist authoritarian "alt-right" (curtis yarvin, etc) but has been rejected by more mainstrean thinkers including most libertarian factions.
It's a common pattern. If you're in their service area compare both the food served by, and the employment practices of In-n-out Burger (private) vs McDonald's (public).
>and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.
Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.
If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
Yes, exactly. It's kind of a wink-wink nudge-nudge at this point. A company citing "public good" under the guise of "shareholder value" is not actually supporting the public good at all.
Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.
But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect the greater good just as much as a public company. The rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just there to support that transfer of wealth.
>We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.
We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).
That's not unique to AI though. That's very common for tech startups.
If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.
[Slaps roof of barge]
You can fit zo many tulips in this bad boy
While AI is an example, it's an extreme one - the uniqueness here is that the AI companies have very large spend commitments that exceed expected cash generation, even under presumption of no faults and very strong revenue assumptions because infrastructure costs outpace revenue by a significant margin.(1)
This differs quite a bit from a typical venture-backed or boot-strapped entity, which has a realistic pathway to profitability.
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/hsbc-warns-openai-coul...
Ponzi schemes work* too.
*At a specific point in time and for certain investors
Please just talk about capital and leverage like an adult. Do you expect a CFO and their team to look at the math and say, "Well, we figured out that we can speed up adoption and bring forward billions of dollars of revenue by spending fewer billions from capital injection and debt deals this year" and then not do it?
Adults tell jokes too, especially gallows humor, and to great effect.
Ergo I propose grandparent commentator inject more humor in their clear understanding of leverage and debt to widen your, my, and their audiences' understanding regarding debt and leverage beyond your proposed metaphor of the toddler CFO failing the marshmallow challenge.
What doesn't work are the predictions of Uber's collapse, of which there were many, cheered on by a great deal who still gather here looking for the next things to see through.
I am personally betting on Uber’s collapse for the obvious reason: it won’t compete with robotaxis and AV companies would rather have customers on their own apps rather than Uber’s platform.
Just unsure about the timing
> Just unsure about the timing
Right after we get nuclear fusion and a million people on Mars.
Uber actually has a service that's worth paying for. I can't say I feel the same about most AI slop factories.
It’s definitely more than just private ownership. In fact I’d say that’s the least part of it.
Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.
If you want to be specific that general idea could be elaborated as "private ownership by people that only need the C-suite salary, instead of needing a C-suite plus a fat % RoI on the company's entire valuation because that's how much they just put down as a sunk cost."
In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
Furthermore, PE ownership generally means (a) achieving ROI as quickly as possible (including by dismantling the company and/or mortgaging its assets), (b) installing leadership who has no ties to the business, and (c) cutting costs to the bone.
It's not just functionally equivalent to an IPO... it's an IPO if all the buying new shareholders were sociopaths.
(Yes, there are the PE companies who run businesses better like Berkshire, but that's far from the most common type of PE)
Private ownership is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to have a business which has a healthy relationship with its customers. You also need the owners to be people of reasonably good character who understand that the best way to run a business is a win-win approach on both sides, not people who see nothing wrong with extracting maximum profit from the business no matter whom it hurts. The PE horror stories you hear are cases where the owners are in the latter group.
You hypothesis then is that there is not a _single_ public company that has a healthy relationship with its company? Not one, in the entire global public space?
When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy customer relations from birth?
The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
> Not one, in the entire global public space?
It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some companies that are more likely to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA, sometimes Apple. But I don’t trust any of those companies to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or Verizon.
Costco is public, according to wikipedia.
That is a good point. I wonder how they have managed not to succumb to the pressure to squeeze their users more.
Fortune 500 companies are particularly neurotic example of 'all' companies.
Sure, but very modestly due to scale, not core institutional morals. Go to your average small business with 10 or so people and ask the staff how they are treated and paid, and you'll get an answer not much different than the level of employee satisfaction for Fortune 500 companies. Look a their customer reviews... are small restaurants for instance an order of magnitude different that megacorp chains? In an economy with regulatory capture and highly unequal distribution of wealth, the wealthy set the tone across the board.
From what I can see, it's often when the founder loses control of the company (either voluntarily (e.g. retirement) or not) and it falls to the board (representing the shareholders) to appoint the CEO. At that point it's at best a toss up whether they'll appoint someone who actually intends to create value or someone who intends to extract value.
> The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing to protect society from the negative externalities it causes. For example:
- Mandating worker representation on company boards. So shareholders still have some power, but less.
- Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller companies which generally have less problematic externalities.
It's not instant (well, sometimes it is), more of a slow but inexorable push down a hill. Some public companies are farther along the path than others, but if the company continues to exist and profit it's inevitable. For example, there are no S&P 500 companies with healthy customer relationships.
It's not impossible to run a publicly owned company in the US that isn't insanely hostile towards it's customers or employees... it's just really damn difficult because of bad legal precedent.
Dodge v. Ford is basically the source of all these headaches; the Dodge Brothers owned shares in Ford. Ford refused to pay the dividends he had to pay to the Dodge Brothers, suspecting that they'd use the dividends to start their own car company (he wasn't wrong about that part). The Dodge Brothers sued Ford, upon which Fords defense for not paying out dividends was "I'm investing it in my employees" (an obvious lie, it was very blatantly about not wanting to pay out). The judge sided with the Dodge Brothers and the legal opinion included a remark that the primary purpose of a director is to produce profit to the shareholders.
That's basically become US business doctrine ever since, being twisted into the job of the director being to maximize profits to the shareholders. It's slightly bunk doctrine as far as I know; the actual precedent would mostly translate to "the shareholders can fire the directors if they think they don't do a good job" (since it can be argued that as long as any solid justification exists, producing profit for the shareholders can be assumed[0]; Dodge v. Ford was largely Ford refusing to follow his contracts with money that Dodge knew Ford had in the bank), but nobody in the upper areas of management wants to risk facing lawsuits from shareholders arguing that they made decisions that go against shareholder supremacy[1]. And so, the threats of legal consequences morph into the worst form of corporate ghoulishness that's so pervasive across every publicly traded company in the US. It's why short-term decision making dominates long-term planning for pretty much every public company.
[0]: This is called the "business judgement rule", where courts will broadly defer the judgement on if a business is ran competently or not to the executives of that business.
[1]: Tragically, just because it's bunk legal theory, doesn't change that the potential and disastrous consequences of lawsuits in the US are a very real thing.
It is not broadly believed in corporate governance circles that there is a legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. Nor will you find court judgements that require it.
If anything Milton Friedman is more responsible for this idea that shareholder maximizing is the corporate goal. That is an efficient market argument though not a legal one and he framed it long after the dodge suit. He needed to frame that argument because so many firms were _not_ doing that.
But just because a Chicago school economist says something about governance doesn’t mean it’s broadly applicable in the same way an Austrian economists opinions about inflation aren’t iron rules about monetary policy.
Theory of abundance, you could classify your approach as. Rather than artificial scarcity to exercise market power.
Could also consider: employee ownership and public ownership
People complain about the latter because they have higher expectations because the institution is supposed to serve them and often has all the diseases of true scale without being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry skates by because people assume it's out to screw them and they can cherry pick.
The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making games as their calling.
No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
Passion matters.
But does he have a plan for when he retires?
Is it good enough or should we be monitoring his health and hoard torrents of our steam collection just in case?
This is the problem of governance by “the good king”, and no, there isn’t a clear succession plan, so things will probably get worse in a post-gaben world
Exactly. Going public is like leaving your baby to be raised by wolves.
If you IPO but the founders still have more than half the voting rights, you can fully ignore the public in all your decision making and there is nothing the other shareholders can do.
Can't they sue you out of control? Fiduciary duty and all?
Fiduciary duty means "put the shareholders' interests above yours". Not "make the shareholders more and more money no matter what".
If you employed your cousin on a huge wage, probably yes.
But if you're just running the company 'badly' (in the shareholders eyes), probably no.
Only kind of. The most obvious examples are big tech companies such as Meta or Alphabet. But they pay their employees in RSUs. If the stock price falls employees make less money and can be lured away.
Private or public, they are making stacks hand over fist. Why cant other companies learn that being good to your customers is a winning strategy?
Because it's not, all other things equal.
Valve can be Valve because HL + Steam, in the same way that Google ~2010 could not be evil because search + ad revenue.
The difference is that Google IPO'd and took market capital, and Valve didn't.
Once public investors are onboard, you maximize profits or face lawsuits.
But thats the point, Valve IS maximizing profits. If they treated their customers like Epic does, do you think people would still be using Valve when Epic is generally a bit cheaper?
The entire point of this thread is that there are many things that Valve could do to increase its profits over the short, intermediate, and long terms... that it doesn't (presumably because that's not the kind of company it wants to be).
As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL").
In more realistic terms, they could have built proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are funding a lot of development, apparently) to give themselves a unique advantage.
If they were a publicly traded company, they probably would be doing all these things.
I don't see a problem with the first, if they want to outsource HL3 go ahead. Consumers can decide if they want to buy it when it releases, that's just normal economics.
As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers despite giving away hundreds of games.
Developing open source emulation is essential to their success - no developer would build and verify for Steam OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer is what makes them successful.
> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
Because it is "common wisdom" even if the wisdom is short sighted and doesn't always amount to increased profits.
See Netflix removing the ability to cast, because fuck you. How much of the current growth is borne out of that crackdown on people using all their profiles they pay for?
There currently isn't a "good guy" so they can keep turning those screws and force some extra growth. Being anti-consumer would be beneficial for Valve because they are currently the only good guys.
> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.
That doesnt explain their surge in growth only in recent years, its not like gaming is new. No, its all the new features they are offering and goodwill they have engendered.
One of the characteristic of network effects is that you see growth, simply by virtue of being the first/biggest.
I'm not really a fan of this reasoning when in the same breath: Epic is also a private company but has its share of stuff.
It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.
I think the point was about publicly traded companies becoming inevitably evil due to shareholder expectations, not about private companies being inherently ethical.
This is a pretty serious problem, since we would like lots of companies to participate in public markets so that regular people can gain some of the upside and so there is transparency and increased oversight.
I find it so weird that you say public companies being 'evil' (which is to turn a profit) is a problem, yet you also say you'd like for companies to exist on the public market so that the public can access some of the upside.
I didn't say that?
Attributing it to private company behaviour really minimises what Valve chooses to do. Per your counter example: Epic Games has been having a very public meltdown this week regarding Steam's inclusion of Gen-AI labelling - here we have two private companies, with two very different priorities.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1) Epic also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds, going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches to optimise it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
I don't really get it myself. I personally don't give Steam credit for weakly saying 'hey you need to label something'. Let me know when really enforce it. Heck, let me know when they at least add a filter. That's when you can really impact the behaviour (or prove consumers really don't care).
But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.
Yeah we also need to get out of the dichotomous thinking that companies are either all good or all bad.
Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*
It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.
*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
Valve's employee handbook: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1074301/Valve_Handbook_Lo...
They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a veto to ship Steam with half life 2.
It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles of money.
this is widely known (been discussed on here many times) that the employee handbook was marketing apparatus and doesnt reflect how the business actually works day to day, and never did
Really? It aligns with what I've been watching employees say in various interviews, such as the recent half life anniversary series of interviews. Would love to read more if you could point me in the right direction.
> And they make oodles of money.
I see it the other way round: they can do all that because they print money.
Not that it's necessarily a bad thing: maybe they stay relevant because they are doing that.
But isn’t Valve extremely profitable compared to pretty much non private company in the industry?
They have few employees and massive revenue.
They're the #1 most profitable per employee. There are plenty of companies more profitable than Valve, but they have more employees. Valve could hire more employees.
Yes, I meat profit margin which is what public investors care about (in addition to growth).
And IIRC Valve and EA had almost exactly the same revenue figures last year, yet EA had 10x more employees.
On paper it would seem extremely appealing to public investors.
Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar).
Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...
[1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review
There's an argument that loot boxes that give you cosmetics just aren't that big of a deal, at least if we're talking about adults.
Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.
It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.
>There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"
Aren't people upset about both? The whole "gamble for features" is pretty much why the mobile market and console market are divorced in audiences (or at least, community).
People are "more" upset about Valve here because this is in the console space. They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
> Aren't people upset about both?
I'm sure a few people are, but typically no. People are aware that trading card games can be a monetary black hole, but Magic and similar games usually don't take the same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper.
> They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm not talking about the mobile market. Are you not aware that Magic the Gathering is a physical card game? (though it does have some digital implementations too)
> usually don't take the same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper.
This is a weird claim. TCG/CCG is far worse than Valve's loot boxes. It's not even close. MTG Arena is huge btw, it's not a footnote.
Their point was that WotC doesn't get the same flak that Value does when MtG is worse, by far, than cosmetic loot boxes.
Yes, I'm calling that questionable. Says who? TCGs have entire formats designed in opposition to the high cost random booster shit. I think that's pretty good evidence that there's high negative sentiment.
Valve is simply larger and took legal heat for people misusing the API.
Oh you're talking about trading card games? I thought we were comparing to the gacha/lootbox market.
I think the simplest fact is that most people online don't think about offline product. Out of sight, out of mind. It's also an interesting market where WotC and Co. Actively try to avoid the resellers market. They don't want any risk in valuing individual cards themselves, so they stick to boosters.
For digital stuff, you are inherently the market itself. So it's hard divorce yourself when you are the one who implemented trading and controlling rarities and drops.
I always interpreted that as cosmetics are OK because it doesn't make the game unfair. You can't buy advancement in the game that way.
Subsidizing the game's devel/ops cost isn't a bad thing. Especially if it's optional and doesn't change the game.
Very few people have a problem with just paying for cosmetics in a game. The main issue here is that it's gambling for cosmetics, rather than straightforwardly purchasing specific items.
Most people do have an issue with it, because every game that's replaced loot boxes with discrete cosmetics purchases has to then massively increase the price of them. For 20 bucks in Overwatch 1, you got (afaik) 10 loot boxes which all had 4 random items. In Overwatch 2 20 bucks barely gets you single good skin.
It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my experience, having been part of communities of both types of games.
indeed. and the fact that it can be resold at will makes it much worse as you just created an gambling ecosystem
> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
The closest I've heard to something compelling is that the digital goods aren't the same as actual physical goods, and that somehow that makes it worse, but I still don't find it particularly compelling; I've heard people (often lovingly) refer to trading cards as "cardboard crack" explicitly to joke about how ridiculous it is to be paying for stuff that's essentially just ink and paper.
> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"
Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.
> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.
For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.
I'm using "gambling" the same way it's typically used in these discussions. If you'd like to convince the rest of the internet that it should only apply to more traditional things like Poker or slots, where the house has some edge, be my guest.
I'd guess that there's markedly different margins on lootboxes versus running the entire steam store.
I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).
Because a billion dollars is still a billion dollars.
To be fair, they may have just wrecked the CS lootbox economy permanently.
It was getting out of control when tiktok "investment guides" were instructing people who don't even play the game to start buying CS skins to make a profit.
They need to keep wrecking it. Skins should just be fixed cost items.
Nah. Digital items should be transferable, similar to physical gacha like Pokemon cards.
That doesn't mean they should be reliable speculation vehicles. AFAIK Valve hasn't interfered with the gifting of digital items, only sales.
Disagreed. Games like Fortnite and League of Legends went down this road and ended up at even more unfathomable $500 microtransactions. The only issue with skin trading is that people will take it more seriously than it is, which is a problem with all cosmetic systems.
Valve selling skins is just so trivial relative to dopamine-inducing doom-scrolling, social media in general, the toxicity of the news cycle, I can keep going.
It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.
We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.
Let's be honest about this current situation.
Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not charity.
Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)
Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
They're doing things that are simultaneously good for business and good for consumers.
That contrasts against the companies doing things that are good for business (at least short term) and bad for consumers.
Sure but it's just being morally lucky. They found themself in a situation where there was temporary and situational alignment, why give them any credit for that? They didn't create that situation.
It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to closed source quicker than you can blink, because the reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do good.
> Sure but it's just being morally lucky.
No, it's not. They're choosing the path that builds user trust and positive sentiment for long term success, rather than choosing to fleece their customers and not worry about whether people hate it.
Other corporations in a similar spot for games and game platforms could choose to make the same type of choices, but they'd rather boost next quarter's profits, even if that means pissing off their userbase with consumer-hostile policies.
No one forced Valve to have a great form of family sharing. No one forced them to have generous policies around generating Steam keys. No one forced them to invent remote play together. They do these things because they're nice features that are useful for players and make people stay engaged on Steam, and more positively inclined towards Valve.
I strongly disagree with this approach in life.
I am “morally lucky” because every decision I make is to ensure I can always be morally lucky, 10 years later. I take certain kinds of jobs in certain kinds of industries.
It’s my same approach to reducing stress or getting things done. I never get a parking ticket not because I’m amazing — it’s because I know if I have to go out later and move my car, I’ll forget, so I’ll just park right the first time. 10 years later and no parking tickets and no stress — if someone tells me “oh you’re just lucky,” I can only chuckle.
I don't see it as an "approach", I see it as a description. If the FSR upscaler becomes better than DLSS, then my description leads to the prediction that AMD will make FSR closed source. The prevailing camp that says AMD are exercising their moral compass will predict that AMD will keep FSR open source. We'll see who has a description that aligns with reality if that day comes.
Why not give them credit for that? There is no moral rule that to be virtuous, it has to be self-sacrificial. If you narrow a commendable course of action to some sort of ascetic vision of martyrdom and self-punishment, then yes everybody and everything is evil.
So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight and their culture will push them to stay the course on the long term, where other companies will do the reverse. Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive, including the worst imaginable?
Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts of decisions based on values and visions that are more than just economical, especially companies not beholden to shareholders that only care about short-term profits. Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and often done from some kind of cultural bias.
yes. it aligns, for now. But only for now. all those FAANG's had the same status too, once upon a time.
Valve predates Google by two years (at least per the wiki), and was started by Microsoft employees who didn't particularly like Microsoft's operation. Hoping Valve has a long future ahead of them :)
Yeah, and they shifted from being a gamik studio to a middleman. The signs are already there, but greed arrives all the same.
Valve has had all the triggers and opportunities to change for the worse and it didn't. Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I don't see what would ruin it now.
You can argue they did, depending on what you value. If you loved valve as a premier developer discovering unique experiences and narratives, thars been gone for 14 years now. If you valued not having your software locked down to middlemen or preferred physical media, Valved killed those off in the PC market. If you are a dev and wanted to set your own prices, Valve is current under litigation for price parties.
Its not all sunshine and windows.
>Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I
In the same way Bill Gates did not force you to use Internet Explorer, yes. Both are free applications with alternatives. Let's not forget our history.
> Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore
That's only a matter of time, and probably not a very long time.
Sure, Valve may turn bad after Gaben. It is also possible that he thought of something for the long term that will prevent enshittification. Some companies have managed.
Your argument doesn’t make any sense. What does this have to do with supporting Arm chips? It’s not like AMD and Intel are waging a war against Valve. If anything Steam helps them by strengthening the PC gaming market, leading to higher CPU/GPU sales.
Slowly getting their stuff independent of wintel gives a lot of flexibility. And the big gaming market's on phones / tablets. A steam controller could find itself paired to an iPad running steam in a year or two.
The only play I see here is a legitimate Valve console to take on XBOX and Sony. Plus Arm on a Steam Deck would improve the battery life considerably (assuming they are able to integrate with some powerful GPU solution).
We're too far into the grip of monopolies for that. Apple would never let a full version of Steam run on iPads. Google wouldn't either.
I think more ARM Valve hardware is likely.
Why is it though. Just release a SteamOS with Secure Boot enabled and you’re done. It’s really simple
> Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)
Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?
> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?
> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!
Microsoft's a competitor. And they have a reputation for being the first ally to stab you in the back (e.g. SGI / DirectX). You don't want to depend or trust them when they like the market you're in.
I don’t see it. Stricter kernel access is pressure on game devs, not Valve. And I don’t see MS booting steam off windows any time soon.
It’s more about Valve having complete control over the stack and being able to vertically integrate, something they will never have with windows, especially as it continues to enshittify
Don't forget GoG which is an alternative game store with a strong anti-DRM stance (all the games there are DRM free).
GOG has a strong anti-DRM stance, but unfortunately not all of the games GOG sells are truly DRM-free if you consider things like online services and online service requirements and live patching/live service. Often considered the worst offender is Sony published games with some of the worst root kit anti-cheat installs still bundled in the GOG edition, with mandatory online "data collection" for the game to run, even for single player games.
GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.
I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).
Steam makes installing windows games easy. With GoG i would need to setup wine myself.
^ The essence of why we're doomed.
Because Steam gives customers useful features that are good? GoG should also directly support Linux.
> GoG should also directly support Linux.
GOG is an online shop. It shouldn't support anything but browsers, bank cards and download managers.
> Because Steam gives customers useful features that are good?
No, because users are lazy enough to not support the better option.
When you're skimming 30 % off worldwide PC game purchases you can afford to do that.
Even there, didn't they recently make some changes to the CS go skins ecosystem to devalue much of the aftermarket sales.
I still put them in the same box as Apple until they fix the price parity and/or adjust their cut. Even Apple is finally having their hand forced there.
They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
The difference is that you aren't forced to buy a game from steam.
You're not forced to buy an Iphone. You also weren't forced back in the day to use Internet explorer.
We should remember our history so we aren't doomed to repeat it.
You are forced to have a phone and there's only 2 bad choices.
Technically 3. Not much different from the Desktop situation. Just replace Microsoft with Google because Microsoft had the grace to bow out early.
Similar to desktop, I choose the middle ground between true freedom and walled garden. At least you Can de-googlefy 95% of Android. More than you can de-microsoft Windows.
3?
Depends on the game - some are not available anywhere else.
They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious
We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take Valve over any of the other players in their market all day every day without even thinking twice. EDIT: You're absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.
>They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns
??? They didn't
All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all
> gambling/loot box [...] legit ethical concerns
I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?
Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.
It's an interesting case study. They're essentially another 'App Store middleman' raking in a huge 30% cut for selling games digitally. But they do enough really good stuff to keep both gamers and developers generally very happy.
The difference between Valve and the other app stores with an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.
To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.
With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.
So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.
People are mostly perfectly happy with authoritarianism as long as their lives are improving.
This doesn’t apply because valve doesn’t have a monopoly.
I have plenty of complaints about them. The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games, the extortionate cut afforded them by their dominant market position or the very rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas). But they do make some very nice open source contributions.
If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even police this.
The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
There was news couple of seasons back that they've capped key generation to some function of on-steam sales.
> shows pop up ads on startup
Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.
Settings -> Interface -> "Notify me about additions or changes..." to disable it, by the way.
Ads can be disabled in the settings.
Not an excuse.
It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.
Not a fair comparison. I CHOSE to download and use steam when there are many alternatives. I enjoy their store page. Everything is consensual here.
They don’t force themselves onto your machines mate.
Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying to read or watch something.
On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
They are ads for games in a store that sells games, right?
I'm very anti-ad, but if there's one situation where I don't have a beef with it, it's the Steam app.
They are also surprisingly effective because they often show things that I might actually buy (especially when it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for it).
No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher to play your games. If the store was completely separate then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in the store there.
You can easily disable the pop-up ads.
> The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games
Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by Valve?
> pretty poorly optimized website
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.
I don’t mind the ads. They are actually about games and I may like some of them. If they start selling ad space for others that would be terrible.
This is because it’s still majority owned by the original founder(s).
This really makes me wonder if publicly traded companies are just a bad idea.
It's kind of scary that in a way future of gaming is in the hands of one man (who is getting old btw).
When Gabe is gone I cringe thinking MS will do everything in their power to buy Valve and turn it to complete shit couple years later.
"We will make linux a viable gaming before we increment that number to 3!"
But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).
Incentives happen to be aligned on this part. That’s all.
Its scary that nowdays a company is simply doing "good business" and it is so unusual that its worth praise.
I strongly feel it’s because Valve is not a publicly traded company where they’ll eventually give up their values to meet Wall Street analyst quarterly targets.
It genuinely makes me see the value in private companies. Public companies must grow. They're accountable to so many different interests. Private companies can be happy sitting at whatever profit level they want. They can take time to tinker on something that they care about. If it doesn't pay off, that's fine.
I think I would say it this way: private companies can be good or bad, but public companies must ultimately become bad.
That's more a property of the community than of the company. If the community were differently inclined then the comments would be about how Valve is making money by addicting children to gambling and so on and so forth.
That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q
I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing almost all the effort on the project.
CodeWeavers sells app support: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
I haven't been able to get MSOffice working, but I didn't have much issue getting Toon Boom Animate to work. Which apps give you trouble?
If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).
Oh it’s not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse.
If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.
In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.
There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was discussed here just this past week.
Yeah, Winboat, I might be part of that conversation you're referring to.
I haven't ruled that out yet. I am planning on trying to convince them on this next time they ask me for tech support.
If you do it would be interesting to hear if/how well they adapted to it. Might do same thing myself with my father.
I wouldn't hold my breath. I've been trying to get them to switch for the better part of a year, and even Windows Update completely bricking my mom's computer [1] (look at my post history if you want more details on that) wasn't enough to convince them. I'm not sure what else could happen outside of Bill Gates personally leaving a flaming bag of dog manure on their porch.
[1] I'll say it again; if anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider getting out of the software game and maybe consider a job in the exciting world of janitorial or food service, because you are exceedingly bad at the whole "software thing" and you should be ashamed of yourself and how much damage you have cost the entire world with your utterly incompetent software.
lsw :)
> knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games"
they still do it because you can't play all the multiplayer games with kernel level anticheats
Let them have their rootkits, good riddens
I wonder when games will start supporting Linux natively, especially after the Steam Machine is released.
Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely had more issues with games with native Linux builds than Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to use Proton over native to get better performance.
Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never.
Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
Yes but the Proton team needs to do work for basically each game to iron out the quirks, no?
Not if you as a developer don't touch the footguns. Avoid those, and your game works fine with no problems, no intervention from Proton or Wine needed.
Oh that's very interesting. Given the large compatibility tables I see, I thought Proton had to cater to almost a majority of games.
It's the Pareto principle doing its thing. 80% of games were fixable by not a whole lot of fixes to Wine (I mean, it's still a lot of work, but once the work is done, you don't need to redo it for 1500 other games), while the remaining 20% are out there doing weird stuff and needs manual fixes of some kind.
If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and everything works as it should. With developers noticing SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80% starts growing to 90%.
Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable though, which pulls the percentage down again.
https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
Of the top 1000 games it seems 77% are playable. 40% of it needing "some tinkering" but I dont know what that means
Hmm, that hasn't been my experience, basically 100% of the games I've tried have worked. Maybe it's because I don't play AAA titles.
This is extremely shortsighted.
I fail to see why? It was pretty short sighted of developers to build Linux verions of their games back when they did, since most either perform poorly today, or just crash on more modern versions. I don't expect those games to get fixed any time soon. Far from it, I expect Linux versions to degrade as more and more of their dependencies change and Linux changes over time. I don't expect the situation to be different for native Linux ges made today.
Wine meanwhile works perfectly with 80+% of games, and those 20% that don't are all newer stuff or stuff that's never going to get a Linux version short of the Linux desktop actually getting of the ground.
It would be better for Linux to gain native support for some of the Windows and DirectX 12 APIs.
Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows devs more than halfway.
What benefit would that have over the current situation, with Wine?
They sold the Deck hardware at a loss, so I hope you've bought several full-price games to play on it since.
Has that been confirmed? Got a link?
I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not.
No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
> like Apple: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model.
Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an exploitive company
More than a little irritating that the only real contenders for smartphones is either Google or Apple, two companies with more-than-a-little dubious business practices.
I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.
Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with me everywhere anyway.
I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably be different companies.
> Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them.
Exactly, and the same goes for Steam.
I honestly can't remember the last time I brought something through the App Store - my lifetime total money spent there is probably less than $500
You also need to include (digital) purchases made inside of apps because Apple also takes a 30% cut there. That is likely the bigger amount because it includes all of the in-app microtransactions for games.
Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad.
That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked.
You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
That kind of logic is exactly how morals get eroded and all bad practices get excused with "it's just business".
Blame the bosses for wanting DRM rather than Valve for making it a default. Blame lawmakers for not regulating DRM out of existence. Valve's playing the game while still being the most consumer friendly option on most fronts, and a solid second place in everything else. Credit where credit's due.
If Steam didn't have nominal DRM, I'd imagine they wouldn't have been able to grow to the point they're at now, and we'd instead have many stores each with their own exclusives, but most of them have worse terms than Steam. That world is worse than the one we have now.
And if you really care, there's always GOG, or the skull and crossbones.
You complelty ignore the foxcon problem?
Google makes money with ads and at least takes this serious.
Apple just exploits.
Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...
Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)
Does Valve engage in a lot of unfair or anticompetitive behavior? If you were to apply some anti-trust enforcement what would you actually do? Split off their game studio (that makes like one game a decade) from Steam?
They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.
Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…
There is no lock-in. It is normal to have accounts on multiple storefronts, and have multiple storefronts installed on your gaming PC; one can access multiple digital libraries on the same PC!
Steam wins because it provides a superior product for the end-user, not because of lock-in. Games purchased through Steam can be vetted with user reviews, supported with user-created guides and steam input configurations, streamed across devices, shared with family members, and even modded; all within the Steam experience.
Valve is not a monopoly/part of a duopoply/oligopoly. They're also not behaving like knobheads. It's the combination of monopolistic practices and causing harm to consumers that should invoke antitrust enforcement.
There are plenty of other stores to get games from. They're just consistently worse than Steam.
One wonders why other, well funded games stores can't compete on features and sales pricing with steam?
Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...
I use Heroic Launcher to play Epic Game Store games in the SteamOS interface in my Jovian box. I'm able to use the custom controller stuff with it without much problem, but it doesn't fix the other problems.
You need friends for a lack of friend systems to matter :)
They also don't support having a space character in your password.
> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement
So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.
Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.
lock-in?
there's no lock-in in any of the contracts
Valve is not building all this Linux Compatibility out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to avoid being shutdown by Microsoft, who effectively had a monopoly on the OS people used to play games.
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
Sure, none of that is untrue, but they could still engage in rent seeking behavior. They could start requiring subscription fees for stuff that previously didn't require it (like start capping download speeds unless you're part of "Steam+" or something), or blacklist any distro that isn't SteamOS, or make it difficult or impossible to install games from third-party stores (like GOG) on Steam Decks or their upcoming Steam Boxes.
I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.
A "company" is just an organizational model employed by people to pursue the intentions that those people have. It goes without saying that large endeavors involving many people will have a mixture of good and bad intentions.
Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more than a little bit pointless.
I didn’t say you would oppose all organized endeavors. I said we shouldn’t worship companies.
Well, no one is literally worshiping companies, so I interpreted this as a hyperbolic way of saying that people shouldn't express approval for activities done by companies.
But companies themselves are just organizational paradigms used by people to pursue human intentions, and the reason you offered as to why we shouldn't "worship companies" was based on the possibility of people acting on bad intentions within those organizational paradigms.
But the possibility of people acting on bad intentions is present in all contexts of human activity, regardless of what organizational paradigm people are using to coordinate their activities.
So if "worship" resolves to "express approval for", and "companies" resolves to "organized human activity", based on a failure modality that's always present in all cases, then you are actually saying that people should not express approval for organized human activity.
It’s fine to express approval for something a corporation does, but I think you are wrong when you say people don’t worship companies. The cult of Apple is very real.
I mostly meant “let’s look at this stuff with a healthy amount of cynicism”. This isn’t to say we can’t like the good things.
I mean you're completely correct.
But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior.
So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.
I just wonder if it's an inherent symptom of massive success. I'm not talking Valve level of success, but more like Google and Apple and Microsoft levels. Eventually every company has downturns in the market, and whether or not it's fair the investors/board of directors will think it's because of the current strategy, and they'll engage in terrible rent-seeking behavior.
I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.
To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.
Valve already owns the market. There is nothing left to strangle. Every attempt to break through has been a failure and none of those failures can be attributed to an anti-competitive action taken by Valve. They could have engaged in rent seeking a long time ago if they wanted to. They are managing their market position well by not abusing their customers or giving customers a reason to complain to lawmakers.
Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly that nobody even knew they tried.
GOG has managed to do pretty well in their own way. Nowhere near as popular as Steam, obviously, but they hold their own, and they've managed to do it without DRM. Humble Bundle has also managed to do something as well (though admittedly that's largely through selling Steam keys).
I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve hasn't abused their status yet, and maybe they never will, but all it takes is a change in management for that to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to squelch, they still might just decide they want more money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games, and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years, I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about it and take out my credit card and just pay it.
Stuff like this has already happened with other companies (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).
I'm not saying that it will happen, but at this point Steam has so much of the market and so many people have their entire game collections on there that I don't think we should discount the possibility that it could happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
I think an important differentiator is that of all the companies you just listed, Valve is the only private company. That seems to explain a lot of this.
I always took the HL3 memes more as a good-faith joke. Like it's part of gaming culture more than a serious jab at them.
I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)
There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.
These rumors come from Tyler McVicker who regularly gets things wrong and makes stuff up in order to get clicks on youtube. I have no idea why anyone still takes him seriously in 2025.
Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.
From interviews with the Alyx devs, it really sounded like the only reason they didn't call it HL3 was fear of not living up to the name.
Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."
That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).
They decided to make it a prequel for fear of not living up to the name, the decision was made much earlier. If you're at all familiar with the contents of Alyx and the Half-Life franchise it wouldn't have made any sense to call it HL3.
In a narrow sense, it did move along the story point at the end of HL2 (I won’t explain how because there’s no way to do so without massive spoilers). But yeah, it would be weird to call in HL3 just because of that.
Ah, haven't gotten the chance to play it yet. But the same implication - we'll need someone at Valve with a big enough ego to take up the mantle.
I don't think that's how the people at Valve think. These people usually have lifetime dreams to work at Valve well before they do because they admired those early games so much, which if you know the story were held up to very high standards internally and repeatedly. They spent their lives being hyper critical of their own craft and admire Valve because they don't a release subpar product as a rule. So collectively they'll have a LOT of collective ego tied up in whatever that product is, but it's not like "I own this", that would be highly anathema.
pretty sure they don't have a totally flat org structure anymore but I might be wrong
Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in development.
https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...
They also said there was nothing coming for SteamDeck in terms of better hardware about a week before they launched the OLED.
Did they? AFAICT what they actually said was not to expect a faster Steam Deck any time soon, which was true, because the OLED version had basically the same performance as the original and in the two years since they still haven't released anything faster.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
OLED has the same HW as the LCD, with only very minor differences
Maybe they finished it...
I believe for the next Half-Life, latest rumors indicate it is actually back to 2D. During the press event last month, they were also pretty clear that no VR game is currently in development at Valve.
A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a theater sized screen is nice enough.
I'm sure they've tried making it hybrid, aka VR optional. I'm curious if they'd be able to make it work. If not, I don't expect a VR only HL game again.
Some rumors from ~1yr ago indicated they were looking into making it an asymmetric co-op game where one player would be Gordon Freeman on PC and one would be Alyx in VR. Of course, they could have dropped that by now.
Calling Half-Life 2D somehow feels right and wrong at the same time but I get what you mean.
Leaks disproved this in 2023. HLX is a single player non-vr PC game.
Seems unlikely with the steam machine coming? I haven't heard any sign of it specifically being frame only
Yes, I too have dabbled in that strongest of drugs called hopium.
Imagine HL3, Portal 3 et L4D3 but all linux only. oh my
Orange Box 2. Then in another few decades we'd get Orange Box: Alyx.
A killer app is a great way to sell a "console". Windows port can come later.
Doubt it, considering Deadlock still only has Windows builds a year into alpha.
https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/depots/
this would be basically what they did with steam
Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
> Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?
They are assuming you’d build a new machine for Linux, I think.
OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.
Why would you need a new PC to swap operating systems?
>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore.
It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to dethrone Duke Nukem Forever.
There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up. I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from releasing an another new entry in the series that uses revolutionary new technology or whatever.
I prefer not to have HL3 rather than a half-baked one, or a very short episode.
They have only one chance of publishing HL3, and I hope put in it the same love and care they put in 1 and 2.
I'd be very disappointed if they just released it just for the sake of releasing it.
They claim they will only release when the game has something innovative to offer.
But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve releasing virtual card games today?
Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now, they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.
They could publish Episode 3 and then publish Half-Life 3 afterwards. I never understood why people keep insisting they can release only one game. It's not like they don't have average or mediocre titles in the series anyway (Blue Shift and Episode 1 are examples of this).
Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual business.
Their absurdly high 30% cut combined with having the only otherwise decent store with real network effect driven market share is a very real criticism
> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.
So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
> So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive.
No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be.
> Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work".
The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be.
It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.
maybe instead of HL3 they will deliver linux on the desktop for the masses.
because that's the foreseeable trajectory at this point
They are merely trying to commoditize their complement https://gwern.net/complement
Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.
Steam Games can definitely be DRM free too. Its the developer/publishers choice.
Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? As far as I can tell, even indie games require steam to run.
DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?
yes
I copied FTL, and Into The Breach out of my steam directory to another machine
and they work fine
> Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG?
To download and update Steam games you obviously need Steam, but once DRM free games are downloaded you can keep playing them without Steam.
Heck, we even shared some drm-free games someone bought in my friends-group over a personal torrent among us, so we could play coop with each other to test the game out before we bought it ourselves.
Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company
When I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in positions of power today.
I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
I think as long as Valve remains a private company, they can continue Gabe's way of doing things. It's when it's a public company will the leader have the pressure of satisfying shareholder returns as opposed to doing what is right and what got them a loyal base of customers in the first place.
Maybe that's why he stays most of the time away from valve? It's his way of training the company into functioning without him, only intervening occasionally when necessary.
Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers can do the job.
Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can.
I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
well we don't know exactly how involved Gabe Newell is with the actual running of the company now a days or how do they going about their governance.
From what I see it seems like the culture of the company is shared between the leadership roles so it might be possible for the company to continue doing as it has been doing after Gabe.
I think the people at valve are smart and they understand their business and the company very well and that this issue is being taken seriously too.
Good governance exists, it's just that for most companies there's not really an interest in having that because it gets in the way of personal interests of people that are already entrenched in power.
He lives on a yacht and fills his days diving and doing marine research. I'm pretty sure Valve is mostly running itself.
That doesn't mean he isn't still making the important decisions.
And Valve has been deeply rewarded as a result. The stance that you must abuse customers to maximize economic success will be looked back upon as the stupidity it is.
From what Ive read his son is pretty actively involved day to day already at valve.
>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore.
And people have forgotten that they existed. I mean it is 18 years since the orange box.
It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholder value to maximize.
To be fair, without the HL3 memes, would Valve ever become as massive as they are now without them constantly teasing and playing into it?
(answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).
Valve had near-total dominance over PC gaming distribution before HL3 even became a meme.
half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2 and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits.
it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.
there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future.
Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translation layers rather than signed blobs.
These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
That's easy to say. But they do prevent some cheating. Don't believe me? Consider the simplest case: No anti-cheat whatsoever. You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency. That's the worst case. Now, we add minimal anti-cheat that convolutes the binary with lots of extra jumps and loops at runtime. Now, someone needs to spend time figuring out the pattern. That effort isn't free. Now, people have to pay for cheats. Guess what? Visa doesn't want to handle payment processing for your hacks & cheats business. So now you're using sketchy payment processors based out of a third-world country. Guess what else? People will create fake hacks & cheats websites that use those same payment processors, and will just take people's money and never deliver the cheats. You get to try to differentiate yourself from literal scammers, how are you going to do that? You can't put the Visa logo on your website. Because you're legit, and you don't want to get sued. Then, the anti-cheat adds heuristic detection for cheat processes. The anti-cheat company BUYS the cheats and reverse-engineers them and improves the heuristics. then the game company makes everyone sign up with a phone number, and permabans that phone number when they're caught cheating. Now some gamers don't want to risk getting banned. Saying that these factors simply don't exist or are insignificant is certainly one of the opinions of all time.
100% agree. This is exactly the kind of big picture thinking that so many people often seem to miss. I did too, when I was young and thought the world was just filled with black and white, good vs evil dichotomies
> You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency
A properly designed game should not send the position of ennemies out of view
That is not always possible for genres with fast gameplay like most shooters. It's quite common for player movement to be able to put an enemy in view before the light could've round-tripped from the server.
This is generally the anti-cheat problem. Certain genres have gameplay that cannot be implemented without trusting the client at least some of the time.
This is correct, the correct amount of over-sharing by the server is non-zero, because otherwise you give a HUGE advantage for slight ping differences.
It's even worse, the lowest theoretical latency possible based on speed of light alone is not low enough for the speed of movement in many shooters, if the server hid all immediately invisible information.
What do you do with footsteps and other positional audio? On multiplayer shooter games that's very vital information to let you know an enemy is somewhere behind a wall but cheaters can use it to draw visual markers to pinpoint the enemy player.
> These things do not prevent cheating at all.
I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to play those games because of it. There is a benefit to making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it impossible.
I don't think that analogy holds because the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.
The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient, unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, the act of bypassing kernel-level anti-cheat will become commoditized just like every other anti-cheat prior.
No. The same way piracy has been diminished in the mainstream by years of lawsuits and jailtime against the loudest most available sources, the strongest anti-cheats have suppressed the easiest and cheapest paths to cheating on AAA games. Piracy hasn't gone away, but the number of people doing it peaked last decade.
Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating completely, they just need to capture enough cheating (and ban unpredictably) that average people are mostly discouraged. As long as cheat-creators have to scurry around in secrecy and guard their implementations until the implementation is caught, the "good" cheats will never be a commodity on mainstream well-funded games with good anti-cheat.
Cheat-creators have to do the hard hacking and put their livelihoods on the line, they make kids pay up for that.
Piracy didn’t go anywhere, it got corporate sponsorship.
Having some anti-cheat is better than no anti-cheat but my point is it’s not a shield. It’s a cheese grater.
> the environment isn't actively in an arms race against seatbelts.
I would beg to differ. In the US at least, there does seem to be a hidden arms race between safety features and the environment (in the form of car size growth)
I don't know why you brought up VAC as an example. It is a horrible AC, so bad so that an entire service (FaceIT) was built to capitalize on that.
VAC is still a laughing joke in CS2, literally unplayable when you reached 15k+. Riot Vanguard is extremely invasive, but it's leaps and bounds a head of VAC.
And Valve's banning waves long after the fact doesn't improve the players experience at all. CS2 is F2P, alts are easy to get, cheating happens in alost every single high-ranked game, players experience is shit.
> CS2 is F2P
Not anymore for the competitive gamemodes. This was reversed a while ago.
That sounds like it does prevent cheating? But maybe doesn’t prevent ALL cheats. Or do you mean they work so poorly that it doesn’t make any difference at all?
It makes cheating harder and the timeline to a cheat product gets longer than the iteration speed of anticheat. Kind of like fancy locks don't prevent break ins, just take longer to pick and require more specialised tools.
As they say, locks only stop honest people.
They are wrong, though. Locks also stop people who would happily commit an opportunistic theft but who lack the necessary tools or skills, people who would trespass if they could retain some plausible deniability ("oops, I didn't see the signs" vs. "oops, I didn't realise I wasn't supposed to cut that padlock"), and so on.
The honest people are a larger group than the dishonest people.
And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness or self-preservation. Only a select few are truly committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their accounts on the line.
Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western countries).
I mean it works by someone saying look for DotaCheat4.exe and it searches for it. That’s basically it. Also if your engine has the ability to be hooked into (ahem, gta) it will detect that a process has been attached. It may do some memory scanning if they implemented the allocator from the sdk. What I’m saying is, it’s a crap shoot out there whether the devs did or not. Executives use it as a blanket as to not get sued. “We have anti-cheat”. They can claim it was “circumvented” or whatever. They are all garbage. BattleEye, EasyAntiCheat, Vanguard. If you don’t know, here LL giving a run down.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VtHlMTc8lR4&t=49s
Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it.
If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security.
You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far.
But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
> But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
> The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state.
And the SOTA anti-cheats now use IOMMU shenanigans to keep DMA devices from seeing the game state. The arms race continues.
You'll never stop the arms race, but requiring specialized hardware to cheat is as close as you'll get to a decisive victory against cheats.
The vast majority of cheaters in most games are not sophisticated users. Ease of access and use is the biggest issue.
> These things do not prevent cheating at all.
Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.
I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop all crime so you may as well not even try"
Ok, they prevent known cheats that the company has found online behind some subscription site run in the basement in Jersey. True. They do raise the bar, but they aren’t the barrier.
They do prevent some cheating methods on Window, like blocking other processes from reading/writing game process memory.
Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected is the challenge.
Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)
The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.
For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.
Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's happening!
I don't hate the lack of cheating compared to older Battlefield games if I am going to be honest.
I remember reading that Microsoft is trying to crack down on kernel level anti-cheats. Just like anti-virus, they mess with the operating system on a deep level, redirecting/intercepting API calls, sometimes on undocumented and unstable internal APIs.
Not only does this present a huge security risk, it can break existing software and the OS itself. These anti-cheats tend not to be written by people intimately familiar with Windows kernel development, and they cause regressions in existing software which the users then blame on Windows.
That's why Microsoft did Windows Defender and tried to kill off 3rd party anti-virus.
If I remember right, it played a role in the Crowdstrike failures. So yeah wouldn't surprise me MS is hoping to get rid of it.
Apple has gone a similar way with effectively killing kernel extensions for the same reasons. In theory all the kernel extensions use cases have been replaced with "System Extensions" but of course not the same.
Please provide source if you manage to find it as I'm deeply interested in said article.
> Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's happening!
I'm curious, does anyone know how exactly they check for this? How was it actually made unspoofable?
The basic explanation is that it prevents binaries that are not signed by default from being loaded during the boot process. It only restricts the booting process in the uefi stage. If an executable has been modified, then it will not load due to secure boot. Technically there is nothing stopping you from modifying say winload.efi and signing it with your own key then adding that key to your bios keystore so that it will pass secure boot checks and still use secure boot.
I think the biggest thing is that the anticheat devs are using Microsoft's CA to check if your efi executable was signed by Microsoft. If that was the case then its all good and you are allowed to play the game you paid money for.
I haven't tested a self-signed secure boot for battlefield 6, I know some games literally do not care if you signed your own stuff, only if secure boot is actually enabled
edit: Someone else confirmed they require TPM to be enabled too meaning yeah, they are using remote attestation to verify the validity of the signed binary
Disclaimer: This is only an educated guess based upon public info. Also, it's impossible to make something truly unspoofable, but it isn't that hard to raise the bar for spoofing pretty high.
There are two additional concepts built upon the TPM and Secure Boot that matter here, known as Trusted Boot [1,2] and Remote Attestation [2].
Importantly, every TPM has an Endorsement Key (EK) built into it, which is really an asymmetric keypair, and the private key cannot be extracted through any normal means. The EK is accompanied by a certificate, which is signed by the hardware manufacturer and identifies the TPM model. The major manufacturers publish their certificate authorities [3].
So you can get the TPM to digitally sign a difficult-to-forge, time-stamped statement using its EK. Providing this statement along with the TPM's EK certificate on demand attests to a remote party that the system currently has a valid TPM and that the boot process wasn't tampered with.
Common spoofing techniques get defeated in various ways:
- Stale attestations will fail a simple timestamp check
- Forged attestations will have invalid signatures
- A fake TPM will not have a valid EK certificate, or its EK certificate will be self-signed, or its EK certificate will not have a widely recognized issuer
- Trusted Boot will generally expose the presence of obvious defeat mechanisms like virtualization and unsigned drivers
- DMA attacks can be thwarted by an IOMMU, the existence/lack of which can be exposed through Trusted Boot data as well
- If someone manages to extract an EK but shares it online, it will be obvious when it gets reused by multiple users
- If someone finds a vulnerability in a TPM model and shares it online, the model can be blacklisted
Even so, I can still think of an avenue of attack, which is to proxy RA requests to a different, uncompromised system's TPM. The tricky parts are figuring out how to intercept these requests on the compromised system, how to obtain them from the uncompromised system without running any suspicious software, and knowing what other details to spoof that might be obtained through other means but which would contradict the TPM's statement.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...
[2]: https://docs.system-transparency.org/st-1.3.0/docs/selected-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module#Endors...
They also require TPM, which I think facilitates remote attestation for secure boot.
Lack of cheating in BF6?
Afaik there have been wallhacks and aimbots since the open beta.
Perhaps, I have yet to experience anything like what the older games had though.
It might just be the game too - I do think the auto aim is a bit high because I feel like I make aimbot like shots from time to time. And depending on the mode BF6 _wall hacks for you_ if there are players in an area outside of where they are supposed to be defending. I was pretty surprised to see a little red floating person overlay behind a wall.
Anticheat devs could REALLY benefit by having some data scientists involved.
Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
Is it ever? No.
Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human.
In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly) legitimate player data.
> Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.
You mustve missed the part where i spoke of consistency?
Ive played at the pro level. Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency.
I dont care if it takes 50 matches of data for the statistical model to call it inhuman.
Valve has enough data that they could easily make the threshold for a ban something like '10x more consistent at pre-firing than any pro has ever been' with a high confidence borne over many engagements in many matches.
> Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency.
Then all you need to do to fool this anticheat is to add some randomness to the cheat.
Then youve immediately made the cheater worse than the best players to blend in with them. Mission accomplished, cheater nerfed significantly. You wont even know theyre doing it.
There's well analyzed video of a pro player streaming who got temporarily banned for something like this. It might not even have been pre-fire, but post-fire at a different enemy retreating at the same position
https://youtu.be/SFyVRdRcilQ
Valve need to tweak the model so that it requires a higher confidence level before a ban, and to reduce false positives in their data capture methods. This is a mistake but doesnt kill the idea.
We used to track various timings in some of our games to detect cheating. Cheaters find out and change their cheat engines to perform within plausible human reactions. Which is a benefit - now the cheating isn't obvious to everyone, but it still happens. I don't know if you could sprinkle data scientist dust on the problem and come up with a viable cross-game solution though.
Thats a win. Preventing cheaters gaining superhuman advantage significantly reduces their impact.
Tomorrow the cheats will be back with human looking reaction speeds and inhuman decision making that is indistinguishable from expert players.
Good! Thats actually one of the goals. Reduce the advantage cheaters can gain to within human bounds. They can cheat to feel like a good player, but not a god.
"Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban."
Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter, that you can spot it in game data reliable to apply automatic bans?
>Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter
A human can't really, which is why you need to bring in ML. Feed it enough game states of legit players vs known cheaters, and it will be able to find patterns.
There is no need for ML. Games arent the real world.
A suitable game engine would have knowledge of when a shadow, player, grenade, noise, or other reactable event occurs for a given client.
Especially if games arent processed in real time but processed later based on a likelihood of cheating drawn from other stats.
And what happens to that pattern, when the cheat engine adjusts? What happens to the enraged players that got wrongly banned for cheating?
If anyone is wrongly banned the system is too sensitive. Let it capture data for a month before banning someone. Ensure the confidence is crazy high.
Anisotropic mouse movement?
Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two.
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data?
There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.
Throwing in ML jargon and going straight to modelling before understanding the problem reduces your credibility as a data scientist in front of engineers and stakeholders.
As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting good features and data. In this case one difficulty is measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with.
In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if someone is around the corner and start shooting when they come close. For far away targets, lots of people camp at specifc spots and often shoot without directly sighting someone if they anticipate someone crossing - the hit rate may be low but it's a low cost thing to do. Then you have people not hiding too well and showing a toe. Or someone pinpointing the position of an enemy based on information from another player. So the question is, what is the starting point for you to measure the reaction?
Now let's say you successfully measured the reaction time and applied a threshold of 80ms. Bot runners will adapt and sandbag their reaction time, or introduce motions to make it harder to measure mouse movements, and the value of your model now is less than the electricity needed to run it.
So with your proposal to solve the reaction time problem with KL divergence. Congratulations, you just solved a trivial statistics problem to create very little business value.
Appreciate the feedback, you're right - armchair speculation is different than actual data science. Without actual data to examine, we're left with the latter and that can still be a fun exercise even if it doesn't solve any business problem. We're here to chitchat and converse after all.
More like congrats, you just made every cheater far less effective by forcing them to play nearer to human limits.
You arent eliminating cheaters, that's impossible, you are limiting their impact.
If cheaters play indistingushable from normal people, the seems like mission accomplished.
Cheaters don't have to play like normal people to avoid detection. They just have to make it expensive to police them. For example, the game developer may be afraid of a even a 10% false positive ban rate, and as a result won't ban anyone except perhaps a small number of clean-cut cases.
Most cheaters are playing well outside of human limits and doing huge amounts of damage to the legitimate player experience. A 10% safety margin beyond human play sounds reasonable. A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment.
"A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment."
My world is pretty fine, as I don't play games on servers, without active admin/mods that kick and ban people who obviously cheat.
ML solutions can maybe help here, but I believe they can reliable detect cheats, without banning also lucky or skilled players, once I see it.
Human administration is not scalable.
Yep
Like another commentor mentioned, I think that only works for a specific cheat(engine) - as long as they don't adjust (and randomize more for example). If it could be solved with some statistics, I think it would have been done already. I ain't a statistician though, but if you feel confident, I think there is quite some money in it, if you find a real world solution.
Even randomisation would cause their aim to be statistically different to a normal players aim over time.
To be sure. There's at most 6 frames of data per event to work with at 60fps. It's an interesting problem and well suited to statistics.
They do prevent some cheating methods, like read/write memory from other userspace processes.
Motivated cheaters will just hook into PCI directly. Cheating is just part of pc gaming.
> though not all developers elect to enable it.
Looking at you Rust.
Edit:
And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
First i thought you meant the video game Rust.
Then I saw the arewe…yet url and thought you meant Rust the programming language
Then I visited the arewe…yet link and realized it was the Rust game you meant after all
I know what you mean, sometimes I google Rust specific things (the coding language) and get Rust the game.
/r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely don't know how people manage to get as far as posting without noticing where they are.
It’s probably because the “create a Reddit post” form doesn’t require you to even visit the subreddit you are posting to. It DOES show you the rules/sidebar of the subreddit you are about to post to (for /r/rust it includes a link to /r/playrust for the gamers) but apparently many aren’t seeing that.
"Banner blindness" applies to the rules/sidebar. The user sees it, notices it's not what they're looking to interact with, and ignores it. The same thing happens for modal dialogues where the user will click whatever button makes the message go away without bothering to read the message, only the button text.
You are an average person. A program you're using crashes.
The only non-generic word you see in the crash message is "SQLite".
You look it up, find SQLite, and you bother the developers for help.
The problem is as old as labels.
It is hard to perceive that which you are not aware exists even with obvious evidence in your face
That's not a great explanation when there's, you know, rust the material.
For awhile googling “Swift” was like that with Taylor Swift results instead of the programming language.
Likely a case where Google figured out which one you meant through the telemetry of what you clicked on and how you refined your search, now that personalization is automatic. In my case, I get four regular results, which are the financial standard, the programming language, the wikipedia page for the programming language, and an ISP; then I get a "top stories" block that is all about the singer.
More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where either one could be valid.
as a person that plays rust and writes rust I feel this all the time
> I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
It's because the Linux versions of those anti-cheats are significantly weaker than their Windows counterparts.
It's telling that Valve uses a user space anti-cheat (VAC) for Counter-Strike 2, but the competitive community overwhelmingly rejects that and ops to use a third-party Windows-only kernel mode anti-cheat (FACEIT).
I think even the "Major" tournaments that are officially sanctioned and sponsored by Valve, though organized by third parties, usually run on FACEIT or similar.
Cheating in CS2 is rampant and VAC2 seems to be just about useless.
FACEIT is significantly more effective.
I mean, people are dumb.
Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct.
Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there (which is not as common as people make it to be on high trust factor).
You think tournament organizers or pro players know the first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing just like everybody else.
The marketing works because online games get destroyed by cheats. Losing in online games can be full of “feel bad” moments, even without cheaters (network issues, cheesy tactics, balance issues). To think that your opponent won because they outright cheated just makes you wanna quit.
I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.
To me the "web of trust" element frankly seems like the only viable solution. And in fact, its almost here already: https://playsafeid.com/
I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike using facial recognition technology to allow for permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95% of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres, and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially implement when you can guarantee that one account = one person.
Eh, some employers also have root for your work PC, that’s different from asking to install a rootkit on your personal PC.
Wow, what a cool site. Just learned that Hunt: Showdown is supported in Linux. And it wasn't the first time I checked. Will love to give it a try.
Arc Raiders is a great example of a modern and popular multiplayer game that works with proton. I haven't heard about it having a problem with cheating.
Marvel Rivals, Age of Empires 2 DE, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys are other such examples. In fact, Marvel Rivals even explicitly mentioned Bazzite in one of their changelogs! I can't recall an instance when a major game name-dropped a (relatively) minor Linux distro like that.
I think a big portion of that is the rather poorly made anti-tamper solution they are using called 'Theia' most cheat developers are too unintelligent to correctly reverse engineer this kind of binary obfuscation
I'm curious, what makes it poorly made if it is working? I don't know anything about it or the game or the state of cheating in the game.
Poor performance and not super advanced. There are better options on the market that have less performance impact and better obfuscation
I mean the performance of the game otherwise is pretty decent. Frankly better than average.
Could be better without Theia but yeah the developers have done a really good job with ARC Raiders
Valve is the only company I'd let inject anti-cheat software directly into my veins if it meant I could play CS and be sure others were not cheating haha.
Online cheaters are first against the wall when I become dictator...
Maybe they'll secretely fund an open source project to emulate only the windows kernel calls that Anti Cheats use.
As a former cheat developer, I think it is impossible since it is digging into some specific stuff of Windows. For example, some anti-cheat uses PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine and PsSetCreateThreadNotifyRoutine to strip process handle permission, and those thing can't be well emulated, there is simply nothing in the Linux kernel nor in the Wine server to facilitate those yet. What about having a database of games and anticheat that does that, and what if the anticheat also have a whitelist for some apps to "inject" itself into the game process? Those are also needed to be handled and dealt with.
Plus, there are some really simple side channel exploits that your whitelisted app have vulns that you can grab a full-access handle to your anticheat protected game, rendering those kernel level protection useless, despite it also means external cheat and not full blown internal cheat, since interal cheat carrys way more risk, but also way more rewardings, such as fine-level game modification, or even that some 0days are found on the game network stack so maybe there is a buffer overflow or double-free, making sending malicious payload to other players and doing RCEs possible. (It is still possible to do internal cheat injection from external cheat, using techniques such as manual mapping/reflective DLL injecction, that effectively replicates PE loading mechanism, and then you hijack some execution routine at some point to call your injected-allocated code, either through creating a new thread, hijacking existing thread context, APC callback hijack or even exception vector register hijacking, and in general, hijack any kinds of control flow, but anticheat software actively look for those "illegal" stuff in memory and triggers red flag and bans you immediately)
From what I've seen over the years, the biggest problem for anticheat in Linux is that there is too much liberty and freedom, but the anticheat/antivirus is an antithesis to liberty and freedom. This is because anticheat wants to use strong protection mechanism borrowed from antivirus technique to provide a fair gaming experience, at the cost of lowering framerates and increasing processing power, and sometimes BSOD.
And I know it is very cliche at this point, but I always love to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". I therefore only keep Windows to play games lately, and switched to a new laptop, installed CachyOS on it, and transfered all my development stuff over to the laptop. You can basically say I have my main PC at home as a more "free" xbox.
Speaking of xbox, they have even more strict control over the games, that one of the anticheat technique, HVCI (hypervisor-protected code integrity) or VBS, is straight out of the tech from xbox, that it uses Hyper-V to isolate game process and main OS, making xbox impossible to jailbreak. In Windows it prevents some degree of DMA attack by leveragng IOMMU and encrypting the memory content beforehand to makd sure it is not visible to external devices over the PCIe bus.
That said, in other words, it is ultimately all about the tradeoff between freedom and control.
A similar concept, trusted computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
companies will go where the money is. If Valve enables, say EA, to have their yearly franchise and in-game-stores on mobile devices, they will find a way.
I honestly don't know why so many people say that anti-cheat with Proton or SteamMachines won't work. SteamOS is an immutable Linux - especially with their own SteamMachine they can enable SecureBoot and attestation that you are using the SteamOS verbatim efi boot file, kernel, and corret system fs image - all signed by Valve. Just as Battlefield 6 does on windows (relying on SecureBoot). That would still allow you to install other OSes on your SteamDeck/SteamMachine, but it would fail the anticheat attestation. I personally see the push in hardware from Valve particular so that they can support anti-cheat on linux.
I think if Linux gaming becomes popular someone may come up with a solution where you run a native linux kernel-mode anticheat. That somehow connects to the wine-hosted game.
I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's what I think will happen.
I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-win situation, users can escape themself from a bloated Windows and Valve has the pioneering advantage.
I believe the same but,
> they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits.
part is wrong. From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Plus, they're building a moat collectively and from an open source stack. So, given the stack gets enough momentum, having Valve or not as a company won't matter anymore.
It's trying to get the elephant out of the bag, and once it's out, then there's really no way to put it back, because it's being out is better for everybody. Game companies and gamers alike.
> From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Yeah that's what I mean too, that's why I put the "accidentally" in a double-quote.
This sounds like what Red Hat is doing, they created an open-source software, prove the importance of it in the community then sells the support package to enterprise who interested in using it.
Hope that they will not close the door when Microsoft, AWS or Oracle making their own GabeCube and call it SatyaCube, BozosCube or LarryCube
Microsoft already has the XBox and despite being backed by one of the biggest tech companies in the world it's a rather weak product. To add to this, with every major studio acquisition they have done there has been a noticeable increase in game monetization and decrease in quality.
AWS has tried to get into the gaming market and only succeeded in creating giant money sinks even if some of their products were technically appealing.
Oracle making anything consumer-facing, much less something that isn't a total nightmare, seems inconceivable.
Valve is able to completely outmatch competitors in a chosen field because of what they are like as a company. No shareholders that expect quarterly growth. No massive bureaucratic corporate structure, just highly skilled engineers for the most part.
Microsoft is also moving more and more away from hardware exclusivity. Even their Xbox Game Pass service is now not tied to the console.
More broadly, AAA gaming as a whole is also moving away from hardware exclusivity. Third-party developers (like Square-Enix) have been making recent releases for all major platforms, and even some first-party console titles are now coming to PC (eg, the Horizon games from Sony).
I'm optimistic about the future of non-locked-down gaming.
You are absolutely correct. Valve's linux push was driven by developments in the windows platform, specifically around the release of windows 8. Microsoft was pushing a windows store similar to Apple's app store, and Valve was unequivocally stating that they were worried Microsoft would basically lock down the platform and only allow software sales through their own store, destroying their steam business. Gabe said it plainly himself (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377):
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
> This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.
Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e. https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since has been an effort to protect his company against that existential threat.
He didn't just "work on Windows."
GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX, GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.
I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.
Well actually they tried with Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 10 S but failed miserably. Even Apple didn't even try to lock their macOS from installing 3rd party app.
Valve's Steam platform is well liked and actually wanted by gamers. Gamers move their games to the steam launcher and often wait for games to come to steam (e.g. with Anno games from Ubisoft).
This is in contrast with EA's Origin, Microsoft's Xbox PC and Ubisoft's Connect, which everyone hates.
I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone.
And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capitalism is bullshit and that makes Valve stand out.
I have been a big fan of Valve since the Orange Box days and I always dreamed of working there, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is all enabled by the massive monopolistic cash-cow that is Steam that requires a tiny team to maintain. Similarly their top games have minuscule teams and still rake-in millions in microtransactions, fueled by a shadow economy of gambling and speculative trading aimed at kids.
Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.
My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.
They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?
Valve cuts 30% of your revenue no matter how much you earn. They also cut 15% of the transaction by being the middleman on the market.
They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).
They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.
I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.
> acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone
I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.
Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.
Stop deifying companies.
It’s funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.
oh that's funny. do you have a link to where he had said that?
i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some basis. but then again, what an organization is internally and how the organization behave as a whole can be different.
Many of steams consumer benefits were a direct result of Valve getting sued and losing court cases. For example refunds and forced arbitration clause.
They are a significant actor in the market, and as a non-pc-gamer I am glad that their business goals align with Linux users. I don't believe that they do it out of kindness, but that's actually a good thing for a long term investment.
> They are a significant actor in the market, and as a non-pc-gamer I am glad that their business goals align with Linux users.
Until MS (or worse, Oracle) shows up with their half-baked clone (like Xbox Machine or Larry Cube) and ruins everyone's party
The trick is to get your egoistic interests to align with what is good for the world.
Environmentalists also only do what they perceive as doing good (and may as well be objectively good) because not doing so won't jive with their self-image. But that in itself doesn't devalue the thing they did.
If Valve shows anything it is that not being a pushover and trying to align your business interest with your values (and not vice-versa!) can also pay of economically.
Would love to see it on MacOS X -- Steam works great on my Mac Mini for the games it supports, would be great to see everything run on it.
Yep. I know Apple has little motivation to support such a project but it would be great to see them work with Valve on this. Having the majority of Steam games "just work" on modern Macs, like they do on the Steam Deck, would be fantastic.
Apple leadership cares more about "games on the Mac App Store built for Metal on a Mac" than it cares about "games on the Mac". This won't change until leadership changes.
It does not matter what Apple wants if Steam ships their own compatibility layer.
Valve is all-in on Linux and their own hardware. They have no reason to invest tons into a platform with an uncooperative vendor who culturally DGAF about gaming. Why run from Windows only to jump into a more hostile ecosystem? You can still run 32-bit x86 games on Windows ARM, you know.
Also, I'll let everyone in on an open secret.
Apple's real goal isn't even the 30% from the Mac App Store. Their vision is to build a library of games that run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and potentially Apple TV and Vision. You can connect a controller to all these devices, so any game would work (without clunky touch controls). That's why they're pushing Metal and will never adopt Vulkan. They want to make their ecosystem as strong as possible against competing ecosystems.
It's also why they've been pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst, why they don't care for web apps, why the Mac and iPad have gotten closer (they want each device just be a form factor that lets you access the same apps and files, though I expect they'll always keep the Mac as open as it is now), and why they made all their platforms adopt one design language. They probably ported Preview to iOS/iPad, and Home and Clock to the Mac, because they went through the Springboard/LaunchPad and asked themselves: "which of these apps could we bring to every OS?".
It's also why Google is dropping ChromeOS and switching everything to Android. One platform, one app ecosystem. They did it only to keep up with Apple. The tablet/desktop-ish side of their ecosystem lags far behind.
And it's why Valve is going all-in on Linux. Kickstarting an alternative ecosystem.
> They have no reason to invest tons into a platform
Maybe not 'tons', but they've got a solid reason to consider some investment: additional sales from millions of Mac users able to access a huge library of games they were previously denied.
I'm one of those Mac users and I just got myself a Deck last year instead of replacing the PS4 with a PS5. Mac for work, console for play.
I don't think Valve has anything to gain from reinforcing Apple's walled garden.
Honest question, did Apple ever care about games on the Mac as a real priority?
Steve Jobs certainly didn't. I hope it changes because so many coders (Who are also gamers) now use Macbooks or Mac Minis as their development platform.
I remember a friend of mine, gloating about how he could play Unreal Tournament on Mac, and I looked at it, and man did it ever run natively. But I could see a lot rendering wrong and a lot of stutters.
I think the pentium compatibility stuff in the powermac was also supposed to attract gamers, but I recall not being able to progress past the installer for Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, which would have been the game that made me change my mind. Ran the installer tho, which was something.
Apple already made it, it's just that it targets developers rather than end users: https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
I think it's more than "little motivation" if we're being honest. Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably) cut them out. Their very clever approach has been a full end-run around the OS by using Proton, which I'm sure genuinely thrilled Apple... as long as Valve is only doing that to MS.
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
Especially looking at Apples recent gaming history.
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
App stores for desktop computers have pretty consistently failed except for Steam.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
Not sure if that counts, but homebrews cask is some kind of appstore. Yes, command line based, but I can install closed-source software using "brew install --cask <software-name>"
It's a package manager. On Windows, winget serves the same function.
Everyone wants their 30% cut into gaming. It's not worth battling a trillion dollar company on this case.
Sure. And Valve want their own 30% cut.
It does suck if you just want to play games on hardware you own that can handle said games.
Apples biggest weakness is games. But it has a pretty large install base when compared to Linux (not counting phones or servers here).Seems like a win/win. Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
> Apple gets to address their weaknesses and Valve gets a large target market.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched? IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at Apple.
That’s a fair point. I don’t think they care about steam competing on the desktop but mobile is another ballgame entirely.
>Valve gets a large target market
They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point
This is really the endgame, I think. A modern smartphone with a controller attached is effectively the same as a Steam Deck or Switch 2, just with a different OS. Apple has been pushing higher-end games on phones lately (this year has seen iOS versions of Hitman 3, Sniper Elite 4, and Subnautica), and reports are that the new pro phones run them well (the limiting factor being thermal load).
A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.
Games are not a weakness for Apple. They have all the gaming revenue they seem to care about with mobile. They just don't have proper/immediate motivation to apply that effort to desktop. I'm not sure i even care anymore. I'm a valve fanboi at this point, until Gabe leaves and they go corporate.
Mobile overlapping consoles in revenue and Apple had a good way years of taking a 30% cut on top. They are indeed behind fine with sticking as a middleman for gambling simulators that make billions.
It may work out all the same because Apple's attempts such as with Game Porting Toolkit and Metal, boost Valve's attempts with Proton and we may see a convergence where Valve is able to make a majority of Steam games work on Mac without Apple explicitly wanting it.
> Right now Valve is quietly targeting MS' attempt to create a walled garden for gaming on Windows and (probably) cut them out.
Current MS' approach is to not do exclusives and sell all their games on every platform available except Apple's
Yes, that is what I was alluding to.
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
> Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
Main issue is the lack of Vulkan support on macOS. Currently, solutions like MoltenVK have to be developed to add Vulkan support, which isn't as clean as just supporting it.
For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.
LunarG is working on first party Vulkan driver for MacOS https://www.lunarg.com/lunarg-achieves-vulkan-1-3-conformanc.... My understanding is performance is worse than MoltenVK at this point, but it's getting there.
This isn't an "issue" so much as a feature. Apple had some vulkan support until move to the full A1 architecture had them only make Metal a first class citizen to the GPU. Concurrently happening was a pretty nasty breakup of Apple with the Khronos group.
This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.
It's an issue for me, a Mac owner. All the games I want to play have buggy graphics on Mac. I have a PC just for playing with my friends.
Apples decisions are often wrong when it comes to third party software.
It's Android where you need Vulkan. Overwhelming majority of PC games that can run on Vulkan can also support Metal due to the engine they use.
The real barrier is DX games.
No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.
Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one.
There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.
No. For best performance, you have to batch your calls/memory access patterns with TBDR in mind. Dropping in a Steam PC game (indy, AA/AAA) game render pipeline, specifically optimized for Nvidia/AMD/Intel, to a TBDR GPU, is going to give poor performance. That's the context of this discussion. Round pegs DO fit into square holes, you just have to make sure the hole is bigger than would normally be necessary. ;)
Steam frame is more for streaming PCVR than running existing PCVR games natively.
The entire reason vulkan didn't ship with dynamic rendering and instead had its entire renderpass system is because it was to support tile based rendering.
I'm aware it supports tile based rendering. I put it in quotes because support doesn't mean performance. Good TBDR performance requires the developer/engine have the concept of TBDR in mind. 99.9% of the PC games out there do/did NOT have TBDR in mind.
But why? Valve is doing this because they don’t want to have the OS vendor exert total control over them and the gaming industry.
Apple is a terrible choice by that metric.
It'll never happen for a whole bunch of reasons, but a phone with Apple's hardware, Valve's OS, and Nintendo's game library would be amazing.
You can get 2/3rds of that with a steam deck.
Are you looking for Crossover? It's a bit annoying to not run Steam natively (no cmd+H to hide, etc) but it's got a lot of support. Performance is decent on my M2 mini, and even cross-platform stuff like Baldurs Gate 3 is comparable performance to native.
Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.
CodeWeavers, the developers of Crossover, also do most of the development on proton under contract for Valve.
This is speculation but I suspect there's something in that contract that prevents Valve from competing with Crossover on MacOS.
Nah, nothing like that. We explored shipping Proton for macOS early on, but decided it wasn't where we wanted to spend our time, so we removed it[1] to focus on Linux. There's only so many hours in the day, and supporting two platforms is a lot more work than one.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817...
wtf take my money expand your team!!!
That's what CrossOver is for :)
Some crossover games perform better than the native ports. I play Path of Exile on Mac using the Windows client with a translation layer, and it plays better than the native release.
Sadly, that's not true—for instance, I was trying to run the Shadowrun Returns series the other day, and while it launches, it will hang indefinitely when you try to actually start a game. (M4 Max)
I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
Valve employed Alyssa Rosenzweig while she developed the graphics stack for asahi linux. That's a very simple statement that masks the size of the achievement and its impact on the world. No, we haven't entered a golden era of gaming on macs, but the world has been shown the way. And no, the software challenges are not insurmountable.
bummed she left for intel she was next level. asahi lina commented after she left that there's currently no one doing graphics work anymore on asahi. projects kinda got some uncertainty to it now
The last time I can remember a collaboration between Valve and Apple was for the SteamVR support on macOS back in 2016. Sadly it fell apart a year(-ish) after that. But… one can dream!
Unfortunately, this will not happen. Even if they have it all working:
Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome, especially because it really is. Running x86 games or compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
If apple wanted to show that they have good hardware they wouldn't gimp the iPad pro with iOS. They really don't care.
Currently, someone interested in an iPad and needing the power of a MB, will have to buy both.
If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would only have to buy an iPad.
And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I would worry that removing the iPad limitations would increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news to me.
I used to understand/agree with this point, but over the past few years i've transitioned to my ipad pro for mobile usage and it has become my daily driver for mobile computing. When i need macos for anything, i typically will use Jump to connect and do something real quick, but that's rare. I'm starting to not understand why i wouldn't just want an ipad pro running a touch friendly (and i mean it would have to be VERY touch friendly) version of macos. again, i would have normally agreed with you, but that line is starting to blur for me...
I'm not sure what FEX could offer on macOS that Rosetta 2 doesn't already, with better performance thanks to Apple Silicon magic.
Running x86 code on ARM macOS is the most solved part of the stack, if anything needs work it's the API translation layers.
Aren’t most Mac issues now around Metal vs OpenGL and DirectX?
Rosetta 2 is going to be EOL'd within the next few years. A more permanent solution would certainly be welcome.
AIUI they intend to retire support for x86 macOS apps in a few years, but Rosetta will remain as a low-level component so that things like Crossover and Parallels can continue to work. Maybe not forever, but there's no immediate threat of it being EOL'ed.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/10/apple-to-phase-out-rose...
Yeah, that's not very reassuring.
You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now, and way worse working WINE. No, there was never time when we could run whatever software we want on a machine of our choice.
> I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now
Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.
Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.
i’m not sure how end-of-life it will actually be because rosetta is used in apple/container and seems to be a large part of the virtualization stuff apple’s built in the last few years
I would imagine they would disable the user-facing "load x86_64 Mach-O's seamlessly" and other loader magic, and keep around the core for such things.
It would be neat if Valve would fund having Steam Client run on Apple Silicon without Rosetta 2 so arm games like Baldur's Gate 3 can be fully supported.
Are you expecting to run Windows 11 ARM version on your Mac Mini directly, or within Parallels?
I think it's a pretty reasonable wish for more macOS + Apple Silicon support of games, including more native FEX & Proton ARM support within the steam client. (We're lucky Steam works, it's a better games client than the Mac App Store dreams to be, but that's also not saying much either.)
Apple Silicon has no UEFI support except as provided by Asahi, so that would be needed at a minimum to boot Windows 11 natively. Then there's the whole issue of having native Windows drivers for the Apple Silicon-specific hardware.
You’d run FEX with WINE/Proton, no windows needed. If you did use a VM, I’d think it would be a Linux VM. But, Linux VM on macOS could already use Apple’s Rosetta2 for x86_64-to-arm64 translation.
Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.
EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
I think they're wishing for something like the Proton/Fex combination for running x86 Windows games on ARM Macs, like they already do for Linux.
I wonder if Apple's GPT (Game Porting Toolkit) could added to the macOS Steam client as a compatibility tool, like Proton is in the Linux client.
GPTK is mostly a bunch of developer tools for converting to Metal, and the closest it gets to anything like Proton is an "evaluation environment" that is nothing close to Proton's performance. Proton is mostly Wine, and Wine on macOS uses MoltenVK, so it's probably easier to just port Proton.
Direct3D -> Vulkan -> Metal is quite the translation layer sandwich, I wonder if that would have a meaningful impact on performance
The D3D -> VK layer actually seems to speed things up, so maybe we'll just end up back where we started :)
Apple's GPTK only supports D3D12 -> Metal. In addition, it's ambiguous if 3rd parties can distribute the D3DMetal dylib, as there's no license.
kinda funny that Microsoft has tried and failed multiple times to make Windows on ARM work
and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment
A funny detail is that Microsoft's mostly fruitless ARM efforts unintentionally ended up being a boon for Valves ARM effort. From MSVC 2019 they started augmenting x86 binaries with undocumented metadata specifically to assist the Windows x86-on-ARM emulator, but then the FEX team figured out how that works and implemented the same optimizations in their emulator, greatly increasing the performance of most recent Windows games on ARM Linux.
I don't understand what you mean by this. My wife's HP laptop has an ARM processor with Windows and it.. just works? Like everything works. The computer is super fast, quiet, great battery usage, ultrathin and even scary affordable for what you get. All software works. I've not found x64 programs to run noticeably worse, at least not the ones we use, and plenty programs have an ARM build.
As a Windows user you don't even need to know that it's an ARM computer. Just use it like you'd use any other Windows computer.
Don't just say stuff, man. This is not Twitter. Try to at least figure out whether you're vaguely directionally correct before writing snarky comments.
I think they meant that by most metrics, Windows on ARM has not yet had a market impact. Not that the product doesn't work.
That being said, the mindshare well of "Windows on ARM" was poisoned by Windows RT, then later the objectively terrible performance of Windows 10 on ARM at launch.
The key difference is that Valve isn't trying to make Windows work, just desktop gaming, which I'd imagine is a large part of why Microsoft's efforts failed. As much as Linux desktops haven't particularly had much polish over the years, there's still an advantage to taking something bare bones and trying to flesh it out in a way that's works well compared to taking something that's already pretty bloated and then trying to retrofit it into something new.
It's mostly because Microsoft have lost focus & interest in the desktop OS market and have shifted priorities to cloud service (Azure). Right now Microsoft is a sleeping giant that doesn't see the writing on the wall regarding Valve's efforts.
Oh I think they see it, the problem is that they can’t execute anymore. They are pivoting in the same direction but nobody wants to use the XBox Store on Windows and nobody trusts Game Pass anymore.
Why don't they just ask Copilot to do it?
It turns out the best API for gaming on Linux and gaming on ARM was Win32 and x86_64. Who knew?
Well, compiling ARM game binaries is actually super duper easy and just totally fine. The issue Windows actually has with ARM is GPU drivers for the ARM SoCs. Qualcomm graphics drivers are just super slow and unreliable and bad. ARM CPU w AMD GPU is easy mode.
Shows how a stable API will beat the hell out of bleeding-edge improvements every time.
I think the problem is that, until recently, there was little impetus to actually run Windows on devices where ARM actually has a meaningful advantage over x86. The Windows ARM laptops out there today don't impress, not just because of the software, but because the hardware itself isn't "better enough" than Intel or AMD to justify the transition for most people the way Apple Silicon was, especially for games. That is to say nothing of desktops, where battery life isn't even a concern.
Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable" devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first" headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even said not to expect a great experience playing Half-Life: Alyx locally (a nearly 7 year old title).
It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging their bets.
> At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip
I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The next Steam Deck might already switch to ARM looking at what they announced last week.
x86 is on the way out. Not in two years, perhaps not in ten years. But there will come a time where the economics no longer make sense and no one can afford to develop competitive chips for the server+gamers market alone. Then x86 is truly dead.
I sure hope it takes a bit longer than that. It would not be fun having only Qualcomm chips to choose from as a CPU. Either that or Intel/AMD start making their own ARM chips
There are rumours Intel might be the fab for the base M7 chip from Apple. That's the future.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores.
Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the Steam Deck conversation is the fact that AMD graphics performance is well ahead of Qualcomm, and that is extremely important for a gaming device. I'm willing to bet that the next Steam Deck goes with another custom AMD chip, but the generation after that is more of a question mark.
RISC-V is another wildcard that could end up threatening ARM's path to total dominance.
> like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
This is only one of many factors, but I know that high performance instruction decoding doesn't scale nearly as well on x86-64 due to the variable width instructions as it does on ARM. Any reasonable performance OoO core needs to read multilpe instructions ahead in order for the other OoO tricks to work. x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions, and the complexity and power required to do that does not scale linearly since x86-64 instructions can be anywhere from 1 byte to 15 bytes making it very hard to guess where to start reading the second instruction before the first has been decoded. Arm cores have at most 2 widths to deal with and with ARV v8 I think there is only one leading to cores like M1 firestorm that can read 8 instructions ahead in a single cycle. Intel's E cores are able to read 3 instructions at two different addresses (6 total, just not sequential) that can help the core look at predicted branches but doesn't help as much in fast optimized code with fewer branches.
so at the low end of performance where mobile gaming sits you really need an OoO core in order to be able to keep up, but ARM really has a big leg up for that use-case because of the instruction encoding.
> x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions
Intel Lion-cove decodes 8 instructions per cycle and can retire 12. Intel Skymont's triple decoder can even do 9 instructions per cycle and that's without a cache.
AMD's Zen 5 on the other hand has a 6K cache for instruction decoding allowing for 8 instructions per cycle, but still only a 4-wide decoder for each hyper-thread.
And yet AMD is still ahead of intel in both performance and performance-per-watt. So maybe this whole instruction decode thing is not as important as people are saying.
> My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
It's a distinction without a difference. x86 is not currently competitive in anything smaller than a laptop. Even in a laptop, the only reason it hasn't eaten the market is Microsoft is uninterested and Apple doesn't tell the Joker where it gets its wonderful toys.
Market forces are at play here, exactly like they were in the 90s with Intel's massive gains. ARM is making money hand over fist while x86 is getting squeezed. There will come a time where it won't make economic sense to invest in x86, technical merits be damned.
> like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.
It doesn't matter if there's an inherent, fundamental flaw in the ISA, if Intel can't, for whatever reason(s), develop an x86 chip that actually beats ARM on performance per watt in a broadly-applicable way.
It may have taken them a while, but it does now work fine.
Define 'fine'
You don't notice you're on ARM at all. Everything "Just Works."
And you're seeing 20+ hours battery under normal workloads (i.e. not spec sheet "20 hours" but day-to-day). I've been mainlining a Windows ARM laptop for six months, and am yet to run into anything I couldn't do.
I run WoA on my daily work laptop and everything I run other than some of the junky IT-pushed apps (outlook extension to report phishing, etc.) are ARM64-native and run as expected.
That's good to hear, I remember that "holy shit" moment when I first moved to an Apple Silicon mac, I guess Microsoft are getting there but in a more hap-hazard "we'll make eventually" sort of way
That actually makes me think of the transition to high-res displays - Apple had like a year of pain when they introduced retina displays and non-updated assets would look blurry, whereas MS (and third-party devs) took years to get Windows to the point where mostly everything looks right at higher scaling levels.
Is a great way of looking at it
They can't even make Explorer work. They're pathetic.
Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026.
Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:
* Lenovo Legion Go S
* Asus ROG Ally
But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-handheld-gaming-devices
It won't be for a while, since Valve is releasing the Steam Machine next year and has commented that they are waiting until they can build a Steam Deck successor that is significantly better than the original.[1] My guess is 2027.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the game.
> Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do
I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you literally can just use the system however you want as a desktop OS as a bonus...
I would assume Steam Deck 2 isn't dropping before at least H2 2026, if not later, if they didn't bring it out with the announcement of the other devices.
Valve's only official statement as far as I know is that it will come when they see a significant enough hardware upgrade to warrant a new system. If they don't move to ARM, AMD's Medusa APUs are their next architecture with major upgrades, so I would guess that Valve would order another custom AMD chip but based on Medusa, which won't release until at least 2027. I would guess at least H2 2027 but probably early 2028 for an AMD-based Steam Deck 2.
I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon, because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did.
Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.
[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-...
The X2 [1] is suppose to be more competitive now.
[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/qualcomms-snapdragon-x2-elite
Does ARM support PCIe, by the way? Or has no one combined ARM with a dGPU because it's ridiculous to combine a low-voltage CPU with a space heater from Nvidia?
The PCI bus has nothing to do with the instruction set. Usually it is just a block a designer can add to a chip, and connect to an internal bus like AXI, give or take a few other adjustments on the chip. You can have PCIe buses without proper CPUs, even: it's quite common to find them paired with FPGAs.
For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-raspberry-pi5/ (random link).
Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller, buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.
AMD has an ARM chip in the works, and there's nothing about RDNA which makes it unsuitable for use alongside ARM.
I recently bought a Legion Go S because the primary way I game nowadays is streaming from my desktop to a handheld, and the higher quality display (1900x1200 resolution with 120 Hz over the 1280x800 and 90 Hz on the Steam Deck OLED) seemed worthwhile given that my desktop can easily provide enough throughput to play with relatively high graphics settings. It came with SteamOS preinstalled, and from a software perspective, everything does seem pretty close to identical. The only things I've slightly missed from the Steam Deck are slight hardware nits with the Legion Go S; the placement of the equivalent of the two SteamOS-specific buttons (not sure exactly how to refer to them, but they're labeled "Steam" and "..." on the Deck) just above the Start and Select buttons while looking and feeling the same mixes me up sometimes in a way that never happened on the Deck, and I miss having four unmapped buttons on the back of the device that I can set up however I like in games rather than only two. I also tend to prefer having symmetrical thumbsticks higher up on the device rather than having one high and one low; I've noticed that my hands aren't quite as comfortable when using the D-pad for extended amounts of time, which is unfortunate given my preference for it when playing stuff like emulated GBA games (incidentally one of the few things I tend to do locally instead of streaming; the low power profile setting already is an easy battery life win when streaming, and in practice it make the battery life when GBA emulation also much more tolerable, along with keeping the fans much quieter without seeming to impact performance of the emulation, given that even with this setting the fast-forward function can go far faster than I'd ever need it to).
If you're considering getting an alternative handheld, a better OS would be either Bazzite or CachyOS Handheld edition. SteamOS is not bad, but it uses an older kernel+graphics stack which doesn't make it very ideal for running on recent hardware. Plus, dedicated gaming distros like Bazzite have additional hardware support (like thirdparty game controllers) which may not be supported in SteamOS.
Currently, AMD Strix Halo based handhelds are the most powerful portable gaming devices out there, with the top three being the GPD Win 5, the OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex, and the AYANEO Next 2. Of these three, the GPD Win 5 has already started shipping. Problem is they're stupid expensive.
Personally, I will wait until I can run FSR4 natively on these portables, because FSR makes a pretty significant QoL improvement on these handhelds.
FWIW it's fairly straightforward to set up FSR4 with Proton-GE nowadays, assuming you're comfortable with editing one config file or manually specifying an env var for the game[1]. I'm not sure if using an alternate version of Proton would be considered "native" though, or if you mean for the default version of proton (or for Linux builds of games specifically), but setting it up is a fairly straightforward process even for people who might prefer not to use the terminal if you use something like ProtonUp to manage the installation for you. I imagine that the process for using a custom Proton isn't much different on Bazzite and CachyOS, although I'm not sure whether it would be something commonly done on CachyOS given that they have their own Proton distribution.
[1]: I don't think there's a way to link to it directly, but `PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1` (or a specific different version if you'd like) is documented in the README in this table: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom#modifica...
MLID says 2028+: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Srvv_Zd_k4c
No earlier than 2027, it's valve you're talking about, they don't need to rush
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Valve don't want to sell hardware, they want to sell games. They only make hardware as flagships for new markets, then they want other hardware manufacturers to take over.
the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
Valves moving into hardware more than ever right now, not moving away from it. They've already sand multiple times a deck 2 is on the cards, but only when theres enough of a hardware bump to make it make sense as a product. Slapping a tiny bit newer cpu in there and calling it a Steam Deck 2 isn't what Valve are about.
They definitely are working on it. They announced the steam machine, steam controller, and the valve frame (standalone vr headset with seamless screen sharing from a PC), and in their reveal video the first thing they rather coyly say is “we’d love to share information about our next Steam deck, but that’s for another day!” and announce a bunch of other cool stuff.
Valve has said they want at least double the capabilities, while still fitting in a similar power envelope. Unsaid is that it also needs to fit in the same price budget, but I tend to believe that's their intent. It's gonna be a while. Valve got a stellar deal on some somewhat unusual Zen2 APUs, orginally built for Magic Leap; finding a similar good deal is going to take time. I sort of hope Valve isnt going to put out a $1600 Halo system (but probably would buy such a next-gen Gorgon Halo system). Maybe Gorgon Point is good enough for them, in which case yeah 2026H2 is reasonable.
Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over? There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
Sorry, good catch - yes, I meant 2026 or 2027!
Can someone tell me how much more power efficient is ARM actually? Like under load when gaming, not in a phone that sleeps most of the time. I've heard both claims, that it's still a huge difference and that for new AMD Zen it's basically the same.
The instruction set has marginal impact. But many power efficient chips happen to be using the ARM instruction set today.
I think that's still highly debatable. Intel and AMD claim the instruction set makes no difference... but of course they would. And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips?
Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact" would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. And there's no way the ISA makes 20% difference.
But today I'd say "marginal impact" is less than 5% which is way more debatable.
> And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips?
Where are the power inefficient x86 chips? If you normalize for production process and put the chips under synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for wide SIMD/vector workloads, but more efficient at idle.
AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash cows aren't in manufacturing mobile chipsets, and neither of them have sweetheart deals on ARM IP with Softbank like Apple does. For the markets they address, it's not unlikely that ARM would be both unprofitable and more power-hungry.
Jim Keller goes into some detail about what difference the ISA makes in general in this clip https://youtu.be/yTMRGERZrQE?si=u-dEXwxp0MWPQumy
Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.
Branch prediction is where the magic happens today.
Jim Keller has to say that.
The stage is yours if you choose to refute him.
>Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.
Yet, on a CISC ISA, you still have to support everything else, which is essentially cruft.
Does that matter? I lean towards the yes-the-ISA-matters camp, but I'm also under the impression that most silicon is dark.
Intel spent years trying to get manufacturers to use their x86 chips in phones, but manufacturers turned them down, because the power efficiency was never good enough.
Well, they were targeting Android, and the apps were emulating ARM on x86, and they were going against a strong incumbent. Accounts on the web of this failure seem to bring up other failings as the main problems.
Eg this review of the AZ210 phone from 2012 seems to think the battery life was good: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/orange-san-diego
"Battery life during our test period seemed to be pretty good and perhaps slightly better than many dual-core Android phone’s we’ve tested."
> the apps were emulating ARM on x86
They weren't (except some games maybe). Most apps were written in Java and JITed.
Well, apps tuned for performance and apps using native code have more than a little overlap. Even back then there were a lot of apps besides games that used native code for the hot code paths. But games of course are huge by themselves, and besides performance you need to have good power efficiency in running them.
Here's some more details: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/02/arm_test_results_atta...
(note it's a 2-part, the "next page" link is small print )
You're basically reiterating exactly what I just said. Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex designs at that point.
Yes, it cost Intel their smartphone contracts, but those weren't high-margin sales in the first place. Conversely, ARM's capricious licensing meant that we wouldn't see truly high-performance ARM cores until M1 and Neoverse hit the market.
> Intel had no interest in licensing ARM's IP, they'd have made more money selling their fab space for Cortex designs at that point.
Maybe, but the fact remains that they spent years trying to make an Atom that could fit the performance/watt that smartphone makers needed to be competitive, and they couldn't do it, which pretty strongly suggests it's fundamentally difficult. Even if they now try to sour-grapes that they just weren't really trying, I don't believe them.
I think we're talking past each other here. I already mentioned this in my original comment:
From Intel's perspective, the decision to invest in x86 was purely fiscal. With the benefit of hindsight, it's also pretty obvious that licensing ARM would not have saved the company. Intel was still hamstrung by DUV fabs. It made no sense to abandon their high-margin datacenter market to chase low-margin SOCs.It's workload-dependent. On-paper, ARM is more power-efficient at idle and simple ops, but slows down dramatically when trying to translate/compose SIMD instructions.
You seem to have conflated SIMD and emulation in the context of performance. ARM has it's own SIMD instructions and doesn't take a performance hit when executing those. Translating x86 SIMD to ARM has an overhead that causes a performance hit, which is due to emulation.
Both incur a performance hit. ARM NEON isn't fully analogous to modern AVX or SSE, so even a 1:1 native port will compile down to more bytecode than x86. This issue is definitely exacerbated when translating, but inherent to any comparison of the two.
Hypothetically, if Valve made a strong push to make SteamOS compatible with all Windows programs, not just games, could they make a serious run at knocking down Windows?
And why would they care? Not even Microsoft really cares about Windows licensing for consumers and businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows.
There is no real business case.
>businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows.
why not? If it's cheaper and compatible, why not?
The value in software at that scale isn't the product. It's the support. And Valve's support as is is really shaky.
Businesses will happily throw a few million to make tech support another businesses' problem. Cheaper than maintaining a team in-house.
That’s not how Big Enterprise works. “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”. Can you imagine the reputational risk of whoever decided that when something goes wrong they didn’t go with Microsoft? No one is going to trust a gaming company when it comes to their entire IT infrastructure.
Besides businesses have an all in one contract with Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL Server, Office, a certain number of seats for MSDN for their developers, Azure DevOps (separate from Azure - it’s the modern equivalent of Team Foundation Server), and the list goes on. They don’t care about saving a couple of dollars on Windows license.
I don't think they'd target businesses. I think they could totally ride the current gamers "Switching to Linux instead migrating to Windows 11" wave. Those users would definitely appreciate better compatibility with Windows apps.
> I think they could totally ride the current gamers "Switching to Linux instead migrating to Windows 11" wave. Those users would definitely appreciate better compatibility with Windows apps.
Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay for it?
I guess improving compatibility with general-purpose Windows apps might help them sell a few more Steam Machines, but it's hard to think that it's really going to move the needle.
> Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay for it?
Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the store. SteamOS is presumably free to install on your own hardware once it has a general release.
> Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the store.
Right, so my question is how does better compatibility with (non-game) Windows apps help them make more money?
A better Linux desktop experience means it's more viable as a daily driver, which makes it more likely to be used for gaming instead of Windows.
Valve wants independence from Microsoft Windows, a better Linux desktop is part of that.
It's also possible they'd strike a deal and sell the software via Steam platform. I don't see why would developers object that, after all it would be a new market for then previously out of reach. Doubt Microsoft would agree, but smaller devs for sure.
The big thing is that the current SteamOS image is incomplete and missing a lot of key features that the Steam products have, since it's optimized for that. That's been the one big sticking point for it as of now.
So Valve will finally make it the “Year of Linux on your Desktop”?
Here’s an idea, charge money for it?
I’m sure there are lots of businesses that dislike Microsoft and the freemium model they’re using.
Business don’t “dislike” Microsoft enough to go with a game developer and revalidatd all of their software over their entire organizations. The people making the decisions don’t go around worrying about nerd wars.
They definitely aren’t going to trust the long term viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing operating systems and supporting business for almost half a century.
$20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you support every Windows APi forever. You’re not going to tie your horse to valve
If you include all the low level works needed to make them work well which is a lot, then maybe.
For an understanding of what Valve are doing, here is a 1 hour talk by Gabe Newell (CEO):
Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
TL;DR:
* The most skilled workers are the most undervalued
* Make products to serve the customer
* Management is a skill, not a career path
* The only people they consider themselves to be unable to compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient way of producing things.
Given how arm license is know to be less than friendly.... Wouldn't it be preferable to explore a RISCV architecture.
As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.
Have we seen a commercially available high performance 64-bit RISCV chip at production scale yet?
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.
>at production scale
You can even omit that part and the result is the same: nothing
>arm license is know to be less than friendly
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
Agree but I would argue RISC is catching up fast.
It’s not even close. Samsung alone ships around 400 million phones a year, that’s 400 million ARM devices a year from a single manufacturer. The number of total consumer ARM devices sold each year is in the billions.
RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.
No one has yet produced a RISC-V CPU or SoC with truly competitive CPU and GPU performance and compatibility to the current state of arm64 or amd64.
It’s a catch-22: why build a RISC-V CPU if there’s no software for it, and why write software if there’s no CPU to run it?
Until there's a common, well-supported, and sufficiently performant family of RISC-V SoCs or CPUs with support for existing well-supported GPUs, RISC-V support will be a massive pain in the ass of a moving/fragmented target.
This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU support.
RISCV is at least a decade, if not two from being useful enough for mainstream adoption. Neither the hardware or software is anywhere close to being ready.
That's a geopolitical question.
ARM is Western
RISC is China / Eastern
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
> RISC is China/Eastern
RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. It's roughly as Western as West realistically gets, short of being made in Hawaii.
> That's a geopolitical question
Sure, but that's not actually about where RISC-V is from. It's that it's a purposely open platform -- so much so that its governing body literally moved to Switzerland.
The reason it's a geopolitical question is more to do with what we did to their supply chains with sanctions on companies like Huawei and ZTE, and what COVID did to everyone's supply chains independently of that. Both of those things made it really evident that some domestic supply chains are critical. (On both sides -- see: the CHIPS Act)
Where RISC-V comes back in is that open source doesn't really have a functioning concept of export restrictions. Which makes it an attractive contingency plan to develop further in the event of sanctions happening again, since these measures can and have extended to chip licenses.
(Edit: I'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with valid concerns about Huawei, raised by various other sources. I'm less familiar with ZTE's history, but my point in either case is more of a practical one.)
> RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley.
That doesn't matter any more than, IDK, the first maid cafes being American. China is where RISC-V is getting adopted, they're the ones who are running with it.
> RISC is China / Eastern
Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading picture in bad faith, please consider this: - https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu - https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... - https://riscv.org/about/ -> "RISC-V International Association in Switzerland"
Sure, but that's orthogonal to geopolitics and intelligence.
US policy makers are actively attacking RISC-V and dissuading its use.
China has an increasingly large upper hand in the RISC-V ecosystem and can use that to remove Western surveillance and replace it with their own.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/regarding-proposed-u...
No: RISC is open ARM is closed.
I suspect that many projects—such as BOOM—have stalled as a consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved, including stakeholders in Western countries.
RISC-V the ISA is open; RISC-V implementations need not be. There's no reason to believe that any truly high-performance implementations will be usefully open.
There are also many high-performance Chinese implementations that are open-source (e.g., XuanTie C910, XiangShan, etc.).
While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5 is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source collaborative effort could, in the long run, significantly change the situation. For example, current versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz (early where at ~9).
Yeah, but then the US doesn't get to spy on you anymore ;)
Stuff tends to stay open until a new leader emerges. Then the closed source shell appears.
We've seen this with the hyperscalers and in a million other places.
Use open to pressure and weed out incumbents and market leaders. Then you're free to do whatever.
So we'd be replacing NSA spying with MSS spying.
And since China has such a lead, you'll be using their implementations.
That's why this is geopolitical.
The DoD and Five Eyes prefer ARM, where the US maintains a strong lead.
*RISC-V
ARM is a RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_comput...
The one thing that worries me is that PC gaming is going fast to requiring controller support.
Which is reducing the complexity of control schemes to either nothing or mortal kombat like combos.
Forward, down, forward, high punch to build a new city in a 4X in a few years?
> PC gaming is going fast to requiring controller support.
Hmmm I don't know. I did play Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a controller but I also played Baldur's Gate 3 on mouse and keyboard. I also play VR games with controllers or hand tracking. Basically I play with whatever the game recommends.
To me it's like saying PC game is dead because mobile phone is so popular. Sure a LOT of players, and thus money, goes into mobile gaming but that doesn't prevent proper AAA and indies games on PC to have interesting mechanics.
PS: if you are into these kind of things checkout exotic controllers in events like Amaze. I remember a collaborative where you had to blow in pipes to push a rocket in the right direction and plenty of weirder stuff. Really cool but totally niche.
> Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a controller
I play soulsbornes on consoles with a controller, of course. Because From doesn't know how to do any other control scheme, they have "console DNA".
But how do you play Civilization (<= 5, the good ones) with a controller?
The one very visible trend in the last 30 years of game development was about reducing input complexity. It has nothing to do with complexity of games themselves. Now instead of fighting clunky controls like in good old times you fight game challenges, where the input tries hard to be as transparent as possible
> you fight game challenges
Like "kill 100.000 mobs" ?
With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)
And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.
I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
I genuinely think you're hallucinating this threat to keyboard/mouse gaming input for anything other than AAA console-first releases and for specific genres like action/fighting games. Keyboard/mouse is still by far the dominant input scheme for PC gaming and PC gamers are broadly quite firmly set on this choice.
You’re sure developers won’t feel guided to get the steam deck and steam box badges for their titles to ensure more sales?
Depends entirely on the genre of the game, the resources available to the developer, and the pressures they're facing from management. Most of the games in my library either have controller support as an afterthought or not at all. Controllers have been the minority choice in PC gaming since about forever and I haven't noticed that changing. What has changed is the gaming industry has created de facto standards and idioms for how PC games should handle. Play early shooters with their default setting and you'll get to experience all kinds of key mapping that send modern gamers looking for mods to fix it or another game to play. These days you can pretty much count on WASD for movement, the mouse for looking. Nobody ships a game with movement bound to the arrow keys or modal mouse look. Game developers now meet gamers where they are, and for PC games that is almost always mouse and keyboard, except in those genres where gamers expect controllers.
Controllers provide analogue controls (eg. thumbsticks and triggers) that most keyboards don't have.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
Heh the MK combo mention was a joke. Forgot I’m on HN.
Original MK, Sub-Zero spine tear, sigh, the first one I ever did. Got me into gamedev. I appreciated it!
Had to look it up to post :)
It was back in the days when we gathered at the kid whose keyboard could actually support so many simultaneous keypresses and did tournaments.
Trying to play with 2 players on the same keyboard was a nightmare. On mine WASD seemed to cope better than the arrows, so there was always a rush to pick sides of the keyboard. Ah, good times.
Oh so they did not "adopt" Fex, they actually financed the leading developer from the start.
I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.
How did you do that?
I followed the same steps the Verge reporter did: Downloaded GameHub, connected my Steam account. The initial boot was lengthy, but it worked.
Commoditize your complements (layers above and below).
I suppose this will is in order to be able to push lower powered hand helds to penetrate further into global markets. Not everyone can afford an X64 Nvidia usd5000 gaming workstation.
Given how expensive PC gaming is, between GPU and memory price explosions, I imagine everything Valve is doing, including recently announced hardware, is all in service of keeping Steam relevant.
Video tech is driven by pr0n and OS tech is driven by games.
Valve has done wonders for Linux. I've often thought about this: https://kaveh.page/blog/linux-valve
> When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment.
At which point does this pay off the emulation overhead? Fex has a lot of work to do to bridge two ISAs while going through the black box of compiler output of assembly, right?
afaia emulators like Fex are within 30 to 70% of native performance. On the fringes worse or better. But overall emulation seems totally fine. Plus emulator technology in general could be used for binary optimization rather than strict mappings, opening up space for more optimization.
> and that’s when the Fex compatibility layer was started, because we knew there was close to a decade of work needed before it would be robust enough people could rely on it for their libraries.
In a recent Linus Tech Tips video, Linus Torvalds (original Linus) was asked, "if you could go back in time and start the Linux project from scratch, what would you do differently?" He had two answers, one was "nothing," and the other was "if I knew how much work this was going to take, I never would have started this project."
It makes me wonder, is there some kind of blissful ignorance required to kick off a project that will take you years to see through? How many times have I self limited myself, stopped myself from starting something, because I put on my lead hat and did some estimations and thought eh, not worth it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA
Don’t you think that if usage goes significantly up, MS will just use its lawyers to shut down all of these cute initiatives ?
No, the supreme court has settled it [0], there's no basis for a lawsuit.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
Does anyone know what the limfac is? The machine code produced is of course different on different CPU arches, but isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.
The exception I see is if SIMD intrinsics.
This system allows playing unmodified production x86 executables on arm64. It doesn’t have anything to do with the developers.
That's great, but begs the question: why not just compile the games for ARM?
Because this works for the enormous back catalog of games that already exist, many of which I bet companies no longer have the code or a working build system for, and for new games it doesn't require the developers to do anything because many (most?) of them wouldn't bother
They may provide an option for developers to distribute a native ARM build (which some are already building for Quest titles that can be brought over to Steam Frame) but one of Steam's main advantages is their massive x86 games catalog so they certainly don't want to require that
So Valve won't need to convince developers to do anything expensive and old games will also work. Most games on Steam Deck aren't tested by the original developer at all.
Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in commercial engines.
You need to convince all developers that all 117,881 Steam games need be recompiled for ARM. Hopefully they have a working build environment, have appropriate libraries built for ARM, still have the source code, and are able to do the testing to see if the same code works correctly on ARM.
Think back to the x86 32->64 bit transition, but much worse, since ARM is more niche and there are more arch differences.
You need all your 85 3rd party middlewares and dependencies (and transitive dependencies) to support the new architecture. The last 10% of which is going to be especially painful. And your platform native APIs. And your compilers. And you want to keep the codebase still working for the mainstream architecture so you add lots of new configuration combos / alternative code paths everywhere, and multiply your testing burden. And you will get mystery bugs which are hard to attribute to any single change since getting the game to run at all already required a zillion different changes around the codebase. And probably other stuff I didn't think of.
So that's for one game. Now convince everyone who has published a game on Steam to take on such a project, nearly all of whom have ages ago moved on and probably don't have the original programmers on staff anymore. Of course it should also be profitable for the developer and publisher in each case (and more profitable & interesting than whatever else they could be doing with their time).
It's a chicken and egg problem. Lack of ARM PCs due to software support, lack of software support due to negligible market share.
Same argument can be applied to Linux. Why not just compile the software for Linux. Not that the most companies couldn't do it, it's just not worth the hassle for 1-3% of userbase. Situation with Linux also demonstrates that it's not enough to have just the OS + few dozen games/software for which hardware company sponsored ports, not even support for 10 or 30% of software is enough. You need a support for 50-80% of software for people to consider moving. Single program is enough reason for people to reject the idea of moving to new platform.
Only way to achieve that is when a large company takes the risk and invests in both, build a modern hardware and also builds an emulation layer to avoid the complete lack of software. Emulator makes the platform barely usable as daily driver for some users. With more users it makes sense for developers to port the software resulting in positive feedback loop. But you need to reach a minimum threshold for it to happen.
Compilation for ARM isn't the biggest issue by itself. You also need to get all the vendors of third party libraries you use to port them first. Which in turn might depend on binary blobs from someone else again. Historically backwards compatibility has been a lot more relevant on windows, but that's also a big weakness for migration to new architecture. A lot more third party binary blobs for which the developers of final software don't have the source code maybe somewhere down the dependency tree not at the top. A lot more users using ancient versions of software. Also more likely that there developers sitting on old versions of Visual Studio compared macOS.
If you compare the situation with how Apple silicon migration happened. * Releasing single macBook model with new CPU is much bigger fraction of mac hardware market share compared to releasing single Windows laptop with ARM cpu.
* Apple had already trained both the developers and users to update more frequently. Want to publish in Apple Appstore your software need to be compiled with at least XCode version X, targeting SDK version Y. Plenty of other changes which forced most developers to rebuild their apps and users to update so that their Apps work without requiring workarounds or not stand out (Gatekeeper and code signing, code notarization, various UI style and guideline changes)
* XCode unlike Visual Studio is available for free, there is less friction migrating to new XCode versions.
* More frequent incremental macOS updates compared to major Windows versions.
* At the time of initial launch large fraction of macOS software worked with the help of Rosetta, and significant fraction received native port over the next 1-2 years. It was quickly clear that all future mackBooks will be ARM.
* There are developers making macOS exclusive software for which the selling point is that it's macOS native using native macOS UI frameworks and following macOS conventions. Such developers are a lot more likely to quickly recompile their software for the latest version of macOS and mac computers or make whatever changes necessary to fit in. There is almost no Windows software whose main selling point is that it is Windows native.
* Apple users had little choice. There was maybe 1 generation of new Intel based Apple computers in parallel with ARM based ones. There are no other manufactuers making Apple computers with x86 CPUs.
...because there are thousands upon thousands of games that will never be compiled for ARM?
Just look at all the "native macOS" games from the 2010s that are completely unplayable on modern Macs. Then look at all the Windows games from the 1990s that are still playable today. That's why.
> isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.
But game devs (at least of a certain type) are notorious for thinking about low-level hardware performance right from the start. As a class I'm pretty sure game devs use godbolt much, much more than your typical developer.
Sadly, nowadays very few, if any, game developers care about performance or optimizations. Look at recent headline about "Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB" and it was done by simply deduplicating assets. Gone are the days of finding inredible ways to use less opcodes that game would feel smoother.
But ... all that duplication was being _done on purpose to achieve better performance_ due to low-level concerns about access times on legacy HDDs?
As far as I can tell, there was no actual low-level optimization being done. In fact, it appears they did not even think to benchmark before committing to 130gb of bloat.
This reads to me as "we did a google search about HDD loading times and built our game's infrastructure around some random Reddit post without reasoning about or benchmarking our own codebase at any point, ever".I think we can all agree that performance is often an afterthought to game developers, particular in bigger productions, but HD2 is sort of a bad example for that.
2026 will be the year of the linux desktop
I used to have `echo "$((( $(date +%Y) + 1 ))) will be the year of the linux desktop"` at the end of my .bashrc
Linux desktop is getting better every year, meanwhile Windows and arguably MacOS are getting worse every year.
this is true, but linux desktop is still fragmented hell and will be for at least a few more years
If you ever get Linux to boot on your Snapdragon notebook...
The best thing Valve could do is nuke Wayland/X11/Xwayland from orbit. Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs. X11 is ancient and screen tears. Xwayland is the worst of both worlds.
> Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs
KDE supports Wayland: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
Nvidia has had Wayland support for a while. Here are their latest beta drivers. The first item of the release notes is about Wayland: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/258750/
Is the problem in this relationship Wayland of Nvidia? It is a shame that GPU's are pretty much the one big part of your computer that doesn't really conform to the general "ownership" model.
What do you use or recommend?
I don't use Linux on laptops or desktops, only servers. I've been through all that pain. The userland has a long way to go to be a good OS everyone can use.
Since you don't have a recommendation, your criticism of X11/Wayland feels a bit hollow. You can just say you don't like Linux OSs instead.
You clearly didn't use Linux any time recently.
Nope, it still sucks. It's no good as an OS for general users. The average user has no idea what it even means to have an NVIDIA GPU, let alone be able to diagnose why their screen scaling is all fucked up or understand why they see stuff about 'killing child processes' when they press the power button.
It is good, but if you didn't use it in forever, you won't actually know if it is.
You're basically confirming the parent's suspicions. Nvidia has supported Wayland since their 550 series drivers, for the last two years desktop Linux has run fine on damn near every supported card.
You're not speaking for the "average user" here, you're speaking for yourself. We have a benchmark for what the average user thinks about Linux, and it's called a Steam Deck. You know what those users never mention? X11, Wayland, Xwayland or any of the stereotypical 2012-era boogeymen you're complaining about.
It's almost as if... you haven't used Linux in years. I won't accuse you outright, but my suspicions are mounting. (posted from an RTX 3070 on Wayland)
No, thanks. That's the worst Android did, creating their own incompatible thing. We don't need another NIH like that.
Android is a much more successful platform than the Linux desktop.
Not as a desktop OS.
More?
Linux desktop is non-existant, compared to Android
And that only created a problem by making the impact of that rift worse. So we don't need even more of such effects. Ubuntu tried going there with Mir, but luckily they figured out it was a really bad idea in time.
Yooo this is awesome, maybe we will finally get some game support on Macs now
Doubtful, the article is about FEX-emu and Apple has only shown interest in native ports of games to their platform.
Plus, it looks like upstream FEX doesn't play very nice with Apple Silicon in the first place.
I find it kinda ironic that they phase out 32bit at the same time. I’d guess it would be easier to emulate 32but x86, although the difference perhaps goes away with a JIT.
There's no point in emulating just 32-bit x86 when modern games are all built for x86-64 plus several extensions. If they could make devs target an arch of their choice, they'd ask for aarch64 and skip funding FEX.
I was also delighted to see Steam has an effort underway for Android on Linux, allegedly a fork of Waydroid, that they are working on. Tentatively delighted because it's unclear if this really will be open source, but hopefully! https://steamdb.info/app/3029110/info/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valves-version-of-andr...
I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for the options here to expand and improve. I want to say much as Proton has accelerated things, but man, I am pretty lost now tracking which projects Proton encompasses and the history of where Valve backed/helped these efforts.
I still really want to believe it's collaborative. That good work is going to flow upstream, to collaborated Valve + crowd spaces.
Wow this is exciting news!
I’m interested in seeing Proton perform on Arm for Windows x86 games. That sounds like a real challenge.
This may be a naive question: why ARM and not RISC-V?
RISC-V SoCs are still underpowered for the job, and the software ecosystem hasn't matured compared to ARM, specially for Windows/x86-64 emulation. The focus on RISC-V chips is simply too recent and has lacked enough demand for it. Your question is at least a decade too early.
How many people do you know with RISC-V computers?
Now we just need qualcomm to sort out their linux snapdragon support
It should be RISC-V...
What would be the benefit?
See the FAQ on risc-v site.
Unless I misunderstand something (not quite awake fully yet...), that's good right? Aka "play games on any platform" as goal. A bit with the inofficial goal of scummvm, to rescue old commercial games from vanishing for young, future generations.
What Valve hasn't announced yet, but which has leaked, is "Lepton", a fork of Waydroid they're working on to enable Android gaming for Steam—in particular, getting Oculus Quest games going on the Steam Frame.
The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans notwithstanding.
I cannot speak for the Steam console and I don't care about playing PC games on my phone: it's not the form factor for me.
But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.
Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).
I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at the edge anyway.
One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2. Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.
Space Marine 2 runs on my desktop, running Manjaro. Never tried on a handheld. Works fine!
Any tweaks for Proton that you think were helpful? I tried stuff from ProtonDB but it hangs during the initial cutscene and never recovers.
Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_ and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has been working on this since.
Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.
> Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8
Context?
Back when iOS and iPad were eating Microsoft's lunch in mobile, Microsoft freaked out and released Windows 8 with that new tiles UI framework ("desktop and tablet are going to converge so we need to dumb down the interface") and the Windows Store that was supposed to be their response to the App Store. Microsoft wanted all future Windows software to be released through the App Store. Of course, this was an existential threat to Valve/Steam, so Valve vociferously pushed back.
The Windows Store and its apps were so bad that Microsoft eventually scaled back their ambitions, but Valve has not forgotten.
Gabe Newell: "I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space."
2012: https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-i-think-windows-8-is-a-c...
He made some critical comments to the media about the Windows app store and Microsoft's position of trying to turn Windows in to an iOS type situation with everything locked down. Remember that Microsoft had just released Windows RT and later Windows 10 S which could only run apps from the Windows app store.
This could have pushed Steam out of the market if it had succeeded. Valve then spent the next decade building up Linux gaming almost from scratch to reduce their dependance on Microsoft.
valve is just as ambitious as microsoft or google, they just appear to be the good guy for now because theyre trying to gain some ground on evil corp, and linux is one of the only openings they (or anyone) has got.
The only proprietary, steam client itself, you can fork their stack build your own store if you like.
fix anticheat!
Steam API doesnt even have an arm version. You cant build a native arm app with it.
This may be a naive question but why ARM and not RISC-V?
This is news how exactly since the announcement of arm Steam Frame?
Did they at the same time announced that they had been funding open source ARM compatibility for over a decade? Maybe it was mentioned somewhere, but the article had new details for me at least, even if I consider myself somewhat up-to-date generally.
Agreed. I saw the Steam Frame announcement, and plan to get one as soon as it's available.
I saw the mention of Fex then too, but absolutely nowhere, before now have I seen any information that they'd been working on this for the best part of a decade.
I think it's more revealing of how they've been playing the long game
I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility.
> force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility
How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't they just avoid doing that?
They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for them to 100% opt out of being on that platform.
Your argument is illogical. If devs don’t want to support it, they simply will not support it—as evidenced by the thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified, but either run just fine, or don’t run at all with the devs not giving it a second thought.
Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows, then I’m all up for it. It’s a win for everyone.
It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs. stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions, X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa, PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.
What has that got to do with Valve providing a compatibility layer so devs can broadly ignore all that nonsense and just target Proton?
I never said they were forced to support, but that they are forced to fund such a thing for their game as opposed to their being an option for Valve to fund it.
They aren't forced to fund anything. They have the option for an additional value add, that's all.
Valve is known for never funding games which is why my original comment expressed surprise. Of course they aren't forced to fund content on their platform, but I had thought they had changed their strategy.
The clsoest thing to funding we ever got was Activision getting Valve to lower the cut for big publishers so they could get onto Steam.
Otherwise, I can't remember the last time they funded a game they didn't make themselves. Maybe in the very early Steam days, but that's long past.
> Practically every other company with an application platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform.
the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows Phone and the Epic Store
both of which were runaway commercial successes
Have you ever heard of terms like "Playstation exclusive" before? Companies benefit from having good content on their platform and they typically are willing to pay for it.
Not since Bloodborne, I haven't. And I've heard people can play that game on Steam Deck now, too: https://youtu.be/eDHiVsr-jfM
These days the only context I hear "Playstation exclusive" in comes from people trying to analyze how much money Sony lost developing Concord.
Real shame, you should try Ghosts of Yotei. It's good.
Astro Bot is a personal favorite too. That one would be tricky to get the true experience on in terms of PC platform.
I probably will play them, once they're ported to PC and sold for $10 like TLoU and Death Stranding were. I haven't even played Tsushima yet.
Neither one of them is a system-seller though. I don't think anyone feels FOMO because they missed the Day 1 release of Gran Turismo, or didn't play Astro Bot with 7.1 Surround and HD haptics. Bloodborne was a magnum opus, Persona 5 had people lining up outside Best Buy to reserve a copy. The PS5 exclusive library is down right impoverished by comparison, to say nothing of the PC exclusives it lacks.
I don't really know if the concept of "system seller" is a thing anymore. Or at least, all those titles belong to Nintendo now. Sony's only had Gran Turismo and then made up for it with a consistent stream of first party titles. Not Nintendo level, but competitive. Xbox has 2 series and utterly bungled one of them. If you're not a racing sim fan, you're looking at the forest instead of the trees.
All those true "seller" series were always 3rd party and they've all pretty much abandoned console deals mid Gen 8. Bloodborne was truly the lasst of its kind.
The real "system seller" for the ps5 is a bunch of Japanese games that will never really be on Xbox and can't run on switch. So that depends on your taste. Japan's mostly come around on PC though, so it's not truly "exclusive" outside of the shaky optimization.
It is typically neither free nor open to develop on consoles. As in, you pay to access developer tools.
iOS and Android less so (even if there is a one time charge for Android and a yearly charge on Apple). OTOH I have not heard of them usually reaching out to more than a handful of devs for promotion purposes.
You pay, but you get actual support from console makers. They kind of need to given how closed off it is otherwise. The competition also means larger profile studios (indie and AAA) will usually get some good deals to work with.
The one time model from Apple/Android really is just a tax that gets you nothing but access in comparison. It's a full advert model where the biggest players throw millions at Apple/Android for visibility.
Valve's somewhere in the middle of the two. No "p2w" adverts but it's not doing too much to draw devs (except reducing the tax for AAA devs). It doesn't need to. A lot of its community models are "we're having a party, you bring the food and drinks".
The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.
A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.
Why the vitriol? This is one of the rare cases where a company actually puts money in open source development. Of course they ultimately do it for business reasons but everyone benefits from it as a whole, so I fail to understand the issue here.
Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.
Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.
It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper support for ARM to make out the most performance on the most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games, but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.
But why would Valve do that, Steam is a game market place, that happens to provide a really powerful comparability layer to allow you to run many windows games on not windows. It’s not a platform in any meaningful sense. The Steam deck is a platform, and the Steam frame, and if they can get existing games running on them, without involving the original devs what’s the problem? Dev get a new market to sell their games into, Stream gets a new market to extend their store front onto, how is that not a clear win-win?
Also Valve does fund plenty of games, such as all of the first party games you might have heard of, like Half Life, and its long tail of sequels and spin offs.
But is the disadvantage worth the relatively high overhead of specifically adding arm support? I doubt that. It is better game devs focus on what they're better at - x86 - while valve and open source devs focus on what they're better at, than trying to split funds across competing solutions to the problem.
The solutions have distant tradeoffs. When you want to run the latest PC games on mobile hardware using a battery, every cycle matters. Using translation layers for x86 will never be as good as as a native port.
Yeah. Also, software written for a wide gamut of hardware configs, even those under the same CPU ISA, will always be slower than software written for a unique hardware stack and only shipped for that hardware. Does it follow that all software should be written for specific hardware? I think not, because the performance overhead you take on allows saving on massive economic costs. It just isn't realistic to use development resources in that way. Even if devs are better at making ports for their games than fex, that takes precious time and money away from making the game, adding features, polishing, etc. It is much more realistic and sensible to focus on the comparative advantage than the absolute advantage [1].
[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativead...
I'm sure those developers hate getting a larger install base for free.
It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that can result in reputational damage.
Then developers should fix their games and make sure the software they are selling actually works as advertised. End of discussion.
I don’t quite understand the logic behind your argument. Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up? That’s ridiculous, utterly consumer-hostile.
I don't think that's the end of the discussion. Let's try to talk separately about developers and publishers. I'm sure game developers would love to spend time making the game run on everything. But publishers work with a budget and schedule and have to consider the returns. If the potential new customers bring more support load and bad reviews, it's not worth it. That, I think, is the end of the discussion for the publisher.
They are advertising that it works on Windows. Developers in an ideal world shouldn't have to worry about unsupported configurations. I'm advocating that developers should only have their games judged by supported configurations.
>Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
Other platforms could be profitable enough that developers could target and support them on their own volition.
I don’t think anyone can seriously hold up the PC gaming platform as a paragon of “supported configurations”. The stupid number of tiny things that can cause a PC game to fail on a supposedly “supported configuration” is beyond ludicrous. To the point where I’ve personally given up running Windows completely because it’s less reliable at actual running the game I care about than Proton is.
>End of discussion.
And that's why Linux market share is a tiny drop in the pool. Devs have enough on their plates and being forced to do support for an attitude like this isn't in their budget.
>Are you advocating pro-monopoly?
Quite the contrary, I'd love for Valve to be taken down a notch.
> Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
If they want to be profitable, yes. If gamers really cared, they had 20, 30 years to put their money where their mouths were. Reality is often disappointing, though.
My future endeavors actually want to have a Linux-first development stack. To make a properly Native linux game, not this sham of compatibility not-emulation layers. But I know that will take some adjustment and me not using the two most popular game engines to help. I'm definitely not doing this because I hope to maximize revenue. I simply am tired of being trapped in the confines of billionaires who have actively made my society worse. But that stand has an opportunity cost, one a business like Valve won't truly make.