Quoting: subWell, I guess we're easy to overlook the numbers.
While it seems to be big money, it's actually significantly less compared to Steam sales
and putting all your resources in there.

The figures from the Epic-Apple case suggested that Valve makes about the same amount of money from Steam and from sales of their own stuff.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe real question is why there's no momentum internally to get those projects rolling.

Shipping a game is really, really hard. Having an idea and knocking a prototype together is pretty straightforward in the grand scheme of things, but getting to a polished, tested, finished product that works and that you can sell takes orders of magnitude more sustained and dedicated work that isn't especially fun. On the bright side, Valve have said that shipping Alyx gave them a nice buzz, so they realised that they'd like to do it again.

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Quoting: amvmonkeyValve didn't upstream the controller drivers to the kernel? I'm disappointed to hear that.

They've upstreamed the Steam Deck drivers but 5.18 isn't out yet.

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Quoting: sarmadYou forgot the most important point, which is that Valve's business model depends on selling games through Steam, not selling the hardware. So, it's in their best interest that the games that work on Steam Deck also works on regular Linux as that simply means more market for them. This is why Valve is trying to support as much platforms as possible just as we recently saw with ChromeOS.

Not just "more market," but survival. They can't make hardware for every single Steam customer, but they need the means to continue to sell to all those customers when using not-Windows in case Microsoft ever goes nuclear. That's what Linux means to them, and it needs to all be available on the computers their customers already have because Valve can't replace all those computers on their own.

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Quake II RTX for example runs on the Steam Deck but as you can tell from the screenshot — not well.

Even with the Windows ray tracing that DF were so excited about in the video, they needed to turn the resolution way way down to get any performance at all.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: setzer22Valve is selling the deck at a loss because they can afford it,

I honestly doubt that.
This isn't a console that can make up for selling at a loss with absurd stuff like costs-to-play-online or generally overpriced games.
Nor is it going to bring it tons of new customers - I'd bet that 99% of buyers are Steam customers anyway.

I suspect that at the scale they're seeing, it probably isn't selling at a loss now because of economies of scale, but if demand had been more tepid (which it absolutely could have been) and they were only making them on the scale of any other niche small-run PC hardware then they'd have been selling at a loss - the cost of all of those is much higher than that of the Deck. But the product is a demonstration device of Linux gaming ("new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" as Valve described it) for strategic purposes - it doesn't have to make any money.

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Quoting: damarrindo you know what I think about snaps and Canonical's decision to make FF one?

Mozilla's decision.

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Vulkan and Linux support was also added to their "GameplayMediaEncoder"

It'd be nice if Unity got around to this, too.

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Quoting: randylDoes Canonical have their employees host official/paid company projects on their personal github repos? That seems strange doesn't it?

He no longer works for Canonical.

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It's on my wishlist, but even my six year old has a Steam backlog now.

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