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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Linux Gaming
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This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn't even built a linux client after all these years.
I mean, I'm not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation. That doesn't mean I (and the overall linux community as a whole) don't greatly benefit from it. I want to incentivize their actions which benefit me. I love that I have been able to not boot into Windows for close to a decade because of proton, so I buy from them. I hate that GOG for all their drm free policy don't support linux, and that I have to jump through hoops to get their games working on linux (which is again made easier because of valve's proton), so I don't buy from them.
I agree GOG and Valve have different objectives. GOG's objective is to provide drm free games, where as Valve's objective is to make linux a viable gaming platform so they can stay independent of Microsoft. My objective aligns with Valve, so they get my money.
I'm really not one for optimism but Valve really does seem to do things that are not entirely to their benefit. Compare the stark contrast to publicly-traded greedy companies like Apple, for instance.
When it comes to hardware, Apple goes out of their way and invests their vast resources into ensuring you have to trash your devices prematurely while Valve goes out of their way to make their components modular, attach with screws, and make first-party parts available through third party storefronts.
Apple maintains complete control over every piece of software you can install on your device, and even the operating system itself. Valve builds onto an open source OS, adds a "return to desktop" button, and while they don't help you install 3rd party stores, they don't put up any artificial barriers to doing so yourself.
Valve could absolutely do all the scummy shit that Apple does and get away with it because they have a similar amount of influence over their industry, and they would probably make buckets of money doing it, but they choose not to.
You could say similarly scummy things about EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc. etc., but not Valve (not to say that they've never done anything ethically questionable).
It really seems like they just don't want to be scumbags, which is incredibly refreshing in these times.
Valve is a private company and hasn't been contaminated by modern, investor focused mindsets. Valve is a company that tries to earn a profit by selling a service people want to pay for. This is becoming increasingly rare with more and more companies focused on investor return rather providing goods and services in exchange for their profits.
I'm most anxious about what happens to valve post-gabe. You can bet there are tons and tons of crappy wall street types just drooling to ruin Steam for the rest of us.
You are right now that I think about it. Valve are a throwback to when companies actually had to make the best product to make the most money.
With these public traded companies the incentive is just to make a line on a graph go up by any means necessary, normally to the detriment of the consumer. They are only there to appease their shareholders, and get more investors.
Private companies, on the other hand, can only make the line go up by making products that more people want to buy, and both the consumer and the company benefit.
I hope he hands it over to someone who will continue his legacy
@HughJanus @greenskye I agree that gog is not supportive of games running on Linux unless that game is already a Linux game. Funny enough, said games may even be playable on Linux but gog will just have the windows port of that game on gog (Alien Isolation for example). So, I agree, if you are on Linux and use steam, then it’s clear to use steam like an iPhone user using Apple Music. It just works.this is where I say that steam should be more open so drm games on steam don’t need steam launcher
Yeah I did not and would not say that. I prefer GoG, all other things being equal. I just bought 6 GoG games this morning.
@HughJanus what did you get today?
I bought Cuphead($14), 4 of the Batman Arkham games($4-5), and Hyper Jam ($4).
Also installed shortcuts for Xbox and Nvidia cloud gaming. Xbox is fairly impressive. Just played a couple of quick rounds of Fortnite. Nvidia I was waiting forever for a slot so I didn't get too far with that.
I love my Steam Deck and have recently made small steps in my journey away from Windows. I installed Pop OS on a laptop. Do you have any tips that might make that transition easier?
Thanks in advance. 👍
There's a key point in the article that emphasizes that valve are indeed "being nice": their policy is " upstream everything".
Yes the motives are still keeping a foot out in case Microsoft decides to screw them over in some way, but they could (as many companies do) keep the improvements all for themselves, buy developers and make a closed source version of any of the tech they have been funding, locking down steamOS to only allow steam games and so on.
They couldn’t legally create a closed source SteamOS, but they also aren’t required to “upstream everything”.
I’m not a legal expert of any kind, but AFAIU they are only legally required to send you the changes they made to the source code on request (with GPLv3).
Though I disagree that this is Valve being nice, IMO doing this makes sense for most companies working in this space, as their code being accepted upstream means they benefit from anything the community has built up around the project, and they don’t have to play catchup with upstream.
They could have gone BSD and then done whatever they wanted.
Complete nonsense, even publicly traded companies upstream their open source code because it makes business sense. Valve doesn't do anything to be nice and never has. They're creating their own market to sell to in case MS locks them out.
That's not fallacious at all. I imagine the guy above knows valve aren't a selfless charity.
There's a guy in my area that goes around with his pressure washer and cleans grimy road signs, park benches, etc (because the council doesn't seem to give enough of a shit to do it themselves!)
He does it because the goodwill and publicity he gets from it benefits his business (he cleans everything from walls and houses, to wheelie bins and industrial/farming equipment).
He is not acting out of pure altruism, but does it really matter? His/Valve's actions are still benefiting people regardless.
I only made this comment because for some reason GOG seems to be more preferred by linux users than Steam, where as Steam has done a lot more for linux, and it not just works for Steam. GOG is now easily usable on linux mainly thanks to Valve's proton. I don't mind if game devs don't make as many games for linux. There is a huge chicken and egg problem with game development and userbase. Before proton they had all the reason to make games for linux but most didn't because it didn't make much financial sense to them. Now they don't have to worry about it. Plus, linux is much more than gaming. Because there is more people using linux now because of gaming, software other than games would be interested in building for linux, because the userbase is getting there.
Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.
I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it's become so widely unsupported that I can't really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there's a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there's just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.
Win ≥8 is awful; I've helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I've ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don't see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.
So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?