Quoting: officerniceOh look, another reason why Steam is better than Epic.

It also shows why people dislike Steam: I don't need a feature creep. There's so much junk like this in the Steam client I don't care about. Someone should tell Valve about the unix principle or at least about plugins.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismReasons like these are why I continue to patron Steam and make it rain . No other store even comes close.

Quoting: Vortex_AcheronticAgreed. Steam and apparently Valve are awesome! I just hope they will not change direction some day in the future if maybe Lord GabeN is no more :/

Yes, really great that they're notify about the shit they're distributing & installing on the user's PC. How forthcoming, I mean where would we be if they'd simply ban the stuff nobody wants.

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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: EikeHow about setting all games that are not getting set anything by developers/publishers to 18, the maximum restriction age? Would be far from being unpurchaseable...

Quoting: TheSHEEEPI'd just set all games that haven't been declared by whoever is responsible to be 18+ and be done with it.

The highest ratings in Germany are unrated and indexed (well they could get completely banned, too). That is 18+ but with additional constraints, e.g. public display is not allowed. It's up to Valve to finally implement age verification.

Quoting: tuubiBesides, Valve have already streamlined the process by not requiring an official rating (which costs time and money) and offering a single questionnaire.

I believe that questionnaire is from the IARC. Valve couldn't streamline the process unless it was officially allowed.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualValve is a private company and they're very secretive about their financials. I doubt you're going to get any of the answers you want, but even if Valve only spent $100,000 on Linux development (which can't be true if you account for employing Joshua Ashton, Pierre, the primary DXVK developer, years of contracting CodeWeavers, recently sponsoring Arch Linux freelancers, just to start with), that's more than any other gaming company has done.

I'm aware. But this automatically means anyone claiming "they put millions" into something can't really substantiate that claim.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAlmost zero. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the question.

Yeah, I got that since you're not really answering to my comment. People talk shit about Epic who are actually trying to get developers onto their platform (by means that already were suggested Valve should do for the Steam Deck). Meanwhile Valve does nothing to promote the Steam Deck to developers & is actually losing games (which turns into losing customer since this uncertainty really drives people to Windows alternatives).

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThat's never going to happen no matter what Valve does. Some developers might change their minds if the Steam Deck had 10 times as many sales, but there aren't hat many people interested in it (including me). Get millions of people to care, and game developers will care. There need to be more Linux users on Steam.

So you do agree with me that "Valve just waits & hopes for the best".

How can anyone care about Steam Deck / Proton / Linux if nobody knows how many customers there are? If the Steam Deck was such a big hit everyone here is believing, then Valve would just release the numbers.

Sweeney: "I wish they would get to tens of millions users"
Valve: "Hey, we are already at ten million Steam Deck users / 20 million Linux users"

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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.

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Meanwhile 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.

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Such a shame, all these licensing deals wreak havoc on game preservation.

You actually fear that Valve is going to remove the game?

Quoting: GuestI wonder what happens to pirate copies...
who's gonna sue them?
Sounds like a de-facto free zone to me.

Just because it's not sold anymore doesn't void the licenses. With this premise free software would not be possible, would it?

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Quoting: scaineIt was entirely on-topic to the comment I was replying to.

You replied to my comment. I do know that I never asked anyones opinion about GNOME Shell or Unity, the topic is still the reason & timing for starting Unity.

Quoting: scaineGnome 3 had a big impact the way I remember it. Canonical wanted to tailor the experience either upstream itself, or via extensions, but neither option panned out.

Exactly, you even agree with me. The reason for Unity was political issues between the GNOME project & Canonical. No user interests were involved.

Quoting: scainePlease don't oversimplify my point just to make a snide internet victory. I said the if the phone had succeeded, we would have a very different desktop experience.

I don't simplify, I'm telling you it's a pointless argument. It wasn't a success so why bother with what-ifs? If Canonical had made billions with the phone they'd probably moved away from open source releases. But that's another pure speculative & useless what-if. It was a failure and as a result they killed two projects.

Quoting: scaineThis is obviously false. Or maybe it's just your opinion? I remember things like Upstart being adopted distro-wide for many years before being replaced by systemd, and Uncomplicated Firewall is the default is in most distros today. Launchpad is still widely used. And a host of smaller enhancements to Gnome, like software-properties to help simplify Nvidia driver installs/change repos, or more agnostic projects, like lightdm, the apport error reporting system, or the ubiquity installer.

Upstart was killed as soon as it was certain Canonical was on their own.

Everything small (UFW, lightdm, extensiond & driver installer) are just small projects which don't show much maintenance (UFW & lightdm have rarely releases, both exactly 1 in the last 2 years).

The others have not yet been killed & apparently see development. Congratulations Canonical. What a great success story & I was wrong all along (since Ubiquity is being replaced by a new installer, it'll obviously die soon).

Quoting: scaineFrom the tone of your reply, it sounds like you have real beef with Canonical. I don't advocate for them anymore, but I still respect the impact they had and still have today. Why so negative on them?

I value Free Software. Since Canonical does not (as I said, the only way to contribute to Canonical projects is to fork them), I don't value Canonical. Actually, scratch that. Who am I to tell anyone how to make their money. I dislike Canonical because they present themselves as a free software company while hiding their proprietary projects behind the GPL. Even Valve does a better job providing Free Software.

Quoting: slaapliedjeI only remember a couple distros like Fedora adopting Upstart. I'm pretty sure it was never included in CentOS.

It was the init system of RHEL6. Apparently it would've been improved if it hadn't been CLAed.

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Quoting: scaineNope, it wasn't ready. But it was still a better experience than Shell back then, which had hidden activities and weird mouse zones and all sorts of strange workflow changes.

That's your opinion but off-topic. There are enough people who disagree & Unity did not fare better.

Quoting: scaineThey also considered staying on Gnome 2, if I remember correctly, but Mark (Shuttleworth) already had one eye on his upcoming phone UX, and so doing their own thing with Unity/Mir was a pretty bold step for them.

That's what I mean: Pushing Unity had absolutely nothing to do with GNOME 3 user backlash but was about self-interest.

Quoting: scaineI suspect that if the Unity Phone had succeeded in their IndieGogo campaign, Unity would still be the primary desktop on Ubuntu today, and likely, powered by Mir. When the phone failed, however, priorities subtlety changed over the next five years, until of course, they abandoned several technologies (Upstart, Mir, Unity) to consolidate their efforts on cloud, core, and snap.

Great point: It would be a success had it been a success. But this shows the issues with Canonical projects: They're not sustainable. They create closed projects which in turn obviously fail to attract external developers and in the end are abandoned.

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