Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
??? They didn't
All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all
Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...
Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.
It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.
The closest I've heard to something compelling is that the digital goods aren't the same as actual physical goods, and that somehow that makes it worse, but I still don't find it particularly compelling; I've heard people (often lovingly) refer to trading cards as "cardboard crack" explicitly to joke about how ridiculous it is to be paying for stuff that's essentially just ink and paper.
Subsidizing the game's devel/ops cost isn't a bad thing. Especially if it's optional and doesn't change the game.
It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my experience, having been part of communities of both types of games.
Aren't people upset about both? The whole "gamble for features" is pretty much why the mobile market and console market are divorced in audiences (or at least, community).
People are "more" upset about Valve here because this is in the console space. They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm sure a few people are, but typically no. People are aware that trading card games can be a monetary black hole, but Magic and similar games usually don't take the same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper.
> They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm not talking about the mobile market. Are you not aware that Magic the Gathering is a physical card game? (though it does have some digital implementations too)
I think the simplest fact is that most people online don't think about offline product. Out of sight, out of mind. It's also an interesting market where WotC and Co. Actively try to avoid the resellers market. They don't want any risk in valuing individual cards themselves, so they stick to boosters.
For digital stuff, you are inherently the market itself. So it's hard divorce yourself when you are the one who implemented trading and controlling rarities and drops.
This is a weird claim. TCG/CCG is far worse than Valve's loot boxes. It's not even close. MTG Arena is huge btw, it's not a footnote.
Valve is simply larger and took legal heat for people misusing the API.
There's plenty of outrage about paid loot boxes and viewing them as terrible, terrible gambling that exploits consumers and ought to be regulated/banned. Not everyone agrees with this take, but it's still fairly widespread.
Now, you do see people pointing out that trading card games are basically still gambling -- and no one really disagrees with that -- you just don't see the same level of outrage about it. What you usually see is grudging acceptance, ala "what're ya gonna do, that's just how these card games are".
Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.
> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.
For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.
I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).
It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.
We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.
But if you're just running the company 'badly' (in the shareholders eyes), probably no.
Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.
People complain about the latter because they have higher expectations because the institution is supposed to serve them and often has all the diseases of true scale without being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry skates by because people assume it's out to screw them and they can cherry pick.
When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy customer relations from birth?
The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some companies that are more likely to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA, sometimes Apple. But I don’t trust any of those companies to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or Verizon.
> The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing to protect society from the negative externalities it causes. For example:
- Mandating worker representation on company boards. So shareholders still have some power, but less.
- Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller companies which generally have less problematic externalities.
Dodge v. Ford is basically the source of all these headaches; the Dodge Brothers owned shares in Ford. Ford refused to pay the dividends he had to pay to the Dodge Brothers, suspecting that they'd use the dividends to start their own car company (he wasn't wrong about that part). The Dodge Brothers sued Ford, upon which Fords defense for not paying out dividends was "I'm investing it in my employees" (an obvious lie, it was very blatantly about not wanting to pay out). The judge sided with the Dodge Brothers and the legal opinion included a remark that the primary purpose of a director is to produce profit to the shareholders.
That's basically become US business doctrine ever since, being twisted into the job of the director being to maximize profits to the shareholders. It's slightly bunk doctrine as far as I know; the actual precedent would mostly translate to "the shareholders can fire the directors if they think they don't do a good job" (since it can be argued that as long as any solid justification exists, producing profit for the shareholders can be assumed[0]; Dodge v. Ford was largely Ford refusing to follow his contracts with money that Dodge knew Ford had in the bank), but nobody in the upper areas of management wants to risk facing lawsuits from shareholders arguing that they made decisions that go against shareholder supremacy[1]. And so, the threats of legal consequences morph into the worst form of corporate ghoulishness that's so pervasive across every publicly traded company in the US. It's why short-term decision making dominates long-term planning for pretty much every public company.
[0]: This is called the "business judgement rule", where courts will broadly defer the judgement on if a business is ran competently or not to the executives of that business.
[1]: Tragically, just because it's bunk legal theory, doesn't change that the potential and disastrous consequences of lawsuits in the US are a very real thing.
If anything Milton Friedman is more responsible for this idea that shareholder maximizing is the corporate goal. That is an efficient market argument though not a legal one and he framed it long after the dodge suit. He needed to frame that argument because so many firms were _not_ doing that.
But just because a Chicago school economist says something about governance doesn’t mean it’s broadly applicable in the same way an Austrian economists opinions about inflation aren’t iron rules about monetary policy.
In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
It's not just functionally equivalent to an IPO... it's an IPO if all the buying new shareholders were sociopaths.
(Yes, there are the PE companies who run businesses better like Berkshire, but that's far from the most common type of PE)
No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
Passion matters.
Is it good enough or should we be monitoring his health and hoard torrents of our steam collection just in case?
It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1) Epic also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds, going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches to optimise it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.
Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*
It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.
*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a veto to ship Steam with half life 2.
It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles of money.
I see it the other way round: they can do all that because they print money.
Not that it's necessarily a bad thing: maybe they stay relevant because they are doing that.
We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).
If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.
*At a specific point in time and for certain investors
Ergo I propose grandparent commentator inject more humor in their clear understanding of leverage and debt to widen your, my, and their audiences' understanding regarding debt and leverage beyond your proposed metaphor of the toddler CFO failing the marshmallow challenge.
You can fit zo many tulips in this bad boy
Just unsure about the timing
Right after we get nuclear fusion and a million people on Mars.
This differs quite a bit from a typical venture-backed or boot-strapped entity, which has a realistic pathway to profitability.
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/hsbc-warns-openai-coul...
They have few employees and massive revenue.
And IIRC Valve and EA had almost exactly the same revenue figures last year, yet EA had 10x more employees.
On paper it would seem extremely appealing to public investors.
Valve can be Valve because HL + Steam, in the same way that Google ~2010 could not be evil because search + ad revenue.
The difference is that Google IPO'd and took market capital, and Valve didn't.
Once public investors are onboard, you maximize profits or face lawsuits.
As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL").
In more realistic terms, they could have built proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are funding a lot of development, apparently) to give themselves a unique advantage.
If they were a publicly traded company, they probably would be doing all these things.
As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers despite giving away hundreds of games.
Developing open source emulation is essential to their success - no developer would build and verify for Steam OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer is what makes them successful.
Because it is "common wisdom" even if the wisdom is short sighted and doesn't always amount to increased profits.
See Netflix removing the ability to cast, because fuck you. How much of the current growth is borne out of that crackdown on people using all their profiles they pay for?
There currently isn't a "good guy" so they can keep turning those screws and force some extra growth. Being anti-consumer would be beneficial for Valve because they are currently the only good guys.
Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.
But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect the greater good just as much as a public company. The rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just there to support that transfer of wealth.
Not really. Most people have terribly low time preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed explanation). Public company ownership is much better because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but still susceptible to much of the same management problems, specially in a society that already favors lower time preference by other means.
I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.
Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.
By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
“Open for the elite” how?
You still don’t have a say and the investor is also the customer. How is it democracy or keeping companies to being good for society.
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
What was your attempted point? Or did you not understand the issue that was brought up?
So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would likely be in the top 50%).
This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.
The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.
Well that's your problem there.
I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
Are they doing good things for Linux? Absolutely. As a long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
I hear that for every major Windows release. And after 6 months everybody is fine with it.
Ok, but this “at the moment” has lasted at least since 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a pretty great company delivering value and not being annoying.
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.
If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
If the company makes a profit and there aren't shareholders there to keep the stewards in check, excesses can and do develop.
So it's not perfect, but it sure as hell beats having shareholders.
Precisely, in the form of the #1 trend of public companies, stock buybacks! I've seen aggressive buybacks take a company with a ton of money in the bank and a profitable business and drive it right to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in just a few short years.
This article explains roughly how Patagonia is structured: https://medium.com/@purpose_network/the-patagonia-structure-...
For Patagonia a trust owns 100% of the voting rights, while a charity collects 100% of the dividends. I don't doubt that there are ways the structure could be subverted, but it's a far cry from "money without oversight".
Do you have examples of Steward-owned companies that ended up with "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issues?
(I personally think Steam should go in that direction, otherwise I'm afraid enshittification is unavoidable once Gabe Newell is no longer at the helm)
The model has worked well for many decades for a 100 billion$ revenue company like Bosch, good to see others taking a cue from them.
(Also goes to show that even constructs like these are not safe from corporate fuckups - see the emissions scandal...)
I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.
This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
It's about leverage. It's all about where you stand and how long your lever is. Musk stands at the top and he has a very long set of levers. He's also much more closely personally involved in engineering aspects of a company that most CEOs know little to nothing about. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, because his decisions have massively outsized effects because of this. Leverage.
If Musk makes good or bad decisions over the next few years, that matters much, much more than the decisions of anyone else at Tesla, especially because he hires and fires everyone else at Tesla. They're all only there, as individuals in particular, because of him anyway.
As it happens I think his decision making has deteriorated significantly recently, in some respects but not all. Also Tesla just doesn't have the magic special sauce SpaceX has had since they developed reusability. There's no special engineering insight in the Tesla architecture. Other vehicle manufacturers already caught up. That catch up is happening in space tech as well with BO's recent booster recovery, but SpaceX still has a very significant lead there, based on a truly revolutionary concept (which Musk championed personally) that they had exclusively for 10 years. Starship still doesn't work though, so we'll see.
I agree that the CEO is typically the most important in this respect, especially this particular CEO. I just think that giving him an additional 1/8th of the company's entire market cap growth, on top of the roughly 1/8th he already has, is highly disproportionate.
Clearly the shareholders disagree, and that's entirely their right. And I'm not surprised, CEOs are greatly overvalued in general.
If they can just easily sell the shares they will do that instead.
There are old companies in either model.
Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not charity.
Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)
Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
I think more ARM Valve hardware is likely.
Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?
> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?
> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!
That contrasts against the companies doing things that are good for business (at least short term) and bad for consumers.
Its not all sunshine and windows.
>Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I
In the same way Bill Gates did not force you to use Internet Explorer, yes. Both are free applications with alternatives. Let's not forget our history.
That's only a matter of time, and probably not a very long time.
It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to closed source quicker than you can blink, because the reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do good.
I am “morally lucky” because every decision I make is to ensure I can always be morally lucky, 10 years later. I take certain kinds of jobs in certain kinds of industries.
It’s my same approach to reducing stress or getting things done. I never get a parking ticket not because I’m amazing — it’s because I know if I have to go out later and move my car, I’ll forget, so I’ll just park right the first time. 10 years later and no parking tickets and no stress — if someone tells me “oh you’re just lucky,” I can only chuckle.
No, it's not. They're choosing the path that builds user trust and positive sentiment for long term success, rather than choosing to fleece their customers and not worry about whether people hate it.
Other corporations in a similar spot for games and game platforms could choose to make the same type of choices, but they'd rather boost next quarter's profits, even if that means pissing off their userbase with consumer-hostile policies.
No one forced Valve to have a great form of family sharing. No one forced them to have generous policies around generating Steam keys. No one forced them to invent remote play together. They do these things because they're nice features that are useful for players and make people stay engaged on Steam, and more positively inclined towards Valve.
So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight and their culture will push them to stay the course on the long term, where other companies will do the reverse. Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive, including the worst imaginable?
Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts of decisions based on values and visions that are more than just economical, especially companies not beholden to shareholders that only care about short-term profits. Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and often done from some kind of cultural bias.
It’s more about Valve having complete control over the stack and being able to vertically integrate, something they will never have with windows, especially as it continues to enshittify
They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
We should remember our history so we aren't doomed to repeat it.
Similar to desktop, I choose the middle ground between true freedom and walled garden. At least you Can de-googlefy 95% of Android. More than you can de-microsoft Windows.
Of course you could also buy one of the purism phones, jolla is apparently planning to ship phones too.
If you're willing to flash the phone, you can run postmarketos on loads of devices too.
I suspect the vast majority of people who are invested enough to want to avoid Android and iOS have the technical knowledge to install postmarketos.
GOG is an online shop. It shouldn't support anything but browsers, bank cards and download managers.
This would be a perfectly reasonable ask despite GOG being a webshop that only supports browsers.
GOG ships what's available. If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?
Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux. If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".
BTW, you can set up your linux to directly execute Windows binaries using binfmt_misc, but that may also be too hard for some...
I don't see why that should matter. It's games, you'd practically have to ship your own libraries anyway.
>If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?
Personally I couldn't give less of a shit, I'm an adult and have better things to do than play videogames.
I certainly do think it's not an unreasonable wish, and it wouldn't even be particularly hard. If GOG wanted to, they could provide pre-configured wine-wrapped installers for games that just work.
I do not know whether or not this would make financial sense for them, but Valve seems to think so, and I suspect GOG could do with a few cheap European software engineers wrapping games for them. Hell, they could even cut costs further by just open-sourcing their wrappers and largely relying on user-submitted patches for maintenance.
>Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux.
If you'd ever used Wine you'd know how fiddly it is, there'd obviously be a lot of value in having someone else handle that fiddling for you.
> If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".
I don't know if GOG shares your poor attitude, but that certainly wouldn't be a good way to run a business. Try coming out of the basement every now and then.
The question for grown-ups with things to do in their lives is usually not whether or not something is too hard, but whether or not it is worth spending their time on. If I ever wanted to play a game, looking up some workaround for a wine-related crash is the last thing I'd want to spend my time on.
No, because users are lazy enough to not support the better option.
GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.
I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).
I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?
Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.
To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.
With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.
So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.
It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
Ironically, this is exactly the reason why most other ad networks go to such lengths to track you, because they think they want to show you ads you'd find relevant and thus worthwhile to click on.
Unfortunately, the way the ad networks go about doing this means that they're actually incentivising making money by any means necessary over actually showing relevant ads, so you get ads that are psychologically abusive, full-screen ads that pop up in the middle of a game, ad networks selling off the data they have on you, etc.
That is why I will permanently have an adblocker - since this is how things work now - but why I don't care nearly as strongly about the Steam ads.
For example:
> as are the recommendations for other games and things like that
I asked for this when I opened the Steam store. It's not advertising, it's just the exact information I wanted. I went to the market to see products, and they showed me products.
If they start bringing the products to my home by plastering ads on billboards all over the place then it's advertising and abusive.
> That is why I will permanently have an adblocker
I recommend the same to everyone.
I'm very anti-ad, but if there's one situation where I don't have a beef with it, it's the Steam app.
They don’t force themselves onto your machines mate.
The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.
Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by Valve?
When Gabe is gone I cringe thinking MS will do everything in their power to buy Valve and turn it to complete shit couple years later.
But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).
I think I would say it this way: private companies can be good or bad, but public companies must ultimately become bad.
This is what you get when you go completely the opposite direction, and it's wonderful.