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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

I think people maybe don't realize that, like Windows, Steam got to where it is for a reason. Valve knuckled under and built a digital distribution platform for PC games during a severe decline in the PC gaming market when very few people thought it would work.

And it wasn't exclusive, they sold other people's games on there too. Then they helped kickstart the indie gaming explosion with the Potato Sack. Then they started trying to make Linux a better gaming platform to provide an alternative to being locked in to MS. Then they released a non-exclusive VR platform against a competitor that was exclusive.

Say what you want about Valve having a monopoly and that being bad for the market, because that's generally true, but my opinion is that Valve has demonstrated a sincere interest in doing good things for PC gaming, not just what's good for Valve.

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Mentioning the Potato Sack gets into one of my biggest complaints with Steam and why I worry about its monopoly position: we can't talk about the Loot Box problem and dumb addiction hacking and not point to the elephant in the room.

Valve has invested a lot of time and effort into its various loot box schemes (hats, trading cards, stamps, badges, etc), and Steam is currently the only retail platform deeply complicit in the worst slot machine tendencies of the industry at large, and has been for a long time.

They have stopped improving their client, doing anything novel in their store, releasing titles in popular franchises and improving graphics or game engine technology.

It's been 6 years since their last franchise title, CS:GO, was released and it's profitability was based on micro-transactions. I think this experience (along with DOTA 2) would forever change the way the company perceives its value to customers.

In hindsight, I regret hats on TF2. I regret that as customers we steered Valve into this lackluster state where microtransacted eSports is in and beautiful game engines for storytelling are forgotten.

Ya, all they did in that time was design and release the world’s first mainstream VR headset, tracking system, controllers, and API.

What a waste of time.

As a Linux-only user, there are almost no Linux-compatible games I'm interested in playing on Steam. So, if I have that rare desire to load up a game, I always find myself going back to TF2, which I didn't even pay money for, and at this point am about as entertained by as Solitaire.

None of the big name releases ever seem to be available. I understand this is due to the game studio's decision of not spending the money on porting to a market that they calculate would make up a rounding error in revenue.

I'm sure there are Linux-compatible indie games out there that would be nice to try, but I'm a casual gamer and I don't have time to research and trial and error what might be a good fit for me.

How is this Valve's fault? Valve lets pretty much anyone who's willing to pay a (small) up-front fee list their game on their store. If there aren't any good games for Linux, that's because nobody is developing them.

There are plenty of AAA games released with Linux support each year - a small fraction of those released with MacOS support, and a much smaller fraction again of those with Windows support but still: they're there.

A large amount of AA and Indie games are also released on Linux (largely, I suspect, because they use middle-ware like Unity which makes multi-platform releases much more straight-forward).

My point being that there are lots of options if you have a hankering to play a quality game on your Linux machine. The problem in this instance, I suspect, is more to do with this line from imjustsaying's post: 'if I have that rare desire to load up a game'.

Give Darkest Dungeon a go. It's the one game I just keep coming back to.

Civilization 6 is definitely an AAA game and it supports Linux if strategy is your thing. Tested it myself with both AMD and Nvidia cards on Ubuntu and apart from few minor glitches it works just fine.

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