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How Valve Can Make the Deck Verified Program Better

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DISCLAIMER

This is exclusively the opinions of the article's author - it does not reflect the opinions of other game developers, end users, Linux users, the owners and writers for GamingOnLinux, and so on unless explicitly stated otherwise by the individual person(s).


About the Author

Hi there! I'm flibit. I work on a lot of games... and I mean a LOT:


In short: I'm responsible for making sure that new versions of games are performant and reliable, and this means passing many of these versions through certification programs. A new Steam Machine directly from Valve was an exciting prospect, but it hasn't come without its problems. Today we're going to talk about just one of them:


Introduction

I've been infamously critical of the Steam Deck from day one. From just about every angle imaginable you could be forgiven for thinking I entirely disagree with the way the Deck's software has been developed, advertised, presented to developers, and so on. I could go on for quite a while about all of these things.

Much of it is about the software and there are a number of reasons why, the main two being:

  1. The software side of things is where I'm most comfortable giving my opinions
  2. A lot about the Deck is genuinely good from a software guy's perspective (the hardware is great, the price makes sense, and with people so desperate for new hardware I get why they were so eager to get it out the door at any and all costs)


However, another reason is that we as developers didn't have a great look at how our software would interact with the Deck ecosystem until the device was pretty much already out. Because of this, it wasn't a huge surprise to see that there were issues regarding the Deck Verified program, across many different kinds of titles on Steam.

While not surprising, it is still disappointing - with the Deck becoming so influential so quickly, this has had a profoundly negative impact on some developers, particularly small developers, who in many cases put in exceptional amounts of work to prepare for the inevitable second generation of Steam Machines, only to be slapped in the face at the 11th hour with a number of results that anyone with a cursory knowledge of the game would know is invalid, including but not limited to native games that are inexplicably labelled as Proton-by-default, or native games that are marked completely unsupported because they only tested Windows binaries without even bothering to try the native ones, and a whole mess of things in between depending on what the cert process was like that day. This has caused problems at the other end of the spectrum as well, with reviewers regularly running into popular AAA games that were mysteriously labelled as Verified when they didn't actually work in reality. This might sound really harsh, but there's something important to consider here:

While not intentionally malicious, it's a good example of how one centralized superpower's decision making can affect an entire industry, whether they were part of the intended equation or not. You might recognize this narrative from the release of the original Windows Store! Given that WinRT and Windows Store were the catalysts for basically everything you're seeing on this website today this is not the comparison we want to be making, so how do we correct this?

Before we dive in we must address a possible conflict of interest, so let me make one thing absolutely clear: I do not in any way expect my titles to be given priority just because they're native, but I fully expect my work to be given the chance it deserves, and any organization that intends to insert itself between myself and the customers should expect to put in as much care into the product as the authors have. Similar to games in general, a select few AAA titles does not speak for an entire library. I and many other developers are doing our best to create an out-of-the-box catalog that directly targets the Deck platform and operating system with as few layers as possible to produce performant, energy-efficient software whose design is not dictated by a totally unrelated megacorporation, which is allegedly the long-term plan for this in the first place.

Developers, and independent developers in particular, are just as interested in expanding the PC beyond Windows as Valve is, and as early investors (some investing a decade or more in advance!) the Steam Deck's launch has not met our expectations. It is in everyone's interest to avoid another Windows 8 situation, and that means trying to fix this quickly and effectively for all developers, not just the highest-profile titles. Since launch was *checks notes* less than a month ago, there's still a chance to make this work! Even better, despite all the issues, Valve have continued to develop the platform in a largely transparent way, at least after the hardware launched: In addition to having their developer documentation be available to the public, they've also continued publishing source code for the Deck specifically, including the recent release of the devkit tools. This was a significant factor in choosing to make this critique public; Steam Deck is a rare opportunity for developers to be transparent about how these processes work with end users. In addition to building a positive relationship with customers in a way that can't be replicated outside of the PC, we can also make end users far more informed of the reality of game development on Steam, and the Steam Deck in particular. Informed customers are happy customers, even if the information isn't always pleasant.

With that in mind, let's dig into the Deck Verified program, how it relates to traditional certification programs, and what can be done to clean things up and get everyone back on the same page. If you want a good starting point as an end user, Valve's documentation for this is public and you should definitely read it.

What is Console Certification?

For those unaware, console certification (known usually as "cert", sometimes other names like "lotcheck") is when you submit a (hopefully) final build to the console vendor so that they can run a series of extremely strict checks to make sure your game is stable and has a fully working user experience. With devices getting more sophisticated and operating systems getting simpler for developers this has gotten slightly easier, but by no means is it easy period: Ask any Nintendo licensee what it's like to make controller support fully robust and you'll most likely get a look of utter defeat and bottomless trauma. Look to the Nintendo catalog, however, and you'll see why these procedures are in place.

Going through cert is a lot like paying your taxes. You know you have to do it, nobody really likes doing it, we can complain about how it might get convoluted at times, but at the end of the day it's an essential part of what makes everything work even if it doesn't feel like it half the time. And you sure as hell would not want the review process for this paperwork to be rushed and later revealed to be part of some temporary experiment. Oh, and before anyone makes the joke, yes rich people casually bypass it constantly.

In contrast, the games business likes everything to be fast, and I mean fast. Customers, investors, and industry insiders alike are often guilty of (perhaps unknowingly) pressuring studios to get the product out now and then finish it later. Cert happens to be the exact one thing that people acknowledge is a big pile of red tape and bureaucracy, and it is a tremendous waste to not capitalize on this! You literally have full carte blanche to take your time and be very thoughtful and meticulous about how you want things to work, and it is extremely important that you take advantage of this.

There had to have been a lot of pressure to showcase big games working out of the box, but there's a big difference between a recommended showcase and building a trustworthy bureaucratic process that people can rely on in the long term. Mix these two up and you're just building up a huge amount of debt that, if not paid back very quickly, will leave players and developers wondering why you even have a cert process at all, which is an attitude that's anything but trivial to turn around. It's hard to build a reliable Trust System(TM), but it's much harder to build one right after making a system that turned out not to be trustworthy. Correcting this quickly will be really important as the rest of the platform begins to stabilize and more people have a Deck in their hands (author's note: there is absolutely no way I'm not wording it like this for all eternity).

I've seen a lot of platforms and a lot of cert submissions from various companies, including the oldest in the industry to companies who only became a major platform within the last few years. Some vendors do things better, some do things worse, but they all have a lot of in common and in general these would be great things to copy for your own program:

0: Each SKU gets its own review

Look, I know it seems obnoxious for me to have this in the article, but when you are testing two different SKUs, each one should be tested separately. When you look at how things are executed now, you could be forgiven for alleging that Valve tried to get by with Wine-only, only to fail horribly and get caught immediately, but regardless of the real story we can at least be sure that native is part of the process today, which is great!

Problem is, from what I and other developers have observed, the results are still just a mishmash with no sort of clarity as to what notes are for what build. Specific devs working on a game might know that the Windows build has patented codecs in it while native does not, but a manager looking at these results probably won't know what this means. Two tables for two SKUs is not a huge ask, especially if you aren't going to let developers tell you what you should test and deploy. (As an aside: People who phoned in their Linux versions will choose Proton from a drop-down themselves, saving you a lot of time coming up with wacky schemes to try and autodetect... even those who did a pretty good job will still do this work for you, so if there's not going to be any effort to improve the native versions at all, why not let them make that choice directly?)

1. Actual notes with test results

Currently when you get test results, you get a series of items with PASS/FAIL on them, with some automated text when there's a FAIL. This is very typical for cert processes, however the automated text is not helpful at all, and that's assuming there are any notes to begin with. To emphasize my point, I can even disclose a private test result because there's nothing private about it:

Test failed due to the title not providing external gamepad support for the primary player. We highly encourage providing support for externally connected gamepad to offer the player with the option of playing using the gamepad of their choice. Partial controller support is available but the following actions are not available via the default controller configuration: [Space, Escape]

You can even see where the autogenerated part starts and ends! In this entire paragraph, the game-specific notes are two words long. End users are held to higher standards than this, so why not the cert program?

This is a pretty severe contrast with competitors' processes, where we get reasonably good notes including screenshots, diagnostic information, and sometimes even video! This information is not difficult to produce if you're a human testing a game, especially if these are things you can get from the OS out of the box. (So okay, maybe video is out of range for Steam right now... having played on an Xbox recently I would love for this to change though.)

With good enough notes, you would also be able to find common patterns and make the official test suite more robust, and eventually build an entire conformance test suite for developers to reference before they've even submitted. Relying solely on the existing framework is a one-way ticket to stagnation, which is the opposite of what anyone wants for their product.

This isn't just about being thorough, it's also about clarifying things that can be interpreted in many ways: When a bunch of native games started to get labeled as Proton titles, you can imagine the panic at my office when I had to explain to my own clients that "yes I actually tested on real hardware, yes the Linux version is optimal, no I don't know why Valve is blocking my build, no you should not delete the port" over and over again basically since all results became public. It would have been nice if the experimental test data had been marked as such, even a "this is temporary, we plan to migrate verified titles to native closer to release" would have saved me a lot of trouble and, to put it bluntly, a whole lot of money I'll never see again. Those opportunities and resources could have been used to make more games, and sadly some of these effects are likely irreversible. Preventing these outcomes is important for the future of the platform.

Finally, making the notes public would be useful as well - while some of the technical notes might include things like NDA'd symbols in a stack trace, in all my years of doing console builds I have never at any point run into high-level notes that were sensitive or required to be private, with the exception of spoilers which are trivial to mask (as Steam already does elsewhere). If a game is only unsupported because of codecs, for example, that is useful information for everyone!

2: Running cert behind our backs is the last option, not the first

Again, I get it, Steam's strength is in its back catalog (I even gave a whole presentation at MAGFest about this), but even the older games that are popular still have someone keeping an eye on them, so it should be no problem to let them submit to cert themselves. This one is hard to compare to other vendors because they aren't releasing games before they get certified, but a big part of the cert process is communication between the console vendor and the app vendor. This back-and-forth process is essential in getting good data, for a number of reasons including but not remotely limited to:

  • App vendors can get clarification on strange test results
  • Console vendors can get clarification on unusual (but not broken) program behavior
  • In rare instances, a developer can file a waiver stating that a cert rule may not be strictly relevant (for example, if the control scheme is deliberately unusual and has clear disclaimers on the store page)

But that's basic, basic stuff. The one that I know Valve cares about:

  • App vendors can provide feedback on the certification program


You have this entirely new platform, with a slightly stricter ruleset than your existing one, and the data set is unspeakably huge with variety that no program in the world is going to be able to automate. You're on record, multiple times, across multiple decades, as saying that human feedback matters a huge deal, and these statements were recorded during a time when everything seems to be getting automated (whether it even makes sense or not). You have a very large subset of games with active developers, who actively target roughly the same platform (natively even!) and would be very proactive if given the chance to be a part of the program, from submitting builds to providing feedback on your program before it's even out. Some of them even had the hardware over half a year before it was available to the public.

Why, why, why was the answer to withhold the submission process to this very day and secretly shotgun blast the catalog with experimental procedures a month before launch? I'm sorry to be so harsh here, but the results have been horrific: It completely ignores the human element of cert (arguably the best part), blocks proactive developers from contributing to the platform, annoys people who are actively watching random, clearly abandoned games get pushed to the front of the queue, and wastes the effort of people who had the working program in their hands from the start and, to put it bluntly again, deserved the spotlight at launch a whole lot more. As a reminder, this isn't about me, there's a whole group of early investors who feel cheated by the current system and these will likely be the experts you will need to have readily available for the alleged long-term plans.

Looking at the cert results, the dates of the tests, and the runtimes being used, I can only assume the timing had something to do with the release of Wine 7, which would be fine for Windows games but completely ignores the breadth of native games that could have been a part of early cert prototypes. I can only hope I'm wrong here, but I can't help but look at the timeline and wonder why people had the hardware for all that time when the paperwork came so late.

Right now a lot of discussion is about the OS and bugs, but my guess is when people call the Deck "rushed" years from now this is what they will be talking about. Sure, the OS bugs are rampant, but they will probably be fixed eventually. As of now I'm not as confident about the cert results and I'm not alone here.

3: Cert results should not be silent and on an unspecified timer

The Deck Verified program's results have the potential to be hugely influential in customers' purchasing decisions, whether they have the hardware or not. The data that comes out of this should be given a lot of care, and more importantly a lot of attention from everyone involved in maintaining the game.

Out of the five products that have been given ratings on Steam that I have partner access for, I have received a single notification for one of them. Developers with less than 70 games under their belt have similar ratios as far as I can tell. (So yes, for the past couple weeks I have had to go game-by-game to manually search for test results for dozens of games, just in case results were sent without a notification. No, the recent per-organization view didn't help, because I'm also in dozens of separate organizations.)

This would be less of a problem if 100% of the testing I'm able to see wasn't being done in secrecy - I have dozens of titles I could submit and actively wait for results on, but I'm also not sure if I'd even get the notes back in time. If you want something to shotgun-blast, this is the place to do it. Send the message to everyone in the organization, and be explicit about who the data is for. I'll even write the multiplat one for you:

These test results were based on both your Linux and Windows versions. We strongly recommend forwarding this information to the appropriate engineers immediately so that the appropriate changes can be made. The sooner the results are verified by your team, the sooner they can be published!

Send that every 12 hours to every account in the org until you get a response or the results are published, then you'll have a legitimate reason for the timer. To get back to the taxes comparison: It sounds obnoxious, but having constant reminders for something this important is trivial to justify, no matter how much you might hate it at the time.

This would mitigate the other problem which is that nobody seems to know how long we actually have until the results get published. Is it a week? Two weeks? Are we even supposed to know about it in advance? When I ask around, the answer is always different, and the docs aren't much help with "approximately a week" as the official timeline. Until looking it up for this post I honestly thought it was twice as long for manually submitted results (and for secret results it seems to just be zero), because in my experience a cert back-and-forth being a week is unrealistic even for the biggest console vendors who have invested far more in this area.

For end users that might see "a week" and think that's a lot, it actually is even less time than I'm making it out to be, because the timer doesn't stop if a back-and-forth starts! That's right, if you get marked "unsupported" and the timer hits zero before you've had a chance to figure out the problem, up on the store page it goes, regardless of the test result's accuracy. This is a direct contradiction to the same sentence that says how long this process is (emphasis mine):

If you take no action, after approximately a week your review results will automatically be published and show up on your game detail page as the "results of Valve's testing" (see Steam Store on Deck section above).

This isn't without reason, it's just not the best reason: From what I can tell, "action" is defined as one of two things:

  • Resubmitting to cert
  • Publishing the results


You can optionally file a ticket to get clarification on the results, but this appears to be completely disconnected from the process itself (in fact, it's just using the end user support system, not a direct contact form, so there's no guarantee the person you get in touch with has anything to do with your test results). I filed tickets for two titles and, after getting no response, I bit the bullet and put both games back on the queue with zero notes to work from. This is a massive waste of everyone's time: As a developer I have no idea if I did anything wrong and therefore can't spend my time making the game better, and Valve now has to go through the entire process for literally the same build only because I'm crossing my fingers and hoping the cert process is nicer to me this time. For a catalog as big as Steam's (or even mine, honestly), this time adds up very quickly!

If you want to point to exactly one scenario where taking advantage of "the bureaucracy" would prevent a whole lot of headaches, this is the one to cite. I know putting hard deadlines on anything sucks, but because cert is the inverse of the rest of the industry the solution is surprisingly simple: Just pick a stupidly huge number that's impossible to object to. Forget "approximately a week", make it 30 days from the timestamp of the first e-mail and then permanently kill all timers the moment you get a response of any kind. Nobody in their right mind is going to ignore 60 copies of the same e-mail, particularly for something that actually matters, unless they're long gone. At that point you have a pretty solid excuse to publish behind their back.

Lastly, having direct contact with the cert tester is really important because they will understand the notes better than anyone else, and it avoids getting lost in the monolithic beast that is public Steam support.

4. Probably more?

The Steam Deck is very new which means it's extremely volatile, whether it be the technical details or the boring, bureaucratic stuff. Looking at its current state, the team involved is probably going to be in crunch for pretty much the rest of the year, which is awful to think about. While I can't act like I can make decisions for anyone but myself, I would like to suggest that if there's one thing they should slow down on, it's the Deck Verified program. To carry out even a subset of changes that I've suggested will take a lot of work, but if Crunch Mode continues unchecked, that delta between what's in production -> what needs to be in place is going to get bigger, which means it's going to be more work and therefore be harder to pull off. I would very happily accept a delay in getting my catalog certified if the results are something that my customers can trust without having to sift through user reviews and databases like ProtonDB, all of which are far more likely to have errors or omissions in their entries. Not that they do this on purpose or anything, it's just the difference between end users and trained QA.

Even an "open" platform like Steam deserves to have the latter, and I will continue to do my best to support a program that demonstrates great care in its quality assurance, because it's absolutely possible to have such a service available to PC gamers and nothing would be more satisfying than having GNU/Linux be at the center of it.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
author picture
Ethan "flibitijibibo" Lee is a Linux porter with over 10 years and 70 games of professional experience, including games like Celeste, FEZ, Transistor, Streets of Rage 4, Dust: An Elysian Tail, and a whole lot more! He is the lead maintainer of FNA and FAudio and helps maintain SDL for a variety of platforms including Linux. He reads all of his e-mails and loves his GitHub Sponsors very much.
See more from me
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d10sfan Mar 7, 2022
Very interesting article, and I appreciate all the ports and work you have done in the past!

Not sure how it applies to your catalog of games, but many native games work better in proton, so in that case it would make sense to pick it over native on a case by case basis, since we are trying to go for the best user experience possible, at least in my opinion. The games that you've ported I've tried in the past have worked great though.

I know there's been a few times where ports have been delayed in terms of the Windows version being updated first, which can be an issue, but not sure how that is taken into account for certification. For example, Superliminial added their multiplayer Dec 17th, and it wasn't until Feb 21 that it was out on Linux(according to the developer's articles). Streets of Rage 4 took some time to get the Linux version on the store as well.

I'm not sure how those type of delays are taken into account with the certification. We've seen alot of ports being abandoned such as with Aspyr, Feral, and Virtual Programming.

What regularly broken games are you referring to, where many reviewers were seeing broken results from verified games? I haven't seen anything like that mentioned, but I haven't been following specific games too much, so was curious.

It does sound like in general that Valve has alot of areas to improve on with their cert process, especially in communicating it with the developers. I hope that they pick the native version where it's the best, as I still try to buy native games over proton where possible.


Last edited by d10sfan on 7 March 2022 at 6:11 pm UTC
EthanLee Mar 7, 2022
Quoting: d10sfanVery interesting article, and I appreciate all the ports and work you have done in the past!

I thought the native vs proton thing was already resolved, or is this referring more to the existing confusion that that led to? And there's still some games preferring proton it sounds like.

Not sure how it applies to your catalog of games, but many native games work better in proton, so in that case it would make sense to pick it over native on a case by case basis, since we are trying to go for the best user experience possible, at least in my opinion. The games that you've ported I've tried in the past have worked great though.

I know there's been a few times where ports have been delayed in terms of the Windows version being updated first, which can be an issue, but not sure how that is taken into account for certification. For example, Superliminial added their multiplayer Dec 17th, and it wasn't until Feb 21 that it was out on Linux(according to the developer's articles). Streets of Rage 4 took some time to get the Linux version on the store as well.

I'm not sure how those type of delays are taken into account with the certification. We've seen alot of ports being abandoned such as with Aspyr, Feral, and Virtual Programming.

What regularly broken games are you referring to, where many reviewers were seeing broken results from verified games? I haven't seen anything like that mentioned, but I haven't been following specific games too much, so was curious.

It does sound like in general that Valve has alot of areas to improve on with their cert process, especially in communicating it with the developers. I hope that they pick the native version where it's the best, as I still try to buy native games over proton where possible.

The delay between launch and the port will likely shrink as a result of this - while it is possible for us to go through cert twice if needed, it's enough work to where it will probably be avoided in the future. I'm hopeful day-one launches will be pursued more aggressively as a result of this, which is a _really_ positive aspect of the program. As an example, Superliminal's delay partially had to do with us wanting a Unity update that fixed input latency issues users were having, but that update took a while to get published so that introduced some delays that were out of our control. But, now that that's in place, others working on native versions will be able to take those changes and reuse them in their own ports, making the delta much smaller for future games. That's the sort of thing I would like to see happen as the Deck becomes a larger part of Steam and it's important that I not be alone here.

I'm still fussing with titles erroneously marked Proton but I don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes as far as the "previous version" of cert is concerned. I'm hoping it'll be done and over with in a month or two.

The one review I distinctly remember was someone trying to run GTA5, and (bless them for actually taking the effort to do this) it took them like a dozen tries to finally get it to boot, and I don't know if they ever found out why. Examples like this are not _insanely_ widespread but everyone seems to have their own individual example so far. Admittedly it might actually have been the OS itself; another reviewer tested one of my games and it just did not work at all for them despite me having verified it locally on real hardware... but the OS was changing a lot up to release from what everyone has been saying.

Overall I expect the traditions of ports to change a lot, hopefully for the better. (And hopefully they won't get totally forced out like I was _really_ expecting early on.)
Liam Dawe Mar 7, 2022
To add my own quick bit now we're here, I've probably already said it in my review but my hope for Deck Verified is definitely more hands-on testing. Multiple Verified or Playable titles have plenty of below 30FPS framedrops that to me would strike them out.

Edit: Vampire Survivors is another Verified, saw it drop to single digits during the end of a battle and so on. Edit 2: Did it on livestream tonight and yeeeeah that should not be Verified.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 7 March 2022 at 9:32 pm UTC
Jpxe Mar 7, 2022
Very interesting read, would be great if we could get Valves perspective on this and the whole verification process. Maybe an interview in the future?
Ethan, thank-you for posting your thoughts on the cert process. I really hope Valve takes your comments seriously.

(I am a big fan of all your work. I hope you continue to post articles here, if you have time!)
d10sfan Mar 7, 2022
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: d10sfanVery interesting article, and I appreciate all the ports and work you have done in the past!

Not sure how it applies to your catalog of games, but many native games work better in proton, so in that case it would make sense to pick it over native on a case by case basis, since we are trying to go for the best user experience possible, at least in my opinion. The games that you've ported I've tried in the past have worked great though.

I know there's been a few times where ports have been delayed in terms of the Windows version being updated first, which can be an issue, but not sure how that is taken into account for certification. For example, Superliminial added their multiplayer Dec 17th, and it wasn't until Feb 21 that it was out on Linux(according to the developer's articles). Streets of Rage 4 took some time to get the Linux version on the store as well.

I'm not sure how those type of delays are taken into account with the certification. We've seen alot of ports being abandoned such as with Aspyr, Feral, and Virtual Programming.

What regularly broken games are you referring to, where many reviewers were seeing broken results from verified games? I haven't seen anything like that mentioned, but I haven't been following specific games too much, so was curious.

It does sound like in general that Valve has alot of areas to improve on with their cert process, especially in communicating it with the developers. I hope that they pick the native version where it's the best, as I still try to buy native games over proton where possible.

GNU+Linux native games don't use or require Proton, it's purely to make Windows games run on GNU+Linux. I have no idea what gives you the impression Proton is required for non-Windows games.

Where do you think I said that? I never said that native games require Proton, I was referring to that some native games work better using the Windows version using Proton, instead of using the native version.
denyasis Mar 7, 2022
Wonderful op-ed. I feel some of the problems mentioned here seem like the cavalier mentality of many tech corporations.

It if curiosity, did they onboard anyone for this? There's, what, 40+ years of console certification experience in the industry out there? I'd assume they'd bring an expert on board to help design the process.
BladePupper Mar 7, 2022
On the topic of verified games that do not work, why is there not a system to where I can submit some kind of report with logs or anything at all to tell someone to go back and reexamine the game because it doesn't work? And also the inverse, if I find an unsupported game but the native port works or any version works, I want to submit some kind of report so that someone can look into that and get the rating updated. Of course one user saying "it just werks" isn't going to get the rating to change but with a few or more reports should help get games that need their compatibility rating changed and give them some data to go off of, and hopefully do their tests faster because they already did a test before and they now have extra user submitted data.
QuoteIf a game is only unsupported because of codecs, for example, that is useful information for everyone!
The importance of this cannot be stressed enough. So many games in the unsupported category say "Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck". This is useless to someone buying this game because this tells me that maybe kinda sorta in the future this game maybe kinda sorta might work, we think. It also, to me, exudes "this doesn't work and we don't know why, but when we get around to it we'll fix it". The codec issue is getting a lot more attention so that might get fixed and if proton gets an update with support for certain codecs I can try those games and see if they now work or if they still have problems. Then if those now work, using what I mentioned earlier, I could file some sort of report to say "this game now works on the latest version of proton" and include some extra information if allowed.
audiopathik Mar 8, 2022
Valve has 360 employees, quite far off of a megacorporation, take Microsofts 180.000, Apple 150.000, Sony 110.000, or heck, Ubisofts 20.000, EA 11.000... these are megacorporations. Valve is even taken prime example for an ultra-flat company structure, devoid of formal hierarchies employees flexibly join workgroups.
Their decision for open-source is unlikely out of some sort of ideal but rather lack of capability and capacity to make place for themselves in the tight market and for a proprietary ecosystem of their own, still it is nothing a megacorporation usually does, Alphabet be the extraordinary exception.

360 employees and 65.000+ games up for sale in the Steam store is how they don't have the capacity to actually deal with every product and developer as much as is their duty, let alone customer. Instead everything is automated farther than is good and any communication bears a lot of delays and yet is short.
Incidently the same goes for Google and their Play Store is likewise automated and filled with garbage.
Apple Store, Ubisoft Connect/Uplay, EA Desktop/Origin or Epic Games Store are curated platforms that select each game individually and thereby can provide proper support for each, and they are not huge dumps for shovelware.
However that also means most indie developers dont ever have the chance to appear on there.
elmapul Mar 8, 2022
some stores like googleplay and itch.io seem to accept any shit without certification.
but that can be remended with the thing called "editors choice" "recomended apps"


that is a bit similiar to the atual situation, verified and playable are like the "editors choice", and everything else that dont work but might work if you look at protonDB, is the equivalent of "search for yourself among this sea of crap"
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