Valve is paying open source developers to keep Steam Deck playable
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.
They are now a corporation with hundreds of employees and equity in the billions of US dollars.
I think it makes sense for them to stay smallish and outsource projects to contractors. It's a nice change from SF companies who raise funds, then are beholden to investors who Demand that numbers go up - including number of people they hired. There's been a correction of that at least this year, with tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in highly funded IT companies.
I don't think this is as simple as "require contractors". It's more along the lines of compensating specific people to work on specific things.
That isn't to say it isn't worthwhile that Valve is doing it, and the article kinda sorta touches on the scale of Valve's activities, but not really. Okay, they've contracted over a hundred devs to work on OSS projects that they rely on. Are those all full-time contracts, or part time? How long are they contracted for? How does that compare to other companies that have similarly contracted devs to work on OSS projects they rely on? As is, the article is essentially "water is wet" for anybody who pays any attention to the interaction between OSS and enterprise. I learned far more pertinent details from one comment[0] on another HN thread on this a couple days ago. PC Gamer couldn't find one of the contracted devs and ask them two or three questions to give some substance to the article?
Seems pretty good open source success story to me?
As opposed to a lot of other hardware manufacturers, where the end-user is 'part of the ecosystem', along with advertisers, and other 3rd parties.
Microsoft and Sony certainly look at Xbox end users (aka gamers) a bit differently than Valve does. They need to keep publishers and advertisers happy. Valve has one audience...others have three (maybe more!?).
That is exciting!
No shade on the journalist here: to me, the software is vastly more impressive. That it can run a vast library of high-end Windows PC games on a laptop SoC running Linux is an incredible feat of software. I wouldn't have believed Proton could work so well if I hadn't seen it happen.
And all the tech is open-source :)
I remember clearly that I was expecting the usual "everyone says it works but it will probably crash on my computer and I have to dig for a solution for 3 hours"-type of situation that we Linux users are use to
But then I launched a game with it that I had struggled to run with the normal version of wine, and everything worked like magic, with only a few glitches.
A large part of my steam library was working without issues even in 2018 with Proton and it only kept getting better
It was like a dream come true. 2018 was the year I finally deleted my Windows partition because I didn't need anymore
I often marvel st how awesome Wine is, even before Proton. The fact that we can translate Windows programs and sometimes run them without a single problem on a completely different platform speaks to the awesomeness of the software and the people who contribute to it.
And proton takes it to a different level. Proton changed the whole linux gaming situation seemingly overnight. After they released the first public versions, all kinds of new possibilities opened
And the fact that it's all open source and easy to use outside of steam (so not just steam exclusive) and the fact that valve devs are contributing to wine, the linux kernel and lots of open source projects just makes me so happy
Wine is a 30 year old project, but Valve's initiative has pushed it over the final mile, and transformed it from 'pretty good' to 'almost perfect'. Not only are most windows games now easily playable on linux, but many perform even better than on windows. This is due to windows games being locked to the API which they first targeted and that does not get updated. Whereas the linux stack can easily incorporate new improvements, and bug fixes. And, good news for non-gamers, this applies to most windows software. If you haven't looked at wine in a long time you should check it out.
I've also been enjoying using the Deck. I'm currently playing through L.A. Noire, graphics settings maxed out. It's great being able to pick it up and start playing within seconds, the game running while suspended.
It seems that the firmware is to blame because only BIOS updates seem to fix the GPU bugs I encounter.
That caused me grief for many months until I figured it out. I updated Arch wiki about a month ago, and provided a command to compute a bit mask that avoids setting unnecessary feature bits.
If I'm purchasing a game that I plan to play exclusively on linux, I still tend to check proton DB before I click buy, but it's becoming more and more of an after-thought.
The first 50 minutes of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (Borderlands) on Linux and Review https://youtu.be/T_3sCcQksKQ
I'm running a Radeon 6800 XT undervolted at stock clocks and 980 mV (+ custom fan curve) and I don't think I could keep it cool without the undervolt. How achievable is that in Linux these days?
I'm also thinking of getting a steering wheel and getting back into race simming, are these kinds of peripherals well supported, or is it a game of chance?
As far as peripherals, sometimes it works better than windows and sometimes not great. I'd look up the specific wheel you plan to buy and see if it's supported or someone has built something to support it. For example, you've got piper (https://github.com/libratbag/piper) for Logitech devices.
Force feedback wheels work in Linux too. The "Linux" builds of games tend to have inferior or missing implementations, but running the windows binary through proton should work pretty well. The input layer in Linux is a bit fiddly; you need to set up obscure udev rules to eliminate dead zones for a steering wheel.
I actually built a force feedback wheel from scratch as a hobby project. I developed the firmware in Linux originally, but switched to Windows so that I could more easily run force feedback test programs. When I bother to set it up, I am probably also setting up VR too. VR works in Linux pretty well these days too, but all the subtle reliability problems compound. On any given day, 80% chance of game launching * 80% of wheel working * 80% chance of VR startinf means it only works 50% of the time. So I just boot into Windows, which works more like 90% of the time.
I mean for example, the back-end systems gave way after a doubling of requests (energy company). As a result, they spun up projects to improve performance, on the one side by enhancing the existing (commercial, expensive) systems, on the other to replace these existing systems with newer ones.
One thing they already achieved is to run API endpoints on lambdas, doubling performance (at least, I'm sure more can be achieved yet) and slashing costs by a factor of 60. While the lambdas are AWS proprietary, those too I'm sure use tons of open source software.
Github (aka Microsoft) should take notice -- Valve could be a big software player in the next decade.
"OSS dev payment pipelines / mentoring" is passé. Putting all their code into a LLM (of sorts) is not the way forward either. There's still a LOT of OS issues, and Valve seems to have surmounted a very large one, WITHOUT angering anyone.
Yet, it sounds like they've managed? Possibly because there's a clear road forward that people generally align on, though even then, disputes about things like code architecture can easily arise.
I'm sure there's history I'm missing, and Valve / Steam undoubtedly has flaws. But while good will can take a long time to build, god has it helped Valve here.
Not everyone loves them.
Everyone may go too far, but the majority seem to hold Valve in higher regard than nearly any other FAANG, Microsoft, and any other PC gaming storefront aside from GOG (from what I've seen).
Do you think they created proton to Extend and then "extinguish" Steam (which they can't because it is proprietary) or what?