It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
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The manner in which they've done so shows a delightful understanding of the "unix philosophy" in so many ways, too.
Last month I was doing hardware changes on our home systems, my daughter's steam install and mine copied to new systems with a quick "tar" and no fuss; which was a very pleasant discovery.
They've rarely if ever (that I've seen) gone to extra effort to introduce warts the user has to deal with. Opening up the new deck hardware to show us how to do so, etc... Good eggs there.
0. They manage the most popular games store in the western world.
1. They provide a community forum for your users.
2. Host downloads of games (sometimes 100s of GBs). They distribute the content all across the world and handle region specific laws about what can be sold, etc. They host content at edge so downloads are super fast.
3. Process refund requests.
4. Have one of the better VR abstraction layers for game devs.
5. Provide networking and social integration (chat, anti-cheat, friends, etc).
6. They allow you to generate steam keys (at no cost to you) and sell them on your own website.
7. They process payments (PayPal charges ~3% for this, Stripe is 2.9%)
8. Achievements, time tracking, etc. These are useful for game devs who iterate on their formula (most use achievements to see what percent of a user base does X).
That's what I can think off the top of my head benefits the game developers. The list of things that benefits the users is also pretty big (steam sales).
I don't think any company is good or bad but Valve's offer to game devs is a pretty decent one.
> Anecdote: some one else's account of this was that it was really helpful because the Linux portion of the community (while much smaller than other segments) provided consistently high quality feedback/bug reports.
The killer feature of Valve / Steam for game developers is customer trust. For me, that trust has translated into a resolute refusal to buy games on any other platform.
The main reason was steam's investment into linux gaming and I decided to support that.
Also, GOG have promised a linux client for years that still hasn't materialised.
Competition among stores and hosting is good IMO, even if a modest inconvenience.
I mean, I don't mind steam, but I'd really prefer to have software that I purchase not check with a gate keeping entity before launching itself.
Every game I’ve purchased on Steam I can play right now with one click. Obviously others offer the same thing now but Steam offered it first. They also have region specific pricing, a huge pull for me at some point.
There are other good store fronts, I’m sure. But the amount of trust they’ve built with me over the last 10+ years can’t be replicated overnight by anyone else.
The disadvantage is that your game is locked now to your account, I cant just gift my games to my son. I have to make sure to keep my Steam version in Offline mode before he tries to play from his PC using my Steam Account. I wish there was a way to create family accounts and share the game or even gift them to your children, you could add some rules like you can't re-gift same game for say n years or whatever.
It won't support every game but it should help you in your quest to share games with your son
Which is essentially what grandparent is already doing. Alas!
I know it's unusual for HN, but I read both the GGGP and am a user of the thing under discussion! Steam's settings in that regard aren't "sticky" enough for me. I've set myself to Offline, quit, and then found myself Online often enough under both Windows and Linux that it's just easier to write a little script to keep Steam from connecting to the internet.
Worth pointing out to others that even if offline mode fails and one intemperately starts a game while someone else is using one's library, that user will get a minute or two to save their game before Steam closes the game for them, but my cousins have found this annoying enough that I figured I'd take OS-level action.
Ensuring that the recipient also has the ability to deny Steam internet access allows my cousins to log into actually-offline Steam as me, and play single-player content, while I'm actually-online and playing multiplayer.
One thing that affects me with Offline mode is this scenario,
1 the kid is playing with his friends soemthing
2 I am in Offline mode but I just found a cheap game I want to try, but I would need to go Online but this would kick my son out.
so going Offline is an ugly workaround for my scenario.
But seriously, you need Family Sharing. Make your kid an account, then set your account to Family Share with his. Now, he can play games from your library as long as you're not playing any, even if your account is online too.
So, when you want to play some singleplayer stuff, log into your account and buy and download the game as you normally would, whilst your son plays with his friends. Now kill Steam's internet connection on your computer, and play your freshly purchased cheap singleplayer game without bothering or having bothered your son.
I suspect it's more to do with the fact that without requiring a new Steam Ticket every once in a while, I could go and install much of my library on a friend's computer (or any number of friends!), rig the OS to deny Steam internet connectivity, and thereby allow them to play games with my licenses indefinitely and undetectably! The horror!
Their controller wrapper obsoleted all of the messy third party tools you used to need on Windows, and they have a sharing platform for controller profiles.
Only if you charge the same as Steam, i.e. you can't pass the 27% (still pay payment processing) savings on to customers, unless it is a limited time sale.
Steam only allows it because they want to be one centralized hub with more and more people locked in through social features, existing libraries, recommendation traffic, etc., but it is only allowed if it isn't price competition so that consumers can't feel the weight of the 30% directly.
No business plan makes sense if they give away their product for free without taking any form of revenue. Casting that as evil is odd and misleading. That they allow devs to generate codes that give steam no revenue at all is pretty incredible.
Well yeah... whether you sell your game on Steam or via Steam codes on your website, the soft-, hardware and business infrastructure in the background handling the sale and distribution of your game is the same. So why would they let you use their infrastructure without letting them have their cut? It wouldn't make any sense.
I do not like the app store model. I rather buy from the developer.
You, as a person might not like it and you as a developer might like to directly sell games, but as pointed out above, Steam/Valve does make it easier for the developer to be legally clear in terms of taxes, refunds, etc. and also makes it easier to distribute by leveraging their "warehouse" which some do prefer.
But is it a causal relation? You probably have a steadier income now than you had back then.
I can now actually afford games (in the quantity I consume them) now, so that question is fair. But thankfully the video landscape fractured, now you better have NowTv, Netflix, Prime and Disney+ and you still can't watch all. I've started pirating again after 10 years or so of complete abstinence. So I think it's causal (if you have money)
I have to say that Spotify completely changed the way I listen to music, and I would really struggle to go back to buying individual albums.
I think of the three, movies are the only one where the "more disposable income" part of things is the dominant component of why I changed behaviours.
“Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market [...] The people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. It doesn't take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.” [0]
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable." [1]
I for one absolutely have more money than I once did, but to be honest I stopped pirating long before that in '09 or '10, once I realized that the then-ridiculous Humble Bundles and Steam sales reduced the actual expenditure required from "gotta save up" to a mere "gotta skip buying takeout tonight". Of course the sales have decreased in quality since then, but so too has the number of games I want to play, and the time I can spend doing it.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-on-piracy-and-steams-suc...
[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pira...
I don’t pirate games and music because Steam and Spotify (or Apple/Amazon music) are a better experience than piracy.
That is just awesome.
But the point still stands, for big titles you don't have to wait long for Proton support nowadays.
For me, there is one major downside: The camera. I really don't like the 3D camera. I think it could be worse. So you can actually play the game without turning the camera, but what I don't like is the perspective. Sometimes you have to move to camera to another position, just to be able to click on a unit. I found that much better with the classic dimetric projection [1]. In addition, I like the art-style of AoE2 a bit better.
However, after putting these things aside, I love how they have adapted the AoE2 concepts. It still feels like an Age of Empires. But then again different enough to be AoE4. So if you like the changes from AoE1 to AoE2 then you might like AoE4 ;-)
The civilizations play more diverse than those of AoE2 so even with just 8, there is a lot to learn. The story telling of the campaigns is also a bit different, but it still has the concept of teaching some history. AoE4 actually has some nice videos about armor and weapons of the time. The fortress building in AoE4 feels a bit more like Stronghold with the ability to move units on the walls and I think that is a good thing :-)
So much after playing AoE4 for about 13 hours.
From 1% to 1.13%. Isn't it glorious?
Part of me can't wait for the winter to come so that I can start using my Index again without feeling like I am wasting my time at home instead of enjoying a nice day outside.
Microsoft will most likely continue to adapt the open source model with lock downs like the rest of the industry.
The question is will they be like red hat or Oracle.
Also they already have a distro although internal: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mar...
A few years ago I'd get flamed hard for suggesting that just building Wine-compatible Windows builds was smarter than trying to build native linux versions.
With Proton now, there's probably more games playable on Linux than MacOS, even though the latter as far higher uptake among consumers.
It also lets each party care about the natural thing for them: gamedevs care about windows and do a good job writing windows code; winedevs care about linux and do a good job writing linux code. Gamedevs don't care about linux so their native linux code is crap.
So Valve tried to break the Windows monopoly on games by creating a native Linux SDK and releasing the Steam Machine, which was based on Ubuntu. The goal was to make Linux a first class citizen as a gaming development platform, not just something to run an emulation layer. The Steam Machine failed, because it simply wasn't very good. Valve quickly lost interest in native Linux and let the native SDK rot away into obsoletion. Fortunately, Microsoft being Microsoft, the Windows Store was (and still is) a terrible platform, so pretty much nobody is buying games there (except for Minecraft), and you can still install anything you want on Windows.
So of course you can say that you don't care if it runs natively or in an emulation shim. It would have been nice if Linux had become a game development platform and not just a kernel with a Windows API layer on top. So in a way, Linux' success here is similar to Android's: Yes, it's technically Linux, but not really.
Your recollection is incomplete. Microsoft was threatening to lockdown Windows app installations by requiring app signing for all executables in Win10. In the worst case, it meant the Microsoft Store would be the only store on Windows, and Steam simply wouldn't work on Windows.
Microsoft was toying with an idea that posed an existential threat to Valve. IMO, Valve's goal was to be unshackled from Microsoft's mercurial whims, and despite a slow start, they have finally achieved that goal in the last few years. Microsoft is still proceeding doen the TPM path, and has a turnkey walled garden - I think Valves call was the right one.
Microsoft has the disadvantage of being the biggest platform and the most scrutinized.
The Microsoft store is as good as the Apple and Android stores, but people using Microsoft are much more used to downloading something from the website they want to install something from. And developers don't have a strong incentive to send them to the Microsoft store from their website.
And Microsoft being such a big player, even time they make moves, everyone else digs in to prevent them from taking over. An example of the is steam machine.
Was it? Or was it a strategy they ended up not needing?
So, I don't care whether a game is native [1] or run on an emulation layer as long as it works and performs reasonably well and, most importantly, it is supported.
[1] the reality of course is that many, but not all, native ports still run on some sort of buggy, proprietary translation layer.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime#default-tools
Have platform agnostic code, or let it prefer windows. If your compatibility layer is so good I don't care.
Better than what we have now where tons of applications don't run on Linux or Mac OS.
So they care so little about Linux they are going to release a subsidized console using Linux next year? Give me a break with your cynicism.
You buy software, but if you leave, you lose it all.
Is that correct? there's no way to retain what you've bought?
Valve doesn't even give an outright monetary incentive to do it. i.e. Valve's 30% cut doesn't turn into 10% if you link in Steamworks.
Though one could argue there's an indirect monetary incentive created by locking away all the platform/social features behind a wall accessed through their proprietary library. But last I checked the DRM aspects of that library could be ignored while using the rest of the platform. It does automatically stay updated though, so they could turn Evil and force DRM @ initialization if they wanted, hypothetically speaking.
I do make a habit out of using the Backup Games option in the Steam client, but I usually do that more as a caching strategy to save myself the 30GB download in the future than addressing the risk of my Steam account going poof
After you installed steam it will probably just work. You might need to go into settings -> steam play and enable proton. that's it.
But if it’s an s-curve it will reach 70% much sooner than 891 years.
In my opinion 1% of the Earth in 9 years is a triumph. Electric cars are not there yet and people are quite optimistic.