Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn't even built a linux client after all these years.
Valve almost makes me believe in capitalism.
Just run the company in a way where you don’t really care about maximizing profit. As long as you’re not at a loss and are liked, you will be successful.
Valve could probably be much more profitable at the expense of being a bigger dick, but Gabe is chill.
Also because valve is private, they don’t have any legal obligations to return maximise profit. They can purposefully lose money if they want and it’s not illegal. (At least to my knowledge)
It would be illegal if they did it to price out the competition, which I don't think is something they do.
Ton of public companies lose money...
As long as execs get paid, it is all good.
Yeah, that's it right there. Not being public means they don't have to appease shareholders who want maximum growth and returns.
Yup. And the moment he steps down (or gets hit by the greed) everything will go to shit. As is tradition.
Since it’s a private company he can just appoint anyone he wants to be the ceo. Maybe his son will take it or maybe he will maintain ownership of it until I’m too old to care.
But they do run it to maximize profit. There's just allowed to do it creatively instead of obsessing over short term gains.
I mean the company essentially gave up on AAA games for well over a decade because they were making more money from steam, and Gabe famously only approves projects that have a plan to turn a profit or expand Valve's market.
They didn't spread into Linux out of sheer principle. It gives them more control and influence over the market to separate themselves from Windows. And they've done tons of shady stuff with steam like refusing to give refunds until they were sued by state governments.
Valve is far from a typical company. While technically not, they operate pretty much like a worker owned cooperative. Have a look at their employee handbook: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
(and Igalia, the company presenting in OP is really a worker owned cooperative).
holy crap I want to work there. I never had any idea they had such a radical structure (or lack thereof)
Is good, but is not the paradise: https://youtu.be/s9aCwCKgkLo?si=a2OGsoF-vHEbb0MH
If you remove stock market as a whole, maybe capitalism can work a little in a soc democracy, with stock market is impossible
Stock markets are socially acceptable ponzi schemes
Valve is the prime example of rent seeking behavior. It's a private company that collects economic rents on a market thanks to that market being the biggest. They're a private company and their only goal is to preserve those rents. They do that by fostering goodwill. They're everything I hate about capitalism, but I don't hate them for doing it.
I don't think Steam is rent-seeking because:
Valve's customers are publishers and devs, and they're charging a finder's fee for connecting customers to the games. To me, that's not rent seeking, that's a direct exchange of money for a service. If you don't think the service is valuable or think you can do better, then generate keys and sell them elsewhere and you won't need to pay Valve a cut.
Valve is capitalism done right imo. You only pay when you receive a service, and only when you profit from the service. Steam also has a fantastic refund policy as well, which is surprisingly rare in the digital goods market.
Unlike every other company in their position they're not complete assholes to consumers :
Most companies in their position would lock their users in, they don't. That doesn't mean they can't be abusive though. 30% of game revenue is huge!
At least gamedevs can generate keys and sell them on other sites to get a bigger cut
I don't think you can do that on EGS or GOG. So they ask 30%, but only if they actually helped make the sale. If you drove the revenue yourself, they're happy to distribute the game for free on their platform.
That's about the least scumbag model I can think of.
One of the few companies I've purchased digital good from - and they haven't enshittified themselves yet
If anything ever happens to Gabe such that he can't run the company, that's the day I'm immediately downloading and backing up my entire steam library to a hard drive.
Wouldn't those games be locked up through steams DRM?
Drm on Steam is optional. It's up to the dev whether to include any or not.
However, if the game uses any steam features, like achievements, voice chat, leaderboards, etc., then those won't work without steam.
It's because they're a privately owned company.
The pressure for enshitification mostly comes from shareholders. Without them, the company can actually think about their long term future and decide exactly when and when not to increase profit.
I tend to avoid proprietary things whenever possible these days, but I found most things by small, privately owned companies are pretty good towards their users.
I would be so proud to be the dude who first said “enshitification” right now.
It’s probably my favorite new word I’ve ever heard in my life and seeing it widely used brings a smile to my face.
I’ve got a cousin who is probably claiming he invented it at this very moment.
It has been used so much recently that there is even a wikitionar entry for it - with a link to its original creation!
Well they did try to sell paid mods and push pay-to-play in the steam marketplace with Artifact, but luckily they ran it back. Steam is super good now but don't get too comfortable.
Yeah, I've been burnt before and know it's only a matter of time. Enjoying it while I can.
I mean, I don't have a problem with mod authors earning money for what they do instead of having to offer it for free. Especially the mods that bring the base game to a whole new level.
What's the argument that paid mods shouldn't be a thing?
It was pretty disastrous. As soon as money was at play tons of people re-uploaded other's free mods and tried to sell them. They even tried copying their steam profiles to seem legit. There was another can of worms where paid mods would use assets from other games or made by other people. Aside from all the attempted theft, there was also tons of spam and fake/unconfirmed mods lying about what they are or trying to upload the same thing multiple times under different names to appear more in search... Etc...
Moderation didn't keep up and the whole thing collapsed on itself. Mods shouldn't be paid IMO, it just encourages terrible things rather than people making content for fun.
I don't game regularly, and Steamdeck is probably not something I'm going to be purchasing anytime soon. However, I was hopeful that Valve's investment into Linux would be beneficial and to the larger Linux landscape.
I'm hopeful that more companies will look at Valve's success and start building more on Linux in a way that will benefit the upstream community.
To a certain degree sure, I'm still miffed at what they did for the steamdeck. Having custom drivers and configurations they never open sourced and have not declared any intention to open source. See https://gitlab.com/open-sd/acp5x-ucm-files#notice .
Valve is still a good advocate for open source, the support they've given to dxvk alone is worth praise. But they ain't no angels.
Is what they're doing causing issues to users of their devices? If not, then no one should care. It's the same for nvidia, if no one is affected, then whatever. But nvidia does cause measurable harm to the FOSS ecosystem and makes adoption worse, so they deservingly get shit from the FOSS community. But don't just criticize companies purely for closing their sources.
I bet Linus still thinks their code is shit tho