Quoting: BielFPs

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI would be really surprised if Valve were unable to persuade those people to enable their anticheat to work with Proton.

The fact that they don't need to is the key point, remember that most of the profit from steam comes from Windows users so Valve isn't losing anything from developers not supporting Proton.

Huh. I could have sworn I'd heard something on the interwebs about Valve planning on releasing some kind of device that ran games on Linux, and hoping to sell quite a few of them. The "Steam Duck" or something. Maybe I was dreaming it.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhile I agree with this concept in general, I'd want to argue that Steam is far from free. You pay for it directly in money--it's just that, like some sales or value added taxes, it doesn't show up on the sticker price that 30% of your purchase went to Steam.

Your logic is understandable. But in real life, it's not you who pay that fee - it's the distributors.

In real life, you say? I think that's a misuse of the term. In real life, all the money in the gaming industry comes from the people who buy the games, which necessarily includes that 30%. What you mean is that in a rather abstract way, it's the distributors rather than the buyers who end up with less.
Still, that doesn't make your actual point wrong, it's just not a phrase suited to what you seem to really be trying to say. I don't think the reality of pricing is quite as cut and dried as you're suggesting. My traffic, for one, doesn't actually bear the prices most distributors set--I mostly only buy things on sale. But still, you have a point.

But it's a point that's irrelevant to what I was saying, and most of the rest of what you say is if anything underlining what I was saying. Yes, as you say, and as I was saying in different words, Steam provides a global marketplace--the key feature of which is that people buy things in it, for money that Valve gets part of, not that Steam harvests their information. This is the distinction I was drawing.

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: CyrilBeamboom, you seem to not understand difference between a law and a DRM

DRM is the tools they use to uphold and defend their legal rights. That's the relation.

There is nothing either inherent to the nature of DRM or generally in the way DRM is deployed in practice that limits it to upholding and defending legal rights. To the contrary, it can and often does limit and control consumer behaviour in ways that companies have no legal right to enforce.

I don't know a ton about how this works out in games, but I do know something about copyright vis-a-vis print media in academic settings. DRM on e-books systematically disables on a practical level consumers' fair use rights, as just one example--fair use rights that tend to be quite important in academic settings, in both teaching and research.

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Quoting: finaldest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: finaldestIf the following is true we may soon be getting a big marketshare boost as this news would significantly affect PC Gamers !!

Quote from pc gamer on 1st Oct.
"Microsoft 'will be enabling VBS on most new PCs over this next year' and that can tank PC gaming performance by around 25%"

In the article SOTTR show a 30fps drop in performance with VBS Enabled. I have not seen any mention of this news anywhere and only saw it mentioned in the LMG Linux challenge thread on reddit.

This does seem interesting. What's VBS?

It Stands for = "Virtualization Based Security" and is planned to ship on all soon to be released OEM windows 11 machines going forward.

Quote from article

"Virtualization Based Security (VBS), a setting introduced into Windows 10 which uses hardware and software virtualisation to enhance the security of your system"

Hmmm . . . I am imagining Windows users getting Steam Decks, installing the latest Windows on them, and finding that native Windows game performance on them is now slower than Proton performance on Steam OS. Ouch!

Overall, if it's really a big performance hit, it could be a major issue. Suddenly playing on Linux is clearly faster for many cases . . . and lots of gamers really like fast. Surely the VBS thing could be disabled though?

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Quoting: BielFPsSadly 9 of the top 15 games are borked

Sure, but 8 of those are from anti-cheat. I would be really surprised if Valve were unable to persuade those people to enable their anticheat to work with Proton.

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I was actually surprised, given how much whining I've been hearing the last couple of years about no big games ever being done Linux native any more, just how many of that top 100 are in fact Linux native games.

I'd say the prospects for launch are looking pretty good. Consider--they can probably get the ones currently only on ProtonGE working in normal Proton by launch. I would be surprised if the anti-cheat on anything in the top 100 was some weird unknown little scheme--probably we're talking the big two, which have already been made to work with Proton. And it's worth Valve's while to go talk to every single one of those and bug them about enabling it.
That leaves 10 I count just saying "Proton broken" (or unstable) right now. What are the chances they could fix half of those by launch? If they did, that would leave just five, for 95%, and some of those might not be the kind of thing you'd use a Steam Deck for--for instance, what's Soundpad?

95% isn't bad. It might get a little lower as you leave the top 100, but Valve's a big company, surely they can bug the developers of games a few hundred down about anti-cheat. There were only 15 in the top 100 broken by anti-cheat; if you put just one staffer on full time "Tracking down devs and getting them to enable their anti-cheat for Proton", how many could they get through in a month? And I think anti-cheat gets less common as you get down into mid-tier games.

100%? No. But sure as heck a lot bigger % than back when they released Steam Machines.

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Quoting: finaldestIf the following is true we may soon be getting a big marketshare boost as this news would significantly affect PC Gamers !!

Quote from pc gamer on 1st Oct.
"Microsoft 'will be enabling VBS on most new PCs over this next year' and that can tank PC gaming performance by around 25%"

In the article SOTTR show a 30fps drop in performance with VBS Enabled. I have not seen any mention of this news anywhere and only saw it mentioned in the LMG Linux challenge thread on reddit.

This does seem interesting. What's VBS?

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Quoting: slapin

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: BeamboomI experience ZERO restrictions on Steam. Zero. Never ever in my 16 years on Steam have I experienced any kind of hindrance. I play anytime anywhere on whatever computer I may have had over the course of these years.
Quite the contrary, what I experience is a free cloud save of all my savegames forever, and a free storage of my entire library of games, ready and available to be installed on new machines whenever, wherever. This service is something I'd PAY for, gladly.

Nothing to add about anything else you said, but c'mon. I'm a staunch Steam defender, but even I've had rubbish experiences with it. I used to travel a lot, so just firing up games on my laptop would often fail if I hadn't launched in the two weeks prior to that travel. I had to do this stupid "launch the game" dance any time I was faced with 5 hours on a train.

Not to mention that if Steam is down these days, a lot of your games are down too. Offline modes works for some of them, but not all.

Yes, Steam's DRM is very low-impact. But it's still, ultimately, anti-consumer. You are paying for it. The data they collect on your gaming habits is how they justify charging devs 30% for their platform. If a product is "free" (Steam itself, is free), then you're the product. I'll still use it, but I won't stick my head in the sand about what it's costing, just like I use an Android phone - you weigh up the convenience against the loss of your privacy. Sometimes it's worth it (Steam), sometimes it's not (Denuvo).

On Steam it depends on game, some don't bother how you play them, some constantly check Internet and refuse to play offline even being SP-only, some refuse being played not in country you bought it in (i.e. no hotel fooling on business trips), some add online requirement, Denuvo, EAC, and custom DRM together to SP game (having some coop PvE) and you constantly have trouble with it doing nothing remotely unintended. So depending on your taste you might have very different experience.

Yeah. But it's all different because Valve themselves don't give a damn. It's down to the specific game companies.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismAgree. Longest 3 weeks of my life. We can thank Wuhan China for that -- after all as I recall, they banned [ Domestic Flights ] but not [ International Flights ].

To be fair, I don't think they anticipated how incompetent most other countries in the world would be in dealing with it.

Quoting: ElectricPrism

Quoting: Guestwhat is happening in Australia show that restrictions doesn't work

Agree. In fact, as I recall, they found 1/3 of the White Tail Deer population were infected with SARS-nCOV-19-Wuhan-Pnumonia -- what this means is -- the kitten has become a cat & cat's out of the bag -- we can't put the cat back into the bag -- meaning, we can't vaccinate our way out of this

We may not, quite, be able to vaccinate our way out of this . . . but certainly in Canada right now, in terms of hospitalization and death it's a pandemic almost entirely of the unvaccinated.
But the idea that restrictions don't work is ludicrous. Various countries have in fact successfully used restrictions to entirely wipe the virus out within their borders, and quickly wipe it out again every time it shows up. Some of these are authoritarian countries such as China, but others are democratic, such as Taiwan, and still others are parliamentary democracies on the British model in the Anglosphere, like New Zealand.
The core methodology that works seems to be
--Draconian but localized restrictions and quarantines wherever an outbreak occurs
--Matched with strong supports to those being restricted, so they don't starve, lose their homes etc. and can generally afford to actually follow the restrictions
--Vigorous contact tracing of everyone found to be infected; quarantines of the contacts
--Keep these draconian restrictions on until all cases die out, which takes a few weeks. Then you can return entirely to normal because there are zero cases!

(My own country has not done this, it's been doing what most of the world does: As much as the authorities can get away with before business starts squalling that it's not making enough money, which means restrictions are never strong enough to wipe the virus out, they just "bend the curve" down, and then get dropped so it can start bending back up again, lather, rinse and repeat. This does not beat the virus. It does lead to far fewer deaths all told than just saying "Oh, to heck with the virus, full speed ahead!" though--and I know this is unfashionable in some circles these days, but I think fewer people dying of disease is better than more people dying of disease)

The Covid zero approach that actually works has not been followed in many countries largely because of resistance from business; ironically, countries that follow it have suffered far less economic damage than either the typical-middle-road countries or the "Oh, just let it spread!" countries like Brazil.

Quoting: ElectricPrism-- the animals are infected & the best strategy would be to help the virus mutate into a weak and pathetic version of itself -- this occurs naturally over time (except the antibody dependent enhancement from the vaccines are making it more lethal {think what would happen to viruses if the whole planet took penicillin for a year straight -- we would make them antibody resistant}).

This is not really the case. Some viruses sometimes have evolutionary pressures that push them towards becoming less deadly. It is not at all clear that Covid and its variant family are among them.
Further, the pressures introduced by vaccines are towards becoming different enough in the right ways for the vaccine not to block them--but that is not the same thing as "more deadly". Similarly, everyone taking penicillin for a year straight would push bacteria (but not viruses) towards being more antibiotic resistant . . . but not towards being more inherently deadly, or more infectious, or antibody resistant. It would be a bad idea, but not because the bacteria would work any better against our immune systems.
Both for viruses and bacteria, it's really not about "stronger" or "weaker" . . . it's more like a skill tree. They level up lots of different traits, and the "bypass a vaccine" trait is distinct from the "spread faster" trait or the "make people cough more" trait or the "trigger a fever" trait. But more than that, everything a microbe does has a cost--you don't find germs that are good at everything, because every trait is a tradeoff--is it worth the energy it takes to make the trait work? If you have too many at once, you get too heavy/expensive to reproduce fast.

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Quoting: scaineIf a product is "free" (Steam itself, is free), then you're the product.

While I agree with this concept in general, I'd want to argue that Steam is far from free. You pay for it directly in money--it's just that, like some sales or value added taxes, it doesn't show up on the sticker price that 30% of your purchase went to Steam. Sure, they're gathering data on us and stuff, but their core revenue model is much less subtle than that. Sure, we're "the product" in the sense that Valve is essentially saying to developers: The people want to come here to do their buying, so if you want to be bought from you'd better be here too. But their business model is less handing our information over to people who will pay for it, than handing over our mere presence and willingness to buy. Given that, they depend on customers being pleased with Steam--finding it convenient and ideally even enjoyable to spend time in while not actually playing games as such, the better to entice us to buy more games.

So while I'm sure they're happy to spy on us, I would say that if there ever comes conflict between the spying and the market share, if some instance of spying becomes disliked by Steam users to the extent that some might leave, Valve would definitely consider user market share more important than user market information and publicly dump whatever was pissing people off. Those 30%s are much more important than gathering more information. This is far from being true of all "free" online services.

The eternal question about Steam is not so much how they're getting money from us when the service is "free" as whether the services they provide are actually worth the 30% (ish) tax we pay them on every game we buy. I personally still have no idea what the answer to that is--I don't think the information we'd need to evaluate it is available.

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Quoting: GuestPlace when I life this year: excess number of deaths is above 100 000 and Covid kill 6 000, fight against covid kill much more humans that covid did, people were dying in hospitals because the doctors were afraid to help them (because of covid)

I suspect you are misinterpreting something. I am aware of many places where people are/were dying in hospitals because Covid patients (disproportionately anti-vaxxers) are taking up all the beds and there aren't enough staff to treat everyone. I have never heard of a single case of doctors refusing to treat people because they fear Covid--even though they do, in fact, fear it and are stressed as hell as a result. Although they probably fear it less now, because they're all vaccinated.
If you are not misinterpreting your information source, I suspect that instead your information source was slandering doctors with false allegations, a practice I disapprove of and which has become all too common during Covid among certain political groups.

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