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Comment by manchmalscott | Hacker News Reader

Valve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released eight years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it's things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck.

The only thing that doesn't really work I've noticed is when games have an online component, whether it's like easy anti cheat which I've heard should be just flipping a switch to enable but I haven't seen anyone actually do that, or some weirdness happening with whatever the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is doing that makes it seemingly a 50/50 coin toss as to whether it'll run with the exact same settings.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0

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I watched a talk by GabeN years ago, where he explained his business philosophy (which also had to do with his exit from Microsoft). It was strikingly simple: treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well (even if the majority of customers don't understand that... yet).

It totally makes business sense for them to not have to depend on Microsoft (who have their own gaming business) for their customers to play games, we all win when consumers have meaningful alternatives.

If his customers don’t feel they are being treated well (e.g. they don’t understand, and won’t for years) then does it really fall under that principle?

Needless pedantism.

If I explained to you that Musk’s decision to buy Tesla was founded on his principle of “make the requirements less dumb” , would it be pedantry to inquire what I meant?

This is more along the lines of Apple having (at least historically) being pro-privacy before the problem became common knowledge.

> treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well.

It's really won me over, I can say that much. When I was using Windows, I favoured buying games from GOG over Steam whenever possible. DRM and all that.

Ever since I moved to Linux, it's been the opposite. GOG couldn't care less about Linux compatibility, and while you can get their stuff going through some combination of Wine/Lutris scripts, the experience I get with Steam is so much better.

I wouldn't put GOG in the same basket as other stores like EGS though, they did make some efforts and officially packaged and distributed games for Linux quite early. It's not the same effort as Valve but it's still to their credit (I'm saying that as a Linux user).

Nowdays, Heroic Game Launcher is the easiest option to play GOG games though (as well as EGS ones) https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

I'm sure GOG would care if they had more resources. Valve's push into Linux is because Microsoft is making a big push towards there being a single walled garden store: Microsoft's. Valve is doing this ultimately to benefit themselves. That's of course the case with GOG too, but GOG has very little money to put into any sort of Linux push so they have to lean on Valve's investments.

They’re not even leaning. They’re doing literally nothing. They could easily provide proton wrappers for their games with no effort. But they don’t, it’s all up to the user. Then you spend more time configuring the game than playing it.

> treat your customers well

That's why it took a lawsuit to get refund support for Steam.

That lawsuit specifically had to do with meeting Australian guidelines. I personally have had zero complaints with the Steam refund system here in America.

They didn’t have a refund system initially.

The Steam refund system in America only exists because of the Australian lawsuit

Valve’s customers are the studios.

Only half-sarcastically.

Not really. More like hostage to distribution. If you list your game on Steam, you can't list your game for a cheaper price anywhere else on the internet.

People put up with that because they still come out ahead by listing on Steam.

In fairness Steam's prices are very reasonable. I imagine there are ways around it anyway.

Is this true for everything? There are open-source games (a great example is Mindustry) that are available for free elsewhere while costing to buy via Steam.

No, it's only true if you're selling steam keys for cheaper on other sites. Devs can generate steam keys for free and have other sites sell them, but they're not allowed to list them for cheaper than what's on steam. Steam makes $0 off these steam keys and it still costs them money (bandwidth and such) so it's a more than fair deal asking to not list them for cheaper.

If you're using a completely different distribution system/client like itch.io or the epic store, you're allowed to list them for cheaper.

It isn’t restricted to Steam keys. It’s anytime you sell the same game for a net cheaper price elsewhere on the internet.

This is the dominant reason that the Epic store isn’t taking off, because Steam is enforcing network effects. Devs can’t switch and so customers won’t switch.

Because of the policy, games with under short but high quality gameplay are getting hit with refunds. If the playtime is under 2 hours, the refund request goes through with very minimal abuse protection. I've seen people try to do speedrun where the goal is to finish the game in under 2 hours and get a refund. Publishing a short but high production value game on Steam has become a lot less profitable.

Not to mention that the refund policy can be useless as the playtime includes load screens when the server is busy, which happens regardless of the studio size.

That being said, I do believe that the refund policy improved sales volume overall because people buy games knowing that they can always refund if the game isn't for them. Return of the demos I guess?

People rushing to finish your game in under 2 hours to claim a refund are not your market. If they make up a large enough percentage of purchases for it to matter, you are going bankrupt anyway. They are not playing at beating your game. They are playing at beating the system. Like all those pirates who collect huge libraries of software, movies or music that they are never going to use or care about so little they would never pay anything at all for it.

Yet fleecing game developers with 30% cut on sales at the same time. It's a soft big cushion to talk profound thoughts from. Reminds me of billionaires giving advice like "you just have to believe and work hard"... yeah, but that's a low baseline you have to have anyways.

Sales through the store, yes.

You’re welcome to sell Steam keys on your own website, and Valve won’t take any cut at all, while still providing the same services as a purchase through the store.

See https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys , at face value, it’s a completely reasonable policy.

If only Apple and Google could do the same.

That's actually quite good and impressive. I haven't realized that.

Still comes back to "can you sell enough keys on your own to make up for the amount of sales you get through Steam, even after the 30%?" It's great if you think you have a hot game or product that will be sought after by a large enough audience vs people seeing a game show up in their feed or on sale or a friend is playing it or however it ends up in front of you on Steam, a game that maybe you've never heard of before and now you're going to buy it.

You can sell steam keys on your store and sell normally through the Steam Store. The only requirement is to keep the Steam price <= your own store's price. That seems like a very fairy policy.

While that's valid, I want to point out that Steam accepts a wide variety of local payment methods that have exorbitant transaction fees compared to Visa. Pretty sure I've seen them cover a particular payment method with 10% fee. Steam takes 15% for big publishers I think and that's not a large profit margin in those scenarios. A lot of younger customers do not have an international credit card and Steam makes purchasing games accessible to them.

This is a really good power play - the idea being that if you can get more eyes than Steam can through your own store, go ahead, keep the money.

But if you're getting the sale because of Steam itself, then we get the cut.

You can still debate whether 30% is fair even if Steam are providing the discoverability but still, it's a solid policy and they're putting their money where their mouth is.

How do you think they got to where they are? by not believing and not working hard? Valve has been working at what they do for longer than some people commenting here have been alive. Steam has been around for 19 years.

Do you believe developers should be able to use something a company has spent the last 19 years investing in and building... for free or cheap? Is there a competitor in the market that would bring them as much exposure while not charging as much? The only thing I can think of are platforms like EGS, where they basically pay people to sell their games on there, so they can grow the platform.

I haven't done the math myself, but I'm guessing indie developers would be hard pressed to make the same money without using Steam as they do using Steam, even with the "fleecing" you're talking about.

Few projections there, alas yeah I remember how Steam sucked ass when it appeared and how it was forced upon customers of their popular game(s) initially to spread it around. There were competitors, but without much strategy or foresight (Ubisoft, EA). These days you have gog (30%), epic store (12%), itch.io (10%), google play store (15%, after epic's push), apple app store (30 and 15% through small business developer program). Steam holds the position still, no need to move if you have the power of inertia. Even damn google and apple moved. Epic did good there, albeit unconventionally.

The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.

My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms. They would rather buy/re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher.

Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.

They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard/Battle.net aren't even on their radar.

They are mostly indifferent to MS/Xbox Store.

With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!

It’s well earned. Steam is BS-free relative to the others on your list. Steam could degrade significantly in quality and customer satisfaction and still handily beat that lot.

It has, and it still does.

It’s a browser wrapper around a visibly slow site, and it’s far, far better than anything else but I’d rather use my real browser for those parts every time.

compare steam to epic if you want a real browser wrapper experience.

Have you seen how slower is the new authenticator app?

I'm the same, as a 30-something. Steam is so much better and Gabe has fostered my undying loyalty. He'd have to shoot my dog to stop me using Steam.

Piling on. And if Gabe shot your dog I would also stop using Steam.

> Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.

Why though?

My friend on steam are far larger than Xbox and with mult screens you can multi task while gaming.

A couple more reasons:

- Steam supports Linux and even for games that don't, Steam lets you pretend they do by automatically launching them via Proton. Sure, you can run other game stores through Wine/Proton but Steam makes this so damned convenient.

- I (and I assume most people posting here) have enough disposable income that game prices are mostly irrelevant and especially for indies I don't mind throwing them some more cash.

- I simply don't want to juggle multiple proprietary launchers. If anyone wants to get me off of Steam, build and open gaming ecosystem instead of trying to grift of more of the same.

> With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!

It's so funny how this works. I remember when Steam came out (I was in HS) and it was extremely controversial. Everyone, and I mean everyone, hated it. "I need to start ANOTHER application to run my game?" It was slow, clunky, buggy, and basically a piece of garbage. It also started the anti-consumer aggressive software DRM trend (you basically couldn't share games anymore). In other words, it was a huge gamble by Valve.

There's few people I'd tag as "visionaries" in the software realm, but Gabe Newell is one of them. No idea how (maybe it was just luck), but he literally saw 10-15 years into the future. Very few people are able to do that: off the top of my head, I can only think of Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.

Steam was 100% visionary. After Steam I realised everything would go online - I kept telling my dad to stop buying DVDs because I told him it would all become online and discs would be pointless.

Turns out it was like 10 years too early. That just shows you how early Valve was.

Except I'm not sure you were right. There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline. It's all just streaming with a catalogue of titles that can be removed at any time.

Yeah turns out even that didn’t happen. Actually piracy is the closest we can get to a universal service.

> There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline.

You've been able to do this for at least a decade, it's called the iTunes Store. I believe Amazon Prime lets you download movies now too.

Even more so now it is not pointless to own some nice CDs or DVDs.. You do not need internet connection.. just put it in the player and go.. still way easier than any spotify integration in modern hifi equipment that I have seen.

You're right, fortunately for steam all the rest of the gaming world became worst than having steam. Now the choice isn't between renting a game with DRM and needing another application to work or owning your game that you could copy , give or lend but between the former and the same + worse shit added like needing a second software or having exclusive

Oh yeah, I was pissed at the time. I held off playing HL2 for years because of it. I think I remember reading about a Steam easter egg where it accepted your old Half-Life box set codes. I tried it, and was pleasantly surprised. I bought the Orange Box, and never looked back.

Even years later, they quietly added HL Alyx to my library. I’m 100% skeptical of platforms like Steam, but Steam & Valve have won my trust.

Their unflagging support for Linux is just another piece of why I won’t budge from their platform.

> The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.

They've certainly come a long way. I remember when they first tied the release of CounterStrike to installing Steam (CS 1.6, 2002), and that was not received well. Online auth was spotty. People were not happy about having this extra software hogging their memory.

But Valve steadily improved it, and made a worthwhile value proposition.

It's worth comparing to Microsoft's incredibly clumsy and ill-fated "Games For Windows Live". At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success? I suppose it's a management problem.

Hah, I remember that! My friends and I stayed on CounterStrike 1.5 for a good while to avoid having to install steam.

Microsoft actively discourages its Xbox employees from talking to customers.

Valve actively encourages talking to customers and helping them out.

(I've worked in both places. It's night and day in that respect).

Just looked this up. Valve also seems one of the few privately owned companies, not publicly traded as a stock. Maybe there's a connection.

> At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success?

Because they lack the simple business mantra. Everyone is trying to copy Valve's monetary success without considering the good will expense.

GoG garnered a lot of good will by being DRM-free, which accounts for its mediocre success. Epic? They introduced exclusives to PC and, let me tell you, that shit doesn't fly with the PC gamer culture - Epic is where people go for Fortnite and free games. Microsoft Store? No mods, no interest. Ubisoft? Great if you like Denuvo.

Microsoft Store and Gamepass support mods now. At least a year I think.

The only potential contender for me would be GOG but their Linux support discourages any steps towards it. Steam all the way for now!

I loved GoG idea, but their resistance to steam deck and linux just lost me.

I play everything on the Deck now, so they literally lost me as a customer.

Which makes me angry, because I find insane that my 1000 games Steam library is fully locked when i'm playing one game, but we are 4 now...

> Which makes me angry, because I find insane that my 1000 games Steam library is fully locked when i'm playing one game, but we are 4 now...

FWIW, many games can be launched directly without Steam. There's also [0] for the rest depending on how you view things you might as well pirate the games at that pint.

[0] https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

I bought 1000 games, definitely don't feel guilty. I know of some workarounds, the problem is I have to teach them to a 4 years old now .

I'll check the emulator. Does it run on the deck? I do 90% of my gaming on the deck now.

Edit: oh it's for multiplayer, I don't need it. I play only single player games, exception maybe for monster hunter, if you consider that multiplayer.

The steam deck is a steam machine, supporting it means supporting their direct and much more successful competitor. I understand the feeling since I have also gog games and a deck, I also understand why they don't want to do it

Yes and no. They are not in the hardware business at all, and they are losing customers because of it. So by supporting LINUX, which has been asked for ages, they will have the side effect of supporting Steam Deck and regain some customers. I don't think it's black and white as it looks.

There is family library sharing: https://store.steampowered.com/sharing/

I already use family sharing. But family sharing "locks" the library of the person you are borrowing from. On top of that, if you happen to have two copies of the game (1 for me, 1 for wife), there will still be no option to choose which library to lock, ending up with potentially the library the child want to use, already locked.

I appreciate family sharing, but it has some limitations that aren't amazing.

GOG is just "you are playing that one game". Way easier.

It's not just kids though ... I have free games on Epic and I honestly can't be bothered playing them. I've caught myself almost re-buying them as well.

This is the freedom you have when you're not a publicly traded company and don't have the boot of capitalism constantly pressing down on your neck.

It would be great to see more of this in the world.

Though, let's be honest, that's not the reason for Valve investing in Linux. Users wouldn't care what's running underneath their games as long as the games run reasonably well.

Back about a decade ago there was real concern that Microsoft might lock away modern graphics APIs behind some sort of entitlement and Valve simply didn't want to be dependent on Microsoft.

It's a bit more than flipping a switch with the anti cheat. Those are absurd systems which use every a bit of trickery on Windows to both detect any manipulation and hide themselves from being interfered with. They both load up as Windows drivers and check for things like enforced driver signature. Steam will need either perfect compatibility with everything they do, or EAC and others will need to cooperate to provide SteamOS-specific versions.

It's in EAC interest to not work on wine out of the box, otherwise it would be too easy to work around.

Basically Valve already partnered with anti-cheat developers and enabling their support on Linux is in fact just flipping of a switch.

Unfortunately this switch need to be flipped by developers / publishers of particular game and they dont cooperate too well.

It's not just flipping the switch, this is none sense.

That means now the dev has to officialy support the game on this platform and all the problems that comes with it.

On top of that the anti cheat on linux is a joke because it's running in user space so serious game won't enable it just for that reason.

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/149075970784115917...

Couple things to note:

- The developer has no obligation to support the platform, Valve provides and pins a working runtime and unless the game is redesigned from scratch (see: Final Fantasy XIV) it should work in perpetuity.

- Anticheat on Windows is also a joke unless it runs in Ring 0, which is literally impossible on platforms like Steam Deck (Flatpak Steam only runs in user space for security reasons). No self-respecting developer should write kernel mode DRM in the first place, though.

- It very well could be as simple as flipping a switch - in the case of Apex Legends, the game already ran perfectly fine but couldn't connect to servers without the anticheat library loading properly. When EA updated the anticheat drivers, the game worked fine on Linux without any modification.

Of course, nobody has a de-facto obligation to support Linux. The larger point is that it's deceptively easy to get your game working on 90% of the world's Linux systems, much more so than shipping to MacOS or console. If all the world's 'serious game[s]' won't run on Linux, than that makes it the world's greatest casual gaming platform :)

Maybe Mr Sweeney should focus more on making an anti-cheat that actually works, compared to the dumpster-fire that is EAC.

Its functioning is spotty-at-best on windows, and when it takes issue with something on your system the troubleshooting is useless. At least Valorants’ anti-cheat will tell you what it doesn’t like.

> At least Valorants’ anti-cheat will tell you what it doesn’t like.

At the cost of system stability, sometimes.

I get random BSoDs from "vgk.sys" (the Vanguard driver) while playing Valorant.

The issue is that flipping that EAC switch means you're effectively disabling a lot of its checks, which is why not many developers want to do it. Maybe this will change as the Steam Deck becomes more popular.

> Our team has been working with Epic on Easy Anti-Cheat + Proton support over the last few months, and we're happy to announce that adding Steam Deck support to your existing EAC games is now a simple process, and doesn't require updating game binaries, SDK versions, or integration of EOS. Alongside our BattlEye updates from last year, this means that the two largest anti-cheat services are now easily supported on Proton and Steam Deck

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31373...

> To make it easy for developers to ship their games across PC platforms, support for the Wine and Proton compatibility layers on Linux is included. Starting with the latest SDK release, developers can activate anti-cheat support for Linux via Wine or Proton with just a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal.

https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-la...

The combination of a CEO that wants to do cool stuff, infinite money thanks to Steam, and no need for growth at all costs because of lack of investors - it's rare and glorious.

Forget native Linux, it's more stable than native windows for me on a few games (and sometimes faster because of windows FS horribleness)

Proton works better than native windows builds. In some cases it actually fixes bugs in the windows version

It's also true for support of old games. I could use a VM with a flaky version of Windows XP (which I have done, and it always crashes) OR I could use wine and have no issues.

My own experience with Proton has been a bit more spotty, maybe because I tried it with some really old games that are not that well tested? Bioshock 1 crashed several times, then I got it to work with some hints from ProtonDB, Bioshock 2 worked "out of the box", Batman: Arkham City (which I bought years ago and never actually got around to playing) didn't work, and I wasn't motivated enough to fiddle with the settings long enough to get it to run. One way to improve Proton would be to provide a possibility to automatically import settings from ProtonDB (it's called "DB", but actually it's more of a forum). But if you look at ProtonDB, every user seems to have different problems and different solutions for these problems, so it's hard to see if some kind of consensus has emerged on how to best get a game to run.

> Bioshock 1 crashed several times, then I got it to work with some hints from ProtonDB

Bioshock is a tricky one because it runs very close to the virtual address space limit (2GiB) and Wine + in-process graphics drivers add just enough overhead to make push it over the edge in more cases than on Windows. This isn't purely a Wine/Proton issue though and can also cause crashes on Windows for the game. For Bioshock it is enough to set the large address aware flag so that it can use the full 4GiB 32-bit virtual address space.

Thanks, yeah, that would explain what happened - the game would start up fine, I could play for a while (saving often just in case), and then at some point (often when moving into an area I hadn't entered yet) it would suddenly get choppy and crash a few seconds later. I guess at that point it ran out of memory.

...any hints for Arkham City ;) ?

This release added Arkham City support. You might want to check it out again.

If it was Google instead of Valve, those projects would been killed approximately 47 times already.

Proton is literally what made me permanently go from dual-booting Windows to going Linux full time. I can play all games I care to play with excellent performance on Linux. It's pretty amazing. Kudos to the Wine and Proton team.

> Valve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released eight years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds.

A while back, I actually did a blog post about using Linux as my daily driver for a week, including gaming: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... (you can ctrl+f "Running games and ProtonDB" if you want)

Clearly not all games work well or even launch successfully, but the situation is way better than it used to be a few years ago regardless! A part of it is the fact that game engines now do cross platform pretty well (pretty much any popular engine out there does Linux export as well with very few issues, though supporting it might be a different question), and Proton is also a good initiative for all the other titles.

Also, the ProtonDB site is useful if you want to check against your Steam library, or a particular title in general: https://www.protondb.com/ It's probably the first place that you should check out when you want to see whether you could play the games you like on Linux.

Even the current GPU drivers are typically serviceable, apart from the whole open source vs proprietary driver debate (which some might choose to overlook, whereas others wouldn't), though curiously I haven't found an alternative to AMD Software for tweaking how my GPU works on Linux, unfortunately. I mention CoreCtrl as one passable option in that blog post, but it's rather barebones.

Here's hoping that things only continue to improve and we don't get caught up with too much bad press or superstitions and put a positive spin on things where possible: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/linux-users-provide-mor...

It makes sense from a survival perspective. Microsoft has their own game store, apple too. If you want to sell games to people, you need a way to play them and not be at risk of being shut down by the big players.

Right, if anything and Valve's Linux commitment isn't really there 100%. E.g. SteamVR on Linux is still a mess with no updates for ages. Alyx came to Linux long after the Windows release and has had pretty much no bugfixes since. Probably more due to Valve's management model where things don't get done if no one is specifically interested in them than an overall focus but still...

I have a incredibly well specced Mac from work that I could use for gaming, but Linux support on steam is so far ahead that I don't bother anymore - it's a pain to figure out what games are supported on Mac - something I no longer even bother to check on Linux.

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