Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: LoudTechieValve doesn't just wait they put millions of dollars into proton to get games playable on the SteamDeck and it seems to work.

Great to hear. Please provide the sources with the actual numbers. And while you're at it: Please provide the number of actually supported games (by the developers, not by Valve).

Quoting: LoudTechieAlso they launched a bunch of other intiatives for it, like souping up the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, Gamescope, KDE and MESA sponsorships, the verified rating system, DXVK sponsorship, Vulkan(they're one of the founders of the Khronos project) and the SteamMachine.

Which of these projects directly help the developers of the games? They mainly benefit Valve & their own operating system. DXVK & Proton are the only projects which would help but it's obvious that it's not enough.

Quoting: LoudTechieI fully understand that Windows gamers and/or developers might see Valve as a dangerous imposing passive and unmoving force, because Valve earned that reputation in the Windows space, but in the Linux gaming space we benefit quite a lot from them.

I'm talking of getting the actual game developers to provide actual support for Steam Deck / Proton / Linux. What are they doing this way?

Quoting: LoudTechieFor Valve this is probably illegal and ineffective.
illegal:
Valve is big enough that anti-trust law applies to them and bundling services for a discount is probably a form of "tying" and thus illegal(ask Microsoft about teams and office).

If it was simply illegal, nobody would be able to do it. Bundling the Index with Half-Life: Alyx would be illegal. Microsoft tying Office & Teams is illegal because they have a monopoly with Office, putting any Teams competitor to a huge disadvantage to sell their alternative. That's not the case with the Steam Deck / Proton / Linux (they could bind it to Proton / Linux in general if we are saying they are market leader for PC based handheld devices).

Besides: They're already lowering their cut if the revenue surpasses a certain amount. This can easily be argued as illegal since they're forcing small studios to exclusively release on Steam to avoid splitting the revenue. So no, I seriously doubt any anti-trust law considerations.

Quoting: LoudTechieIneffective:
they tried bribing developers to support Linux for the Steam machine...

Steam machines were a complete disaster & failure, so that's not comparable.

Quoting: TheBardTim Sweeney is the best comedian of this century […]
3. They showed that gaming handhelds can be successful with Deck.

Funny. You have really never heard of Nintendo?

Quoting: TheBard[…] There are many things to say against Valve, starting from their cut being way to high. But saying they do nothing is just not true. Especially if you compare Steam to Epic! Comparing with GOG and Itch could be understandable. GOG has the merit to be against DRM and Itch is the platform for very indie games. There are reasons to love these two stores. But Epic? :D

You fail to provide a single point which shows what Valve is directly doing to entice developers to officially support the Steam Deck / Proton / Linux.

What directly helps the developers.
Proton basically took all the active effort needed to support SteamDeck away and left only active blocking efforts(Batteleye does support SteamDeck EA just really wants to not support it when they include it, Roblox gave active Wine isn't supported errors, LOL worked until the devs publicly declared to start blocking Linux, etc).
DXVK gave significant preformance improvements(in both Windows and Linux) that meant they've to spend less time optimising the game to get it to work.
MESA means they can work with a single graphics api instead of twenty different dirvers.
NVIDIA driver improvements means performance and more importantly stability improvements on Linux
VAC and Steam store Linux support means they can rely on the Steam API, drm and anti-cheat in the SteamDeck space.
KDE sponsorship means that the stuff they show actually gets shown right.
The Steam store separate distribution mechanism made live easier for anti-cheat providers to support SteamDeck(which they did although based on how it went I suspect Valve flatout bribed them with direct payment, which was effective in this case, since there are a lot anti-cheat products than Games, for which we can the Microsoft driver signing policy).
The SteamDeck itself means direct financial gain for the devs for supporting Linux(A growing market with paying customers)
The Nautilus patches mean better performance on the SteamDeck specifically, so they don't have to deal with a slow platform forcing them to spend time on platform specific optimizations.

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EDIT:
What you actually meant is: what helps the direct income of the studios(cost savings don't count) for SteamDeck games?
SteamDeck(cutting into the console market with pc games).
Proton improvement(if your game becomes available on a new platform through no effort of your own, suddenly a new group of people will license it.)
VAC and Steam Store Linux support(anti-cheat and drm against pirates and cheaters which don't pay you for your services/products and are assumed to do that if they can't take them another way.)
(Grudgingly) the Steam Deck verified system. By providing a way for customers to easily check whether a game works they create a financial incentive to build working games, because customers prefer to buy working games and if they're not wasting it on non-working games they have more money leftover to spend it on the working games.
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On the ineffectivity stuff:
The steam machine was a failure, because they took the bribery path.
What makes Steam a success all the available games.
Bribes are slow and expensive.
A successful bribe costs at least the price of porting an entire game to Linux(+profit margin), which was back than several days to months of work and gets you one game.
If you get something working in Proton it works for all games with the same dependencies and it is comparably expensive, because porting is mostly replacing Linux incompatible parts dependencies and Proton is too(and giving it the same name as the incompatible dependency) and it's forward compatible too this problem won't show up by new yet to come games.
Valve has lots of money that's true, but they don't have the kind of money that would allow all studios to do a soft rewrite of 60% of all their games and support a platform without significant amounts of users for 5 years(The SteamDeck userbase is growing rapidly, but it took 5 years to get to this point and it's still an ignorable platform, the SteamMachine wouldn't have grown faster)(I estimate that would require a 61% cut instead of a 30% cut).

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Edit:
Also you might argue that it's not comparable, but it's the failure Valve learned from for the SteamDeck.
First they published a failure.
Then they published a success.
That's because the first they did things that don't work.
Than they did things that work.
It's how learning through experience works and as we all know "experience is the best teacher, but the tuition fees are really high."
\

On the anti-trust stuff:
A. just because it's illegal doesn't mean people can't do it. Murder is illegal in the USA, yet on average somebody is killed at least every day. Piracy is illegal, but there are still million and even billion dollar businesses if you count AI companies(trillion if you count Google) based on it, GPL violations are super common in the IOT space(AHEM Samsung, Vizio, CISCO, etc.) and they still get rich from it, Microsoft pays on average 30$ dollars par Windows license worth in active litigation of patent violations in Windows.
Firing workers for going on strike is illegal in the USA, but according to Trump in their X conversation Elon Musk did it.
I'm happy to hear you're such a law abiding citizen that you can't imagine people could break the law to get rich, but not everybody thinks like you.
B. Tying isn't simply illegal.
It's illegal if you're the seriously dominant player in one of the markets your tying.
Valve is that in the pc gaming distribution space.
Marketshare matters in whether or not something is anti-competative.
This lawsuit actually accuses them of tying. [External Link]
One of google's defenses in the Google search anti-trust trial was that they had always even when they were smaller behaved this way.
That got thrown out, because the same behavior can be anti-competative when done by a dominant player.

Edit:
About the increasing discount:
In that case they're using only one service/product to achieve what they want, the Steam Store.
That falls under Bulk discounts.
A big difference in such case is that you can explain to the judge that thanks to scale economics you actually spend less par product and that you're simply calculating your discount through to the customer.
This doesn't work for tying, because the different products are supposed to have a mostly different supply chain(translated in an example most to all of the developer time spend adding features and improvements UE doesn't help adding features to Epic Store and vice versa).
It's how Sweeney negotiated this one out.
He argued that the 30% percent made sense when the Steam Store was smaller in scale, but that, because these same economics of scale Valve spend a lot less on it and Valve agreed(grudgingly) and gave large publishers a discount, because their larger scale provided them with cost savings(the only cost savings agreed to officially were marketing, big games pull many customers, but this's at least also true for hosting(storing one file of a hunderd gb is easier to index and store than a 10 of 10gb), legal and moderation).
Epic Games negotiation. Sweeney might not have gotten his favored outcome, but he did win this round.

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Quoting: const

Quoting: LoudTechie...

It's not like there is no way to do it privacy friendly. Valve gift cards are sold in nearly every super market and tobacco shop here. They are usually located directly next to products that already require age validation or even full identification to purchase (like sim cards). I assume it would be possible for them to bind the purchase of one tier of these cards to an age verification at the counter (the cash register would even trigger a small alarm for necessary age validation). That would hardly be considered privacy invading here.

Physical gift cards also go well indeed.
Adding a bank account coupling or a physical confirmation to a transaction that doesn't already have one(yes, this isn't the case for this law) creates a giant privacy and usability problem, because bank accounts and id cards have a lot of personal details like your name, your bank account id, your birthdate, your financial status, your length, etc. and also require quite a lot of work if you live in another country than the developer.
This is as I already stated not a problem for gambling game purchases, which is what the law covers.

Edit:
As such I do agree that in this specific case age verification isn't a problem.
I have a great respect for the german lawmakers for getting such a hard problem well oozed in the law, but that doesn't change the fact that digital id verification without invading various fundamental rights is hard.

I made my previous comment to clarify to myself and other people concerned about the privacy risks of such a law that in this specific case this isn't a problem.

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Quoting: const

Quoting: Deleted_UserAbsolut overkill by Steam (or the legislator). It would be still less disruptive if they asume an age restriction of 18, which would be the harshest possible restriction.

Obvious solution. Age verification is nothing magical and for a shop the size of Steam it's obviously worth the implementation cost. In Germany, we are used to authenticating against our ID card (which every adult must have), our banking cards or 3rd party authentication services like Postident to register to streaming services or buy alcohol/tobacco/vapes/adult content/knifes/whatever on the net. As Steam is completely account based, they could bind a single validation against the account and be done for.

When I was a child, things were a lot more restrictive then they are now, especially regarding video game content. Digital distribution broke through our laws that were made assuming video games are sold as physical items and only now got back to attention.
There is broad consensus here that children should not get access to violent computer games unless parents decide to allow it. If parents want to allow it, they are free to do so, but it's not their job to invade their kids privacy.

I would scream that digital age verification without privacy invasion is hard, but gambling games(the only games covered under the law) already require bank account coupling, so just make people take a loan and immediately pay it off before they can buy the game.
(This is mostly to warn off myself and other techies not to start screaming Privacyyyy)

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: CGullWhy is this kind of political censorship accepted for games?

It would be prudent to wait for confirmation on the exact types of prohibited content included in the questionnaire before knee-jerking about censorship. Any developer with a game on Steam should be able to check it out and report back. We've got several here on GOL.

Or someone fluent in German legalese can probably dig out the relevant laws and regulations. After all, that's what Valve has to comply with here.

My german is okay, but I'm lazy, so here is a link to a bunch of licensed legal professionals giving the answer. [External Link]
Basically the law is an anti-gambling law.
It actually takes a quite narrow view of gambling.

Edit:
Warning though lootboxes fall under lottery.

So feel free to put sex, violence, drugs, hate, crime, etc. In your game, but if you want to insert gambling mechanics you've to apply for a license.

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Quoting: poiuzMeanwhile in Steam-Land: Yet another Steam Deck Verified game gets unplayable.

It's funny to see how Epic Games apparently puts it all into their platform while Valve just waits & hopes for the best.

Must be very hard for you guys to see the "enemy" do exactly what you expect from Valve.

Valve doesn't just wait they put millions of dollars into proton to get games playable on the SteamDeck and it seems to work. [External Link]
Also they launched a bunch of other intiatives for it, like souping up the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, Gamescope, KDE and MESA sponsorships, the verified rating system, DXVK sponsorship, Vulkan(they're one of the founders of the Khronos project) and the SteamMachine.

Edit:
I fully understand that Windows gamers and/or developers might see Valve as a dangerous imposing passive and unmoving force, because Valve earned that reputation in the Windows space, but in the Linux gaming space we benefit quite a lot from them.
As to why they don't do this exact thing Epic did:
For Valve this is probably illegal and ineffective.
illegal:
Valve is big enough that anti-trust law applies to them and bundling services for a discount is probably a form of "tying" and thus illegal(ask Microsoft about teams and office).
Ineffective:
they tried bribing developers to support Linux for the Steam machine...

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Everybody thinks this is good for publishers.
I claim they're wrong.
What Epic is doing here is probably "tying" in the legal sense and at least bundling in the informal sense.
Specifically they're tying their store to their engine to their payment provider.
This would probably be anti-competitative if they had any market cloud.
This is as good for publishers as the Windows api is Valve, IE api's are for web developers and Apple "integration" is for Apple customers.
It creates a walled garden that is fun, while it lasts...

Edit:
It's a standard market practice.
Which is really frustrating for the European commision and the DOJ, because it's more often than not also illegal.

It actually surprises me Epic does it.
Epic has a fat track record of winning large anti-trust cases, so I would expect them to have been warned of by their legal team.

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For people with knowledge of Chinese and time leftover.
This arch page contains a good list of projects you can contribute to, to fix your specific problems. [External Link]
This project started as a Mandarin specific localization effort, but is more generic now. [External Link]

If you would rather fix localization problems with money:
The outreachy project of SFC attempts to fix under representation issues and with that localization issues. [External Link]

If you would rather fix localization problems as a job:
https://www.credly.com/org/the-linux-foundation/badge/linux-foundation-research-localization-partner-2023 [External Link]

Localizationlab specialises in fixing locale issues for floss [External Link]

Development of good locales is difficult in open source development, because although the contributors tend to stay once they've made significant contributions.
The best way to attract them is through socials and that works a lot less with people that come from a different culture and speak a different language.

There's a reason all the medium to large projects beg for translators.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: pbPersonally I find this fascinating that China is so Windows-centric. It might be because there's no IP laws and a lot of these are pirated copies of Windows (so basically free as in beer), but still, it's an American product, I would think its use would be discouraged at the very least. I guess Red Flag Linux didn't gain as much popularity as they hoped it would. ;-)

On the other hand, Linux is an open system while Windows is fully controlled plus they might have some deal in place for backdoors and stuff, so everyone is happy (I mean the corporation and the government).

Honestly, I think it is mostly because Windows has really, REALLY good support for Chinese language + Pinyin.

Linux support of those two is absolutely abysmal - yeah, you can get something installed that "kind of works", but it will still be far, far away from the support MS offers for this.

And because that is the case, there are not many Chinese Linux users, and because of that, not much effort goes into improving the situation, and there you are, vicious cycle.

I tried learning Chinese for a while and I totally get why no Chinese person would want to touch Linux, even IF they were tech affine and not afraid of terminals.

First: I believe you immediately.
Second: That's surprising, the CCP has put quite a lot of development in developing their own Linux distros this is exactly what I would've thought would've gotten better from that effort.(kylin and derivatives)

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Quoting: sarmadSpeaking of Black Myth: Wukong, can it run on Steam Deck? I assume that is way too demanding title for the Steam Deck to handle, but I just thought of asking anyway.

these people seem to think so. [External Link]

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Quoting: tfk

Why ignore a platform that's sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?

Cause Sweeney hates us.

Sweeney doesn't hate us.
He hates Valve, because he can't use anti-competition law to force them to do his bidding(they're not anti-competative enough) and he hates software freedom, because it enables others to compete on his turf.
Also tens of millions of users isn't actually that much.
Serious platforms do ~150 million units nowadays [External Link].
To Sweeney the Steam Deck is still like the Vision Pro was to IOS developers.
Support dependent attempt at ensuring the future of someone you normally can't get around, but this time you can.

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