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Latest Comments by Mohandevir
Canonical planning to drop 32bit support with Ubuntu 19.10 onwards
21 Jun 2019 at 12:23 am UTC

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: MohandevirValve could up their game and offer a Steamos-Desktop Edition. It's already Debian based and includes a Gnome DE... Both hands on the steering wheel.
Or they can just open source their UI and add it to Debian proper ;)
Yeah... One can dream. :)

Canonical planning to drop 32bit support with Ubuntu 19.10 onwards
21 Jun 2019 at 12:13 am UTC Likes: 4

Valve could up their game and offer a Steamos-Desktop Edition. It's already Debian based and includes a Gnome DE... Both hands on the steering wheel.

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
17 Jun 2019 at 7:03 pm UTC

Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: Mohandevir
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: gradyvuckovicAll Valve has to do now is offer some kind of option to run your own remote instance of a gaming PC on a Valve server, and connect direct to it, and they'll have an alternative to Stadia. Buy your game on Steam, download it to play it locally, or stream it to any PC or phone/tablet or TV. Stream it from your PC or stream it from a Valve server. All your workshop mods, your cloud saves, your Steam friends, etc, take them all with you anywhere you go.

Buy Portal 2 and download/install it locally to play on your PC, then stream it from your PC to your TV and play it with any controller you want, then stream it from a Valve server to your phone and play it on the train.

If Valve offered that service for free, (which they probably could because the overwhelming majority of users would prefer local gaming so it wouldn't be a commonly used option), Stadia would be dead on arrival.

For Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.

Boom, no need to ever install Windows for any game on Steam. No need to buy games on Google's or iOS's app store even, just buy it on Steam and stream it to your phone!

I'm calling it, this is what Valve is working towards. Valve is going to make it happen.
They would also have to invest a number of billions in new datacenters and bandwidth for that to happen on the scale that Valve operates (they have roughly 90 million monthly users) and they would have to build them locally all over the world. The costs of running stuff like this is extreme and is why currently only Google is pulling it off (and we don't know yet if they will pull it off).

The other services described in this thread is nowhere near to compete, Shadow seams to have only a small number of servers in California and Geforce Now seams to have only 300k users with some reports that performance is bad during peak hours (but to be honest I have just spent a few minutes googling this).

For what it's worth I worked as the CTO of a Cloud computing startup 11 years ago and had to design stuff like this.
I have an Nvidia Shield. GeForce Now has a small set of free games included with the service, as standalone games and managed by Nvidia, but and this is where it's getting interresting, you may run Steam, Origin, Uplay and/or Epic launchers inside GeForce Now to play any games in your personnal library on Nvidia's servers (remote computer). Each instances are powered by a Tesla P40 GPU and grapical options are preset for each officially supported games. Stil, no problems running games at ultra for the other games, as far as I witnessed.

Imo, it would be the ideal services if it ran on Linux instances, but I don't think it's what they do.
Thanks for the info! Do you know if the GPU shared or dedicated?
Sorry. I have absolutely no clue on this one.

Edit: All I know is that it's based on the former Nvidia Grid technology, so I suspect it might be shared with some form of "load balancing". Is it the good expression when it comes to GPU workloads?

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
17 Jun 2019 at 12:35 pm UTC

Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: gradyvuckovicAll Valve has to do now is offer some kind of option to run your own remote instance of a gaming PC on a Valve server, and connect direct to it, and they'll have an alternative to Stadia. Buy your game on Steam, download it to play it locally, or stream it to any PC or phone/tablet or TV. Stream it from your PC or stream it from a Valve server. All your workshop mods, your cloud saves, your Steam friends, etc, take them all with you anywhere you go.

Buy Portal 2 and download/install it locally to play on your PC, then stream it from your PC to your TV and play it with any controller you want, then stream it from a Valve server to your phone and play it on the train.

If Valve offered that service for free, (which they probably could because the overwhelming majority of users would prefer local gaming so it wouldn't be a commonly used option), Stadia would be dead on arrival.

For Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.

Boom, no need to ever install Windows for any game on Steam. No need to buy games on Google's or iOS's app store even, just buy it on Steam and stream it to your phone!

I'm calling it, this is what Valve is working towards. Valve is going to make it happen.
They would also have to invest a number of billions in new datacenters and bandwidth for that to happen on the scale that Valve operates (they have roughly 90 million monthly users) and they would have to build them locally all over the world. The costs of running stuff like this is extreme and is why currently only Google is pulling it off (and we don't know yet if they will pull it off).

The other services described in this thread is nowhere near to compete, Shadow seams to have only a small number of servers in California and Geforce Now seams to have only 300k users with some reports that performance is bad during peak hours (but to be honest I have just spent a few minutes googling this).

For what it's worth I worked as the CTO of a Cloud computing startup 11 years ago and had to design stuff like this.
I have an Nvidia Shield. GeForce Now has a small set of free games included with the service, as standalone games and managed by Nvidia, but and this is where it's getting interresting, you may run Steam, Origin, Uplay and/or Epic launchers inside GeForce Now to play any games in your personnal library on Nvidia's servers (remote computer). Each instances are powered by a Tesla P40 GPU and graphical options are preset for each officially supported games. Still, no problems running games at ultra for the other games, as far as I witnessed.

Imo, it would be the ideal services if it ran on Linux instances, but I don't think it's what they do.

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
14 Jun 2019 at 5:30 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Dunc...There's the odd naysayer, as always...
Nessus is pretty hilarious to read... Feels like he tried to run Linux from Scratch.

I can't remember a single time I had to manually install a single dependency when using the software center on any Ubuntu based distro. Feels like the problem is between the keyboard and chair, to me. :D

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
14 Jun 2019 at 2:45 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: kuhpunktNot sure what you mean. How/why would buying be a bigger problem? It would still be exactly how it is now. You buy a license for a game. Whether you play the game locally on your own computer or on a rented unit somewhere else makes no difference.
*edit* I probably didn't express my thoughts too well when writing them up during thinking. :) Not buying itself is the problem.

If people are still buying games, everything might be fine.
But then, how many DVDs have you bought lately...?
People stop buying stuff, be it music, films, ..., and many will stop buying games I guess.
And then it's harder to do.
Personnally I still buy blu-rays and rip them with makemkv so that I may copy them on my OMV server, but I get your point. We are a minority to think about these things. :)

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
14 Jun 2019 at 2:30 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: kuhpunktThey sure can. Services like Geforce Now and Shadow already do that. You just rent a remote computer with those and access your Steam library from there.
It will severly limit what you can do, IMHO.

Many people will prefer to just play game X - not buy, download and install it first.
Hm... But then, who if not Valve is in the position to do this faster than anybody else...

Buying will be the bigger problem. Like people don't buy Netflix series, they won't want to buy games. But how would Valve be allowed to install it then, without an agreement with the developers...?

No, I don't think it's so easy.
I can't say for sure, but how does it differ from renting a remote computer from Shadow and then installing our Steam library on it? Basically it's the same, it's just that you rent the computer from Steam, then. Why Steam couldn't offer a remote computer service while Shadow is allowed to?

Edit: Like in: "We at Valve, offer you the location of a SteamOS Clockwerk computer to do as you please with it."

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
14 Jun 2019 at 1:07 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: jens
Quoting: Mohandevir
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: gradyvuckovicFor Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.
The Valve servers would have to run on Windows, though and I highly doubt Valve would want to pay for those licenses.
No they wouldn't, not with Steam Play once it's mature enough.
I suspect SteamStreaming, or SteamCloud (who knows how they will call that), might happen the day SteamPlay/Proton leaves beta and become official. Simultaneous announcements is my guess.

Edit: It can't be too far away, because Valve risks long term damages, if they let users get accustomed to the competitions' solutions (Xcloud or Stadia).
I wonder if Valve is legally allowed to offer everything in your library as a streaming service just like this. I could imagine that existing contracts would need at least some review. This might also be the reason that official Steam Play whitelisting isn't happen that often, even for games that work perfectly well (e.g. TW3). I'm just speculating here though.
Who knows... Whitelisting of games might not have happened for a while, just because Valve is so hard at work to make SteamPlay a thing that they didn't stop to Whitelist games, too. Maybe they consider that the SteamPlay compatibility tool is doing an awesome job and is sufficient, for the moment.

Edit: And maybe SteamPlay just switched focus, during the development phase, from desktop to cloud, and it's not relevant anymore to update the Whitelisted list since SteamCloud (I like this name) is not a thing yet.

Edit2: For the case of Witcher3, I wouldn't be surprised if we learn that CDPR warned Valve not to ever officially support their games with Steamplay. How far goes their mistrust of the Linux community is unknown...

Valve release a new stable Steam Client from all the recent Beta builds, nice fixes for Linux
14 Jun 2019 at 12:43 pm UTC

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: gradyvuckovicFor Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.
The Valve servers would have to run on Windows, though and I highly doubt Valve would want to pay for those licenses.
No they wouldn't, not with Steam Play once it's mature enough.
I suspect SteamStreaming, or SteamCloud (who knows how they will call that), might happen the day SteamPlay/Proton leaves beta and become official. Simultaneous announcements is my guess.

Edit: It can't be too far away, because Valve risks long term damages, if they let users get accustomed to the competitions' solutions (Xcloud or Stadia).

Double Fine Productions acquired by Microsoft for Xbox Game Studios, Psychonauts 2 still for Linux
11 Jun 2019 at 5:06 pm UTC

Quoting: dibz
Quoting: MohandevirNot on subject, but just a tought... What use for EGS exclusivity deals if Xbox PC gamepass works around it? Metro Exodus is now on the Xbox PC gamepass, after 4 months of exclusivity. Has the sales been lower then they expected? Could it become the demise of Epic's strategy? Better put their Fortnite cash down the drain, unless it's a Steam lockout deal?
IMHO it's absolutely a steam-lockout deal in everything but name.
If that's so, I dare hope that Steam as legal recourses against EGS.

Edit:

EGS is so focused on attacking Steam that they don't realize that they are going to be overtaken by Microsoft, at full speed?

Thing is, Win32 app or not, Xbox gamepass or UWP... It's the same concept in a different wrapping. Ulitmately, MS is still pursuing the goal of making everyone use it's store. If it happens, be carefull of the next step(s).