Quoting: damarrinOoh, that is a huge development. I hope it works well in practice and other stores (hello, Epic) don't roll out their legal guns against it.

This is actually a market political interesting question, what does epic hate more Valve or lack of sideloading options.
I don't know the answer.

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They're really holding that lighter close to the barrel full of fuel.
I'm curious how this works out.

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I'm still curious what took them so long.
It's not chip restrictions, it's not copyright law, it probably isn't wiretapping law and it isn't the market.
Does Australia have some product safety law it failed to meet, such as "all gaming consoles should have minimally EAL5 rated hardware."
Could it be Chinese import/export restrictions.
The closest I get is that it's according to the american government [External Link] a "small competitive market", but that applies to a lot of their already released countries.
:huh:

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Cool

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The developers keep developing for windows

And yet the amount of their games compatible with GNU/Linux keeps growing rapidly. [External Link]
It didn't cost them anything and allows them to compete in places they could've never afforded to compete in.
Thanks to the technical way of wine/proton.
It's easier to convince computers to do something technical than people.

Valve only does it, because it's part of the platform:
that's backwards.
XBOX, Playstation, Android, Epic game store and Switch don't have vendor developed compatibility layers as part of their platforms(Windows does with WSL and Apple does with game porting toolkit).
Especially not one that is open source and is as such useful for other platforms, like Mac(game porting toolkit) or GNU/Linux(UMU).
This is something Valve offers extra on their in an effort to appease users and developers in strengthening their platform.

On the steam machine thing I concede.
I remembered some things wrong.

I still say that paying publishers to develop for an extra platform isn't as scalable as developing translation layers especially in an open source context, because convincing people is hard and expensive, while developing translation layers allows you to use existing talent and projects and once you've achieved something for one case you've also achieved it for all other cases.

on the murder thing:
A. As I already said tying isn't always illegal. It's illegal when a. you're the distantly dominant player in the tying market and b. you're actually using your market dominance to keep other players from effectively competing with you.
This is the minority of all tying cases.
What Epic did for example is legal tying. They're not the distantly dominant player in the game store market and/or the game engine market, so condition a won't be met.
That doesn't make it legal for Valve, because they're the distantly dominant in the game store market.
It actually admits this in the case pleaseReadTheManual refers to.
This simplifies a lot of legal analysis.
It removes the "what is the market?" question, which makes anti-trust cases often difficult(this one is often found in cases against Google).
It removes the "what is market dominance?" question, which less often, but still often makes anti-trust cases difficult(this one is often found in cases against Apple).
B. Even the most obvious murder cases take multiple years, before you get a guilty verdict or even a trial, because the lawyers need to figure out who the damaged party is, what compensation the damaged party wants, which kind of murder it was(manslaughter, first/second/third degree murder), whether there're extra complicating elements to the case(mental health, suppliers, criminal liquidation, etc.), how far the relevant parties are willing to go to get what they want, etc.

The case pleaseReadTheManual refers to actually has an even more wide interpretation of "the tying market" than I present here.
They say that if you connect the use of a product in which you're not dominant(steam keys) to using a product in which you're dominant(steam) without also doing the reverse it's tying.
I simply present that connecting a product in which you're dominant(gaming stores) to a product you're not dominant(OS's) and thereby exploiting your dominant market position(anti-competiveness is exploiting a dominant market position to quell competition) is tying.

On the: they're not selling anything point.
They do sell something for which they as I described before they make several kinds of costs.

What do they sell:
Distribution, service, protection and store space/marketing.
Distribution: the games are hosted on Steam servers meaning that they can be bought, downloaded, maintained and repaired in a large array of possible locations when the publisher can't supply this themselves(DOS, costs, bankruptcy, crashes, etc).
Service: Steam offers several default options like payment method/drm/anti-cheat/api/etc. saving you several man days of choosing the right one for your game(and still the freedom to choose a different one if you want a different one, but that's a different discussion).
Store space/marketing: this is actually a scarce good to them. They have thousands of buying wallets looking at their store, but it is still a finite number, which wallets do you show what? Steam has taken the lottery approach, you can buy a chance to get there, but not the assurance.
Protection: by hosting the content they take a certain level of legal responsibility and risk on themselves the publishers would otherwise have to(this can't be opted out if you use other services, because laws can go pretty far in holding digital infrastructure responsible for what happens there).
Also they moderate both comments and games.

Costs they make for this product:
Hosting: each and every game on the steam store is hosted on Steams servers ensuring availability.
Legal: they take various legal risks and that requires lawyers.(DMCA(prosecuting and defending), EU cybersecurity act, gdpr, ISTG2021, Sherman act, DMA, FTC act, DSA, taxes, etc.)
They function in different jurisdictions, so they will need many different kinds of lawyers(and yes although the location of your headquarters matters it isn't enough several countries will block your platform if you don't comply with local laws).
Moderation: moderators are expensive.
Development: they need to keep the store and the services it offers up-to date.
Marketing: steam gift cards in the physical stores, flatout steam ads, etc.
Administration: lots of money requires lots of administration.
Communication: keeping your customers informed about changes is needed, because they need to be able to adapt.

Savings made thanks to big publishers:
Hosting: fewer files and file classification and thus better compression and less fragmentation and tendency to run own update systems(saving Steam update bandwidth)
Legal: less total content, better legal pre-processing(internal legal teams of the publisher avoid crimes and possibly even send documentation)
Moderation: publisher moderation teams, more uniform content(all of Fortnight has no sex, but only most battle royale games)
Development: most stuff is developed in house and shipped with the game reducing system dependencies(which is the stuff which can force you to update) and better security reviews of the using hosted software.
Marketing: big publishers pull many payers.
Administration: large sums of money are easier to administrate than many small sums, because you need to classify each transaction(ask crypto).
Communication: it's easier to inform one publisher than a thousand.

On the marketing forces and is thus illegal part:
In marketing they're a. not the dominant market player(Google, Apple appstore, etc. are much bigger) and b. it's part of the product they sell and thus within a single market definition.
In this case it thus fails one of the two standard problematic tests: "What's the market?", "What's dominance"
Dominance isn't the case in marketing and in Gaming Store space(where they do have dominance) it's all part of the same product and thus not anti-competative.
As I already said before tying isn't always illegal, but it certainly can be and coupling Steam Store prices to anything other than Steam Store services is certainly one of those.

Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: LoudTechie[…]

The developers keep developing for Windows. They don't care much about the Steam Deck or Linux or they would provide actual support. They just take the money from people who mostly would buy the games anyway.

Valve suppport these projects because they're part of the platform. Without it they would've had another Steam machine disaster. Steam machines didn't fail because of "bribery" but because Valve overestimated their standing with customers & developers. I'm sure everyone was really shocked nobody wanted to buy expensive PCs you could basically play no games with.

If you murder someone in public there is usually less of a question about it. Microsoft & Valve are bundling their stuff in public. It took quite some time to reach the conclusion that Teams bundling is in fact illegal. So no, in general it's not illegal. Valve does not have a monopoly in the handheld or Linux sector. So I doubt there is any more consideration than their existing illegal activities.

They're not selling anything, what bulk discount should that really be? It's just a mechanism to hurt their competitors. They have basically no extra costs for additional sales (we're talking about digial products). If there was some kind of storage cost, they would've to tie it to the actual storage size needed. Marketing would be just another tying to force developers move their customers to Steam (by your definition illegal).

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Quoting: PhiladelphusMy current job ends in three days, and with all the free time I'm about to have on my hands I figure I might give this whole "streaming" thing a try. :smile:

I'm sorry to hear that.

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Good news from Microsoft.
A fun diversion.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: iodI wonder if Wine will ever recognize the correct locale for non-english apps.. People keep telling me it's not Wine's job to do so but Windows does it somehow no problem.

Also waiting for generally better Wayland support because old XWayland games set the fullscreen resolution incorrectly.

I wonder if this can be locale specific, aka in that there is a problem with some locales, because when running applications in Wine apps picks up that my Linux is configured in Swedish with zero issues (or I'm mistaken about what the issue is).

It's locale and app specific, just like 90% of all locale problems, locales are like user side drivers. There are hundreds competing ones, the only way to test them is to use them and the slightest failure is catastrophic.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: ElectricPrismThis really is basically a Proton Space-Suit, allowing containerizing the whole Game and Proton to be used elsewhere.

Did I get that right?

I agree with the sentiments above ^^^ I will always love Valve and Steam but we need to be able to play our purchases offline and without Steam. We can still do all our purchasing, friends, community, discussion, achievements and searching on Steam but just have the freedom to be offline.

Another banger by Penguin tanks and madlads, much respect, much props.

Yes and no:
- No: This does nothing to give you the ability to play steam games offline, on it's own - at least not without other methods I cannot mention here.
- Yes: Games which are not bound by steam will give you the same level of quality / compatibility you would otherwise have had you used steam and their steam proton to begin with.

You know you sound like a story villain mentor.
"Methods I can't mention here", "bound by steam" and "This does nothing to give you the ability to".

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Quoting: PoliticsOfStarvingSeeing comments about this elsewhere, people asking for screenshots, why should they switch to this one from Lutris, how many more launchers do we need and so on.

People are not really getting what this is. And annoyingly most of those posts linked back to this one too, so they’re obviously not reading what Liam has spelled out.

This isn't a Lutris competitor its goal is to be a Lutris dependency.
Lutris and its competitors can use this magic box to launch things like the SteamDeck does(proton+launch options), so basically it's a Lutris runtime.
I do understand the confusion though.

Edit: also the amount of Lutris competitors that will be launched is close to infinity, because that is the spirit of the third software freedom.
If someone thinks they can do it better or even different they've the freedom and ability to use all software adhering to the software freedoms to build it.

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