Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
github.com
github.com
The community around the engine is vibrant and well-versed in the caveats of the Source workflow. With a GPL release, just like Carmack did with id tech, the amount of creative projects from indies would sky rocket. No longer bound by obscure deals.
The kind of discourse that litigates why that fact is true doesn’t serve curiosity or add knowledge.
For Source 2 it ends up being a constant source of leaks where strings for engine features of in-development games get shipped out in Dota 2 and CS2 updates. We learned tons of stuff about Deadlock that way.
FFS some of the best indie games out there made was made on RPG Maker and let's say it's far less advance than Godot. After all games are all about enjoyable core loop and player expirience. And no game engine magically give you any of it.
Company I co-founded released 2 games on PC and about to release 3rd one on PC and all the consoles. One of them was made with Godot, two with Unity. The only reason we had to switch to Unity are consoles. And the reason why Godot cant efficiently complete on consoles is the fact that platforms are backward and proprietary.
And of course I appreciate what you do. Thing is if you shoved it into a first person shooter, would it be even more successful? The answer to that question is often yes. Same as Roblox being basically Tavern Brawl but for third person platformers. Coming from a POV of game design for phones, Roblox games suck, but look: they are extremely popular and the clunky format of that engine makes them work. My point is that it’s impossible to generalize, but basically there is nothing you could make better with Godot today than with Unity or Unreal, as lamentable as that is, and even the things they make you want to make, it’s better to make those things instead.
If you look past TOP100 most popular games by player count you will find there are hundreds of less popular niche titles and wast majority of them likely not even 3D at all and there is reason for this.
Anyone who tried to start game development company and get their project funded knows that majority of publishers in the world operate well under $500,000 per project. This could sound unreal for US-based person who knows of FAANG salaries, but this is how game development industry is: lots of enthusiast trying to make some games working for penies.
So nope, wast majority of game developers dont need Unreal or even Unity feature set simply because they dont have budget for building modern 3D game.
Do you see Source being used in virtual soundstages? No. Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? No.
Does it have anything approaching the 3D or 2D or rendering style capabilities of any modern engine? No.
Is Source going to be remotely relevant for metaverse stuff? No.
All the money in the world won't change the fact that Source is an outdated pile of garbage.
Respawn uses it to this day for Apex, and it's horrific. Its graphics quality is atrocious especially for the demands it places on hardware. It has the worst latency of any similar multiplayer game (some events can take half a second to make it from a player's action to another player's system!) It lacks modern features that have been in other games for many years, like variable event rates (some games, for example, will use much higher event update rates for stuff happening within the player's field of view.)
Its game engine has so many bugs around inputs, movement, and collisions that high level play revolves around abusing all of them for competitive advantage in what is lauded as "movement", and because Respawn never treated these issues as exploits, they got painted into a corner where they can't ever switch to a modern game engine because trying to get the quirks of movement behavior would be impossible.
The game's input processing is done in relation to framerate, for fucks sakes....so input processing behavior changes depending on framerate.
The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung by Source that multiple world tournaments have been hacked live and ultimately had to be done in secret, later broadcast - because Respawn was so powerless to stop the hacker(s).
With more Unity shifting to a royalty model you're going to see a lot more interest in open source game engines like Godot; Godot is, for example, working on being usable for massive multiplayer and open-world games.
Vulkan support is now there (it was added in the last couple of years). Might not be for all engine branches though.
Given that the engine has been in, essentially, maintenance mode for almost a decade now, that is not really surprising. A more apt comparison would be Source 2 I assume.
> some events can take half a second to make it from a player's action to another player's system
What are events here? At least in normal source this should be impossible for anything movement/input related as the server processes the input each tick and then distributes that to each client (the Apex implementation should still do this). If it takes half a second to forward such an action, the whole server should hang for this time in the eyes of each client.
> The game's input processing is done in relation to framerate
This is a behavior added by Respawn, not something normal Source does.
> The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung by Source
That is a really broad claim imo. AFAIK CSGO only had this issue once in its lifetime and that was caused not by an issue in the engine but in the matchmaking service. So isn’t it more likely that Respawn just screwed something up?
IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
They couldn't release the windows port of Doom either, as that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore include Microsoft copyrighted code.
With Quake, Id did their own windows port, so it was possible to release the source code for winquake.
How does that follow? Normally copyright would transfer to the company paying for it.
But Microsoft essentially licensed the Doom source code and ported it themselves, it's not work-for-hire, so the copyright on any changes would default to Microsoft. Though, I'm really not sure if Microsoft paid anything for this licence, or if there even was a contract.
Nope, not true. Work by non employees is only work-for-hire if it falls into one of the qualifying categories and the contract explicitly says that it is work-for-hire.
Oddly enough, the project of "porting Doom to Windows" was started by Gabe Newell, who worked at Microsoft at the time,
- https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom
- https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom2
- https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/29/windoom-wing-win32s-on-w...
> The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows.
> Still, the code is quite portable, and it should be straightforward to bring it up on just about any platform.
It seems like they just didn't have immediate access to the code for the Windows version. The DOS source code eventually leaked a couple years ago along with the code to the Mac port of Doom. https://archive.org/details/doom-mac-source
The implementations get compiled in based on whatever platform you’re compiling for using a bunch of #ifdef statements
In that case it’s just a matter of not including certain .h/.cpp files
reminds of the whole "opensourcing solaris" drama that Bryan Cantrill talked about in his speech at usenix some ten years ago.
i wonder if the culprit is i18n again, "lol"
Probably other stuff there but not sure off the top of my head.
And yeah too much effort to re-encode all the game audio most likely.
This just seems like a lazy excuse. Ok so some of the code can’t be released. Fine, what stops you from open sourcing the rest of it that isn’t licensed? The OS community will surely fill in The blanks.
I do think that the source code of source was leaked. Its just that valve has to themselves give the code of source. FLOSS community would really do it. Trust me.
Modders in general won't care though.
So they could probably do it, but it would be costly, while just releasing the TF2 code is basically free.
You’d think so, but some developers have a very adversarial relationship with abstractions, such as abstracting away platform-specific code behind a common interface. It happens more often than you’d think.
> And even if the developers were that crazy those calls need to be excluded when building for other platforms so can also be stripped form the source code in an automated fashion.
So they’re going to leave people code that either doesn’t compile or, if it does, doesn’t work? And what’s stripped out may have very important technical considerations that might only be known based on which function calls were yanked out.
I think that in general, potential open source developers would not care at all about that. Some code (that doesn't yet work) is better than no code. As someone else mentioned, a motivated open source group could probably easily fill in all the missing gaps within a month.
It's all legal risk with little commercial upside
https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3/blob/master/neo/render...
I remember that being somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 LOC to fix, and exactly where to change it was “common knowledge” the moment the source came out
On one hand, at one point we had CEO and CTO publicly stating in townhalls that they want us to be a technological forefront and looking for ways to showcase our capabilities. At the same time it was virtually impossible to open source even something as trivial as a string formatting library, because once you started talking to stakeholders about approval their POV was that it's part of a project that took X amount of employees Y amount of time and that equation is in millions, so that has to be really valuable.
hell, when I joined the frontend circus in 2013 I was flabbergasted that most people needed to install 3rd party library to perform "isEven(num)" operation
... not to mention that aforementioned library had at least 3 dependencies itself.
if someone just does a `git push` and changes license it won't be much help to anyone until there is a proper documentation.
Source uses Havok, which is a licensed middleware. Convincing Havok to be also open source is likely a nonstarter. Repeat for any other middlewares they might have used, such as Adobe's ScaleForm used by CSGO, and it quickly is just an endless legal nightmare. idTech handled this by either spending time to rip out those components, allowing for a partial open source release which is what you're ripping on Valve for doing right this moment, or by avoiding using any licensed middlewares at all which is a significant development limitation that not everyone can get away with.
As Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed alternatives, it's possible we might see that open sourced in the future. Who knows.
There is a third-party implementation of vphysics based on an open source physics engine, for example - so for Valve that seems to have been successful: https://github.com/misyltoad/VPhysics-Jolt
Haven't played TF2 but at least HL2 relies heavily on physics for gameplay, so while replacing the rendering engine might lead to rendering artifacts which can be annoying but tolerable in many cases, replacing the physics engine will probably lead to game-breaking issues.
One could reverse engineer it, but then you're into copyright territory...
They seem fairly functional but not fully drop-in replacements.
For example, one of the bugs might be inadvertently relied on in one of the map puzzles, unbeknownst to the map creator.
Do you have a link for this? I know the sound system is theirs as they open sourced it.[0] What about physics?
Also, I agree that they should open source Source 2 if possible. They gain almost nothing by having it closed source and gain a lot by giving developers a better deal than Unreal because more money saved on the engine means either cheaper or better/long games. (At least assuming both engines are equivalent which they are not, but in theory.) Meanwhile Epic is using Unreal as a carrot for developers to release their games in Epic Store.[1]
[0] https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24258723/epic-games-store...
Source 2 dropped Havok in favor of their in-house Rubikon physics engine.
But maybe this wasn't execute well enough? Maybe Steam was too in its infancy to attract highly profitable licensees? Most of the non-Valve games made on Source 1 weren't big-budget AAA games so it was likely only a modest return on investment.
If you were a developer you are looking the other way, getting those app store fees down.
The App Stores - Steam, iOS, Google Play, are making higher margins per game than most game devs, and that's based on hard numbers not a guess. There is no meaningful way for game developers - artists, programmers, and everyone else involved - to make more money other than getting rid of the app store fees.
There is a whole explanation about network effects here, and endless debate about what the fees should be. There is a cost to sell a game and it is not small. Several percent just go to credit card processing, refunds, and fraud. More has to go for the infrastructure to deliver games and updates. Then there has to be some margin. Then there maybe should be a premium that goes to the "app store" so that developers don't have to worry about distributing their app to thousands of locations. There is another premium that really is delivering demand for the game in the first place. Many sales would never happen on Steam if the users were not shown the game as featured or recommended. Most developers have no problem paying 30% for a sale that would otherwise never have happened.
However, if I went back in a time machine to 1999 when you drove to a retail store to pick a game box off of a shelf, and you told me some arbitrary application would get to take 30% of all game sales decades in the future, I would have said that's fucking crazy. More developers should be able to seamlessly sell their games direct to their players, and I'm not entirely sure why they don't. Selling a digital item online is definitely simpler than developing a successful game.
Edit: And if you look at Unity's financials they are in real trouble and probably will only survive if another larger, profitable, company acquires them. Not a great feeling for game developers who might suddenly be paying Facebook/Meta or someone worse their license fees.
That's not really true. As a strictly internal engine they gain the massive benefit that the only users are themselves. They don't have to make affordances or adjust for third party users. If they released it with no intention to play nice with the community then all they open themselves up to is criticism and bad press when they inevitably break third party users. To keep their nice internal workflows without more engineering effort would make the release a dump of the source tree and a "have fun" message pledging zero support.
Often in internal engines there are lots of workflows and tools that only work with access to the company's internal network. Things you can't make public. I work on (a different) internal AAA engine and our build system would not work without access to our internal network even if you had a dump of the entire source code. Do you rip that out or modify your internal workflows? Not so free to release it anymore.
>when they inevitably break third party users.
Wouldn't versioned releases solve this issue? You can ship a new release every 3 years (lets say) and developers would expect things to break between versions which is the case for all engines.
I haven’t spent _that_ much time reading the doom3 codebase, but when I go “I wonder how that should work,” it’s a decent place to look.
Having a base of useful code to read that’s better than anything you’ve written is always a good thing.
I kinda get this but also don't get this. You can always open source something without giving any guarantees to third-party users about stability, feature requests, etc., no?
It would still be useful as just having the possibility to look into the code, and if someone want to build on top of it, then they know the context and have to accept the conditions.
If you ever meet any you should ask them.
Contributing to this is probably
- custom external hooks (eg: homemade test framework, patchnotes publishing, steamapp backdoor integrations, hardware-specific firmware interfaces, 3rd party closed source SDK hooks)
- assumptions about Valve's server architecture/implementation for most multiplayer stuff used by Valve games, the codebase(s) of which are probably as vast as Source itself and closed-source too
- bespoke engine modifications made for specific games like HL2 or CS1.6 which hasn't been touched for a decade, the authors of which may not be accessible to document them trivially
Adding sufficient documentation to a massive closed-source system meant for internal use, over multiple decades, to bring them up to par for functional OSS publication is a monumental feat that honestly probably isn't worth the risk of bad publicity from the modder community who'd just be mad about how unusable it would be.
My general impression from lurking on these kinds of threads (with no relevant personal experience) was that Godot is a good 2D engine but not a good 3D engine. Do you find it comparable to the other two?
Sadly, you need to put in a lot of work to get good results out of it (neither of its predecessors had a reputation for being easy to work with) and for whatever reason many studios aren't exactly rushing to invest a bunch of time into it (many just go for Unreal Engine 5, or stick with Unity etc., indies often opt for Godot), so you don't get much past simple example projects. Part of this is probably that it never generated a lot of hype or much of a community around it.
Godot has a big community around it and is maturing pretty quickly, the early versions were pretty rough when it came to 3D (2.X and 3.X), but it's better now. Not as stable as Unity or Unreal but those have had the advantage of lots of years of work put into them, by more people than Godot has up until now.
There's also more niche options like Stride (https://www.stride3d.net/) and Flax (https://flaxengine.com/) but they suffer from the same issues as O3DE, even if otherwise are promising.
My guess is the primary use for this is going to be corps cloning it for their own internal use, whatever that might be. I see lots of huawei-aligned commits.
[1]https://sbox.game or https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/
https://vghe.net/source-2-engine.html#source-2-engine-games shows Valve almost exclusively.
PS: I am the guy who wrote the long paragraph about crowdfunding.
After reading the hackernews , it became evident that yes it would be nice for foss source code but its never gonna happen because its gonna take effort and money for valve for what? they might not do it , because I guess they are there for making money ?
I believe that crowdfunding is the way to go , Instead of forcing companies to give what we want for free , we need to provide an incentive for them.
This crowdfunding could also be a great PR for valve itself as well. Crowdfunding is the win-win situation I could think of , but oh I am more than happy to eat my own word , if I can get source's source code and really run team fortress 2 fully open source.
Maybe remove that part if you really want valve to listen to this professionally please ?
Forget Source, what about GoldSrc.
... which was based on Quake which is now GPL.
There's Xash3d which lives in a kind of licensing limbo because it was developed mostly from scratch except for some header files which could now be replaced by GPL QuakeWorld ones yet the current Xash maintainers can't do anything about it because they're tainted by non-clean-roomness.
Even if the above issue was solved, this is about the engine; the HL1 game code (the "SDK") is open but licensed by Valve in a way (MIT-ish permissive with a non-commercial clause) that is incompatible with the GPL.
This makes both legally undistributable as binaries together.
I steer clear of Xash3D because of it's legal grey area too.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
I don't think it reflects well on this site either
I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well.
After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all? The only things I can think of are a) anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting important secret sauces made by the company itself
a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that case they would be protected even if the source was released so it's still the same situation.
Far more likely the community kicks up a huge stink about how Valve released a crippled engine.
I'm not fully up to date but I'm under the impression that Source 2 is currently used by their modern games. I don't think that's the case for Source 1. The same logic wouldn't apply.
>After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all?
Pretty much what you said. It's all down to cost-benefit at the end of the day and of they think there's more cost (perceived or otherwise) to releasing source 2 code they won't bother.
There are maybe four still in development and due hopefully this year, plus Apex Legends is still going strong.
Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact still too much secret sauce left there?
There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was the only engine which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT, without a performance penalty most of the time?
You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things you're building on top of it.
This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as they said in their manuals.
ID's engines are always called "The world's most expensive xcopy". You always get the source, but you never share it.
Same model. Get the license, get the source.
See the relevant page at: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
From that page:
> This page provides detailed instructions for subscribers to download the source code for Unreal Engine (UE) from the Unreal Engine GitHub repository, and to get started working with the code.
(Emphasis mine)
* The NDA'ed console bits are hidden of course but all the PC code is there. Not just release snapshots either, you can see all of Epics commits in real time.
It’s just free as in beer.
“Click through EULA” is the mammoth in the room.
If this apocryphal story is true, they might only have a license to it (making it a derivative work) and depending on the terms of their licensing agreement from id they might not be able to do that without having their legal people talk to ZeniMax’s (they bought out id software and are their parent company now) lawyers, which runs to thousands of dollars in pure costs even if everyone is totally cooperative and on board and wants to make it happen immediately.
We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in the TF2 comminity)
We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)?
I think some of these fixes were through something a bit more complicated like sourcemod which hooks various methods.
I remember downloading a leaked version of the source code for source engine, and in general it was laughable at how awful it was. I dont know if it was ever discussed mainstream but only based on recollection of IRC chats.
I think it was about 6 months out of date, but even so it would explain why HL sequels would become vaporware despite years of teasing the community by Gabe Newell himself.
Volumetrics, physical sound, pbr, great snapshot based networking.
Godot doesn't really come close.
I am asking this from a total legal standpoint.
It is necessary to avoid distributing any copyrighted material, so the user must provide the game assets from a legitimate copy for using the program to be legal. In addition, the 'clean-room' must be maintained by ensuring that no contributors to the re-implementation have ever seen the source code for Source, or they become tainted with forbidden knowledge.
Indeed, it's quite common for beloved old games to be re-implemented on new codebases to allow easy play on modern OS's and at high resolution, etc.
See https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity, https://openrct2.io/, https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz
It's about damn time, really. The TF2 source code has already leaked twice. And a group even made a cloned version of the game in an earlier version of the engine. The community support this game still has is massive.
edit: here's the announcement from the TF2C Discord:
==============
@everyone We'll have more to say later, but you might not be able to launch TF2 Classic for a little bit due to the massive SDK update and public release of Team Fortress 2's code.
We're already preparing for the porting efforts and a potential Steam release now that we've been legally enabled to pursue that, but in the meantime, you will have to shift Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer to the "previous2021" beta branch that still has the previous revision of the SDK files to continue playing. See the screenshot for an example.
Thank you, and we'll have more news soon!
They don’t have Valve’s humor but… who does.
A good example of the stuff they're trying is the Jump Pad PDA, the alternate to Teleporters for Engineer. I like them a lot because they really open up the verticality of the maps to players who aren't obsessive rocket/sticky-jumpers: https://wiki.tf2classic.com/wiki/Jump_Pads
It's fun as Engineer too since they make that slot more useful in circumstances where Teleporters are a waste. A single Jump Pad costs more metal than a single Teleporter, but then it's also useful on its own instead of requiring the complete pair. It's great if there's an enemy Spy who has made it their mission to constantly harass your buildings, and on maps/modes where the objective is so close to spawn (like the first phase of Payload as BLU and the final phases of Payload as RED) that Teleporters are less tactically important.
e: also the obvious visible fact that TF2C maintains the original cohesive art style with meaningful silhouettes, something Valve made a huge deal about in the TF2 developer commentaries only to throw away in favor of becoming Very Rich via gambling for colorful sparkly hats lol https://ia904504.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/11...
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...
frogs and graphics programming are good friends.
(Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine titles)
I see what you did there
Double digits? That's very very optimistic. It's closer to like two people.
People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-frustratio...
I think "courting" is underselling what they actually did.
They invested heavily into building tooling and APIs specifically for games, which eventually powered their own gaming console. They were practically the only company doing this on PCs since the mid '90s, and they became a monopoly because nobody else was focused on this. Developers and consumers jumped aboard because there was nowhere else to go. This is the same reason Steam won. For many years, there were just no alternatives.
Microsoft gets a lot of flack for many things, but they deserve a ton of credit for inventing and supporting the PC gaming landscape as we know it today.
Regardless, it seems silly to claim that Microsoft's 30+ years of supporting Windows to make it the dominant gaming platform on PC rests on the shoulders of 3 employees. I don't have any insider knowledge, but it would be safe to assume that this was a long-term strategic decision for the company. I can imagine the existence of internal detractors at every step of this direction, but what they've achieved and their position today is surely the result of the successful execution of this vision, and not something they stumbled into by chance.
That is actually more than I thought, but its clear without compatible games there is very little reason to install Steam.
Also, Apple only recently started to be more gaming friendly, so it's really not surprising they would try to port a 20 year old game.
About 30% of the games I own on Steam would run on my Mac. I think that's quite much for a platform that nobody likes to develop for. But to be fair, I have few mainstream games like CoD, LoL or whatever.
I can't find it. But essentially it was Apple not wanting their machines to be used for gaming. And so axed all the work of the port and refused to publish the game.
The best I can find is from 2007 from Gabe:
> We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. The cycle then repeats itself when a new group of people replace the old ones at Apple.
> We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
So it sounds more like Valve just hadn't done the work to make it possible to run on more modern macOS (that has long been 64-bit only) until now. Not much Apple could have done except maybe tried to directly pay them to do it earlier...
> As [1]announced on the official TF2 website
[1] https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 states:
> We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
So that seems to be coming, at least in the sense of x86-64 which Apple Silicon supports better via Rosetta 2.
Windows Vulkan and OpenGL drivers exist, because Microsot still hasn't removed the ICD plugin interface from the OS, which is used by GPU vendors themselves, not Microsoft, to provide drivers on Windows for VUlkan and OpenGL.
Likewise, Valve could have use MoltenVK if they actually wanted to.
Valve didn't bother with Metal because Apple are hostile to their business model, they've given up dedicating serious rescources to the platform and at this point Steam only exists on MacOS out of inertia.
Unless you know for sure that you're going to get a decent player base, I don't think optimising for Mac makes much business sense for games companies. Users that can afford a Mac can probably also afford a console anyway.
You can trick games into running by using the same wrappers and workarounds that you'd use to game on Linux (except you need to optimise the wrappers yourself because they're less mature) but gaming on Linux already has plenty of DRM/anti-cheat incompatibility issues, and using less mature tools will only make that worse. And, of course, Apple doesn't care much about backwards compatibility; they've killed 32 bit for no apparent reason other than "we don't want to maintain compatibility" and who knows how long they'll maintain the current set of replacement APIs. Linux suffers from similar issues, and that's why the go-to method of playing games on Linux is to run them in an emulated Windows environment.
I think games companies will recompile games for Snapdragon before they'll bother with Mac. By the time they got all their 32 bit x86 libraries to work on ARM without emulation, Apple has probably switched around a couple of APIs and requirements anyways, so why bother.
See also: Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose its way after the original generation is gone.
As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team.
Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each project support team is like 30-50 people at most.
To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024:
* Epic Games - 4000
* Nintendo - 7,724
* Sony Interactive Entertainment - 12,700
* Take-Two Interactive - 12,371
* Electronic Arts - 13,700
* Activision Blizzard - 17,000
* Mircosoft Gaming - 20,100
They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to play with cheaters unless they are cheating.
They could definitely invest some resources into this. But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will eventually make them do something.
Counter strike cases are a gambling product. They cost money to buy, they cost money to open, and they reward with an item worth real money. This is indisputable, and arguing otherwise is either in bad faith or due to ignorance of the platform and surrounding ecosystem.
Valve wouldn’t be making over a billion dollars a year on case openings alone if the outcome of opening a case was worthless 100% of the time.
I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item trading and such convenience features. And I say this as someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.
Epic is gnawing at the lead, at least with me, as they give out a free game every week. I must have 300 games in Epic - I've even paid for a few.
Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects:
1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]).
2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting.
3. This can even lead to money laundering [1].
As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation.
Some video resources that might be useful:
- Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
- People Make Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g
[0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...
Edit: this is a genuine question. What is the solution here?
Valve's enforcement was one round of C&Ds in 2016 (!), and then some technical measures [0] in 2024. For Valve to take heed the problem, they literally had to have a stage invasion at their esport event [1].
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/730/view/41856069942...
[1]: https://internettalk.xyz/blog/cults-vendettas-gambling-how-a... - article I published, Coffeezilla also has a video on this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE
The problem is, if you can no longer cash out the items for real money, they’re going to lose a lot (>95% I’d guess) of their value. Nobody wants $25k of steam wallet money, they want $25k, period. This would be terrible for valve, since it would severely diminish the value of all items (thus diminishing their cut of every on-platform sale), as well as cut the demand for unboxings (which they of course also make a cut on). Valve obviously cares more about their money printer than the fact that it facilities children gambling, so they do nothing.
It’s pretty easy to see why they allow this. They made over a billion dollars in 2023 on unboxings alone, ignoring the sale/trade fees. I doubt anything will change without a major US lawsuit, which I doubt will come any time soon if it hasn’t already.
You can wrangle that with words in any way you want, its gambling. Same for Team Fortress 2 and stuff like hats.
Most current monetization for cosmetics allows you to both (1) grind for items without paying anything and (2) if you want to pay, show you exactly what you are paying for.
Even games that still use lootboxes (i.e. don't follow #2) allow you to grind for items.
CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where you can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase keys to open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are getting (lootboxes).
It's bad and there is no excuse.
The trading mechanic, which adds a real world value to these cosmetics, and encourages players to pay for lootboxes makes it worse.
People sometimes hate on popular games like Fortnite and COD, but they have way better/more fair monetization practices.
You get dropped items through playtime which you can sell on the community market to gain steam wallet funds, which you can then use to purchase most other cosmetics or even games.
I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.
I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex, while people do demonstrate what gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can potentially be disasterous.
That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame on your own biological body and treating parts of it as taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a complicated thing.
Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers. The biological imperatives and inclinations are too strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone, easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received by other people during their childhood.
>people do demonstrate what gambling is early on
Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word of advice to their children about gambling-like activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those themselves, let alone their own kids.
And? More reason to educate them early. Similar to why we have a strong desire while young to devour sweets. Now imagine we ignore diet and leave a kid to eat whatever they feel like.
>compared to anything related to gambling.
My theme is education and awareness, not playing a one up contest on what is worse. Could we both agree that these are factors to teach to kids early?
>What are you basing this affirmation on?
My upbringing and education? You think 3rd/4th graders learning about "number cubes" won't equate that to gambling? They also love talking about card games later on. Parent taught me plenty of common games as well, alongside Dominoes. And ofc Z the media. Kids have eyes and can see adults gamble. They don't need a deep dive into a dedicated class to learn the deal (but yes, I was taught that gambling is bad).
You're not trying to sway people away from internet porn, you're telling people how sex actually works in reality. My teachers taught about the basic biology of genetalia (especially wrt sexual function), how to perform safe sex, STD's, Pregnancy, and school resources (we had condoms at the nurses office, for example).
I feel those are the basics needs everyone should he taught. A decent teacher would also have an open Q&A about sex and help in dispelling any potentially bad notions learned from elsewhere. The best lessons come from.those who seek knowledge themselves.
It's not perfect. I wish my education also taught more about genetalia care (there's still so so much misinformation about foreskin) and dove more into what consent actually is (that was more in college). But the point was to counter balance whatever people was seeing on the internet, not necessarily demonize it. Just like how understanding how to calculate probability can change your approach to gambling, learning more about your body and other humans' behavior can change your approach to how you interpret porn online. Even if people continue to consume it after being educated.
But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so selling on Steam is a must
When you put it that way, the model makes so much more sense to matching how the US operates.
Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing 200GB downloads though Steams servers.
- anticheat
- voice chat, friend list, ...
- matchmaking
- marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ...
- clips and videos
- forums/ discussion board
- cloud saves
- rankings
An indie would have to implement and host those by itself or rely on third party services.
Steam was taking 30% when they did heavy curation and hand picked every game. At that point being on Steam was probably as valuable as a traditional publisher distribution wise because just being on Steam assured some level of quality.
Greenlight was the start of the decline in that value, and then with Steam Direct its just officially insane that they're still pricing their cut at the same rates they did at launch.
The value adds you listed also got much easier to build over time and got commoditized. EGS offers most of that for free for example, sans gambling enabling marketplaces.
For example the Forums feature is seen as a plague, many of the forums on Steam are filled with neo nazi content and spam.
Source really wasn't built for the amount of particles present in the cosmetics (especially the "Unusuals")
I am however eternally grateful Steam allows me to painlessly run Windows games on Linux so I never have to deal with MS in my personal life ever again. As a game distributor they are awesome. And that is what Valve does best, distribute games.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC...
They also likely have another half-life game in the works, as mentions of half-life-esque things have popped up around their codebase (as published through updates of their existing source 2 games):
Half-Life Alyx actually took me by surprise. As in: "What? Valve still makes games?". And while it is the Half-Life franchise, it is different enough to stand on its own.
Maybe I'm not enough of a hardcore gamer to like DOTA or MOBA style games. I loved TF2 but you can only play for so long.
I would like to see Valve come up with some fresh new imaginative IP that isn't something decades old. Half life was a ground breaking game and to this day I will fire it up and play through about once a year after I get the urge. On a rail was my favorite part. I feel dread when I get to Zen because I know the end of the game is near.
But PCVR isn't really why people buy these things (which they do, Quest headsets cumulatively have sold ~30 million units) it's a value-add, most engagement is with Meta's store. The reason why this engagement isn't noticed by you is because the demographic showing the fastest uptake for VR is kids and teens, while you, I and everyone else posting here is old as fuck.
Valve's release cycle has slowed down to almost nothing, and are just feeding off their cash cows. Gabe is 62 and seems more interested in his Neuralink competitor.
CS:GO is the worst offender; to the point where there's third-party gambling[0] sites to gamble cosmetic gun skins with, that specifically cater to children. Basically all of CS:GO's pro scene is sponsored by it.
[0] The skin gambling sites are not officially condoned by Valve, but they absolutely do not do shit to try and stop it.
[1] Half-Life: Alyx notwithstanding
Same with the Half-Life repo - when the 25th anniversary stuff was released it was just pushed as one mega-patch.
On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers? That would be unfortunate indeed.
I doubt it - there have been at three or four Source engine leaks over the years, as well as the Team Fortress 2 game code. I suspect anything they don't know they reverse engineer from the Linux and Mac builds, and I'm sure anything Windows specific is easy to find as they'd have IDA scripts to automate what they need to find.
Initial commit
+1153568 -222431 lines changed
Valve is not 40,000+ company, not even 4,000+. 400 people. That's it.
It makes sense they decided to focus on Source 2 instead...
Existing instructions use the old, leaked source engine. Time to make it official and native.
There might be some Team Fortress 2-specific stuff in the engine (certainly the GoldSource engine tweaks a couple of things based on which game is running) but I doubt it - the Source engine relies a lot more on expecting game code to implement a bunch of interfaces.
Shame that source itself is proprietory.But still its leaked so its "theoretically" possible to be open source. IDK.
it was heavily disliked by people. So I think I have come across the solution of crowdfunding.
I have presented various benefits to the crowdfunding & I am writing this again so that this can be a comment of its own so that it can be much more easier for hackernews people to see I suppose for better discussion purposes I suppose.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624#...
Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]).
Oh and lately, I had to build the original lsof command to please the steam webhelper... and there is a liblsof library they could have linked statically...
Valve "linux" devs should be worry putting "valve" on their resume, this could backfire... seriously.
Steam launched without any runtime. They added all that because yes, the average game developer cannot manage to build portable libraries.