The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
There are old companies in either model.
If the company makes a profit and there aren't shareholders there to keep the stewards in check, excesses can and do develop.
So it's not perfect, but it sure as hell beats having shareholders.
Precisely, in the form of the #1 trend of public companies, stock buybacks! I've seen aggressive buybacks take a company with a ton of money in the bank and a profitable business and drive it right to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in just a few short years.
I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.
This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
It's about leverage. It's all about where you stand and how long your lever is. Musk stands at the top and he has a very long set of levers. He's also much more closely personally involved in engineering aspects of a company that most CEOs know little to nothing about. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, because his decisions have massively outsized effects because of this. Leverage.
If Musk makes good or bad decisions over the next few years, that matters much, much more than the decisions of anyone else at Tesla, especially because he hires and fires everyone else at Tesla. They're all only there, as individuals in particular, because of him anyway.
As it happens I think his decision making has deteriorated significantly recently, in some respects but not all. Also Tesla just doesn't have the magic special sauce SpaceX has had since they developed reusability. There's no special engineering insight in the Tesla architecture. Other vehicle manufacturers already caught up. That catch up is happening in space tech as well with BO's recent booster recovery, but SpaceX still has a very significant lead there, based on a truly revolutionary concept (which Musk championed personally) that they had exclusively for 10 years. Starship still doesn't work though, so we'll see.
I agree that the CEO is typically the most important in this respect, especially this particular CEO. I just think that giving him an additional 1/8th of the company's entire market cap growth, on top of the roughly 1/8th he already has, is highly disproportionate.
Clearly the shareholders disagree, and that's entirely their right. And I'm not surprised, CEOs are greatly overvalued in general.
This article explains roughly how Patagonia is structured: https://medium.com/@purpose_network/the-patagonia-structure-...
For Patagonia a trust owns 100% of the voting rights, while a charity collects 100% of the dividends. I don't doubt that there are ways the structure could be subverted, but it's a far cry from "money without oversight".
Do you have examples of Steward-owned companies that ended up with "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issues?
(I personally think Steam should go in that direction, otherwise I'm afraid enshittification is unavoidable once Gabe Newell is no longer at the helm)
The model has worked well for many decades for a 100 billion$ revenue company like Bosch, good to see others taking a cue from them.
(Also goes to show that even constructs like these are not safe from corporate fuckups - see the emissions scandal...)
If they can just easily sell the shares they will do that instead.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.
So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would likely be in the top 50%).
By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
“Open for the elite” how?
You still don’t have a say and the investor is also the customer. How is it democracy or keeping companies to being good for society.
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
What was your attempted point? Or did you not understand the issue that was brought up?
This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.
The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.
Ok, but this “at the moment” has lasted at least since 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a pretty great company delivering value and not being annoying.
Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
Are they doing good things for Linux? Absolutely. As a long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
I hear that for every major Windows release. And after 6 months everybody is fine with it.
Well that's your problem there.
I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
Not really. Most people have terribly low time preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed explanation). Public company ownership is much better because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but still susceptible to much of the same management problems, specially in a society that already favors lower time preference by other means.
I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.
Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.
If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.
But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect the greater good just as much as a public company. The rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just there to support that transfer of wealth.
We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).
If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.
You can fit zo many tulips in this bad boy
This differs quite a bit from a typical venture-backed or boot-strapped entity, which has a realistic pathway to profitability.
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/hsbc-warns-openai-coul...
*At a specific point in time and for certain investors
Ergo I propose grandparent commentator inject more humor in their clear understanding of leverage and debt to widen your, my, and their audiences' understanding regarding debt and leverage beyond your proposed metaphor of the toddler CFO failing the marshmallow challenge.
Just unsure about the timing
Right after we get nuclear fusion and a million people on Mars.
Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.
In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
It's not just functionally equivalent to an IPO... it's an IPO if all the buying new shareholders were sociopaths.
(Yes, there are the PE companies who run businesses better like Berkshire, but that's far from the most common type of PE)
When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy customer relations from birth?
The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some companies that are more likely to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA, sometimes Apple. But I don’t trust any of those companies to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or Verizon.
> The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
Abolishing public equity is quite drastic, but there are lots of other things we could (and IMO should) be doing to protect society from the negative externalities it causes. For example:
- Mandating worker representation on company boards. So shareholders still have some power, but less.
- Progressive corporation tax (larger companies pay more tax). This would bias the economy towards smaller companies which generally have less problematic externalities.
Dodge v. Ford is basically the source of all these headaches; the Dodge Brothers owned shares in Ford. Ford refused to pay the dividends he had to pay to the Dodge Brothers, suspecting that they'd use the dividends to start their own car company (he wasn't wrong about that part). The Dodge Brothers sued Ford, upon which Fords defense for not paying out dividends was "I'm investing it in my employees" (an obvious lie, it was very blatantly about not wanting to pay out). The judge sided with the Dodge Brothers and the legal opinion included a remark that the primary purpose of a director is to produce profit to the shareholders.
That's basically become US business doctrine ever since, being twisted into the job of the director being to maximize profits to the shareholders. It's slightly bunk doctrine as far as I know; the actual precedent would mostly translate to "the shareholders can fire the directors if they think they don't do a good job" (since it can be argued that as long as any solid justification exists, producing profit for the shareholders can be assumed[0]; Dodge v. Ford was largely Ford refusing to follow his contracts with money that Dodge knew Ford had in the bank), but nobody in the upper areas of management wants to risk facing lawsuits from shareholders arguing that they made decisions that go against shareholder supremacy[1]. And so, the threats of legal consequences morph into the worst form of corporate ghoulishness that's so pervasive across every publicly traded company in the US. It's why short-term decision making dominates long-term planning for pretty much every public company.
[0]: This is called the "business judgement rule", where courts will broadly defer the judgement on if a business is ran competently or not to the executives of that business.
[1]: Tragically, just because it's bunk legal theory, doesn't change that the potential and disastrous consequences of lawsuits in the US are a very real thing.
If anything Milton Friedman is more responsible for this idea that shareholder maximizing is the corporate goal. That is an efficient market argument though not a legal one and he framed it long after the dodge suit. He needed to frame that argument because so many firms were _not_ doing that.
But just because a Chicago school economist says something about governance doesn’t mean it’s broadly applicable in the same way an Austrian economists opinions about inflation aren’t iron rules about monetary policy.
People complain about the latter because they have higher expectations because the institution is supposed to serve them and often has all the diseases of true scale without being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry skates by because people assume it's out to screw them and they can cherry pick.
No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
Passion matters.
Is it good enough or should we be monitoring his health and hoard torrents of our steam collection just in case?
But if you're just running the company 'badly' (in the shareholders eyes), probably no.
Valve can be Valve because HL + Steam, in the same way that Google ~2010 could not be evil because search + ad revenue.
The difference is that Google IPO'd and took market capital, and Valve didn't.
Once public investors are onboard, you maximize profits or face lawsuits.
As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL").
In more realistic terms, they could have built proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are funding a lot of development, apparently) to give themselves a unique advantage.
If they were a publicly traded company, they probably would be doing all these things.
As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers despite giving away hundreds of games.
Developing open source emulation is essential to their success - no developer would build and verify for Steam OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer is what makes them successful.
Because it is "common wisdom" even if the wisdom is short sighted and doesn't always amount to increased profits.
See Netflix removing the ability to cast, because fuck you. How much of the current growth is borne out of that crackdown on people using all their profiles they pay for?
There currently isn't a "good guy" so they can keep turning those screws and force some extra growth. Being anti-consumer would be beneficial for Valve because they are currently the only good guys.
Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.
It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1) Epic also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds, going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches to optimise it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.
Companies will do things that represent their interests, sometimes their goals align well with their customers, or the greater good, and sometimes they do unpopular things where they believe the profitability will outweigh the blowback.*
It's a lesson in not being too attached or needlessly loyal - our connection to a business is not a personal one.
*The Epic example is useful because their actions represent a steady pattern of deceptive conduct.
They seem to have a high ownership, consensus driven organizational structure. The only time I'm aware the consensus model was violated was when Gabe overruled a veto to ship Steam with half life 2.
It's very interesting to me because it seems to operate similarly to a lot of anarchist shit I've been involved in, but at a highly effective level. And they make oodles of money.
I see it the other way round: they can do all that because they print money.
Not that it's necessarily a bad thing: maybe they stay relevant because they are doing that.
They have few employees and massive revenue.
And IIRC Valve and EA had almost exactly the same revenue figures last year, yet EA had 10x more employees.
On paper it would seem extremely appealing to public investors.
Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...
Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.
It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.
Aren't people upset about both? The whole "gamble for features" is pretty much why the mobile market and console market are divorced in audiences (or at least, community).
People are "more" upset about Valve here because this is in the console space. They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm sure a few people are, but typically no. People are aware that trading card games can be a monetary black hole, but Magic and similar games usually don't take the same heat for the business model that Valve does for loot boxes, even though they're actually worse on paper.
> They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
I'm not talking about the mobile market. Are you not aware that Magic the Gathering is a physical card game? (though it does have some digital implementations too)
This is a weird claim. TCG/CCG is far worse than Valve's loot boxes. It's not even close. MTG Arena is huge btw, it's not a footnote.
Valve is simply larger and took legal heat for people misusing the API.
There's plenty of outrage about paid loot boxes and viewing them as terrible, terrible gambling that exploits consumers and ought to be regulated/banned. Not everyone agrees with this take, but it's still fairly widespread.
Now, you do see people pointing out that trading card games are basically still gambling -- and no one really disagrees with that -- you just don't see the same level of outrage about it. What you usually see is grudging acceptance, ala "what're ya gonna do, that's just how these card games are".
I think the simplest fact is that most people online don't think about offline product. Out of sight, out of mind. It's also an interesting market where WotC and Co. Actively try to avoid the resellers market. They don't want any risk in valuing individual cards themselves, so they stick to boosters.
For digital stuff, you are inherently the market itself. So it's hard divorce yourself when you are the one who implemented trading and controlling rarities and drops.
Subsidizing the game's devel/ops cost isn't a bad thing. Especially if it's optional and doesn't change the game.
It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my experience, having been part of communities of both types of games.
The closest I've heard to something compelling is that the digital goods aren't the same as actual physical goods, and that somehow that makes it worse, but I still don't find it particularly compelling; I've heard people (often lovingly) refer to trading cards as "cardboard crack" explicitly to joke about how ridiculous it is to be paying for stuff that's essentially just ink and paper.
Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.
> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.
For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.
I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).
It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.
We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.
Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not charity.
Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)
Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
That contrasts against the companies doing things that are good for business (at least short term) and bad for consumers.
It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to closed source quicker than you can blink, because the reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do good.
No, it's not. They're choosing the path that builds user trust and positive sentiment for long term success, rather than choosing to fleece their customers and not worry about whether people hate it.
Other corporations in a similar spot for games and game platforms could choose to make the same type of choices, but they'd rather boost next quarter's profits, even if that means pissing off their userbase with consumer-hostile policies.
No one forced Valve to have a great form of family sharing. No one forced them to have generous policies around generating Steam keys. No one forced them to invent remote play together. They do these things because they're nice features that are useful for players and make people stay engaged on Steam, and more positively inclined towards Valve.
I am “morally lucky” because every decision I make is to ensure I can always be morally lucky, 10 years later. I take certain kinds of jobs in certain kinds of industries.
It’s my same approach to reducing stress or getting things done. I never get a parking ticket not because I’m amazing — it’s because I know if I have to go out later and move my car, I’ll forget, so I’ll just park right the first time. 10 years later and no parking tickets and no stress — if someone tells me “oh you’re just lucky,” I can only chuckle.
So they may pivot to closed source when the circumstances will benefit it, or they may actually not do that. They have no shareholders that force them to squeeze the bottom line. The perceived benefits may just be slight and their culture will push them to stay the course on the long term, where other companies will do the reverse. Maybe if their survival is at stake, but wouldn't anyone faced with existential danger do anything to stay alive, including the worst imaginable?
Within certain commercial boundaries that keeps the business profitable, companies can and do make all sorts of decisions based on values and visions that are more than just economical, especially companies not beholden to shareholders that only care about short-term profits. Even the economical decisions aren't purely rational and often done from some kind of cultural bias.
Its not all sunshine and windows.
>Short of Gabe Newell not controlling it anymore, I
In the same way Bill Gates did not force you to use Internet Explorer, yes. Both are free applications with alternatives. Let's not forget our history.
That's only a matter of time, and probably not a very long time.
I think more ARM Valve hardware is likely.
Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?
> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?
> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!
It’s more about Valve having complete control over the stack and being able to vertically integrate, something they will never have with windows, especially as it continues to enshittify
GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.
I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).
GOG is an online shop. It shouldn't support anything but browsers, bank cards and download managers.
This would be a perfectly reasonable ask despite GOG being a webshop that only supports browsers.
No, because users are lazy enough to not support the better option.
??? They didn't
All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all
They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
We should remember our history so we aren't doomed to repeat it.
Similar to desktop, I choose the middle ground between true freedom and walled garden. At least you Can de-googlefy 95% of Android. More than you can de-microsoft Windows.
Of course you could also buy one of the purism phones, jolla is apparently planning to ship phones too.
If you're willing to flash the phone, you can run postmarketos on loads of devices too.
I suspect the vast majority of people who are invested enough to want to avoid Android and iOS have the technical knowledge to install postmarketos.
I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?
Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.
To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.
With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.
So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.
The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.
It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
They don’t force themselves onto your machines mate.
I'm very anti-ad, but if there's one situation where I don't have a beef with it, it's the Steam app.
Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by Valve?
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
When Gabe is gone I cringe thinking MS will do everything in their power to buy Valve and turn it to complete shit couple years later.
I think I would say it this way: private companies can be good or bad, but public companies must ultimately become bad.
But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.
In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.
I haven't ruled that out yet. I am planning on trying to convince them on this next time they ask me for tech support.
[1] I'll say it again; if anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider getting out of the software game and maybe consider a job in the exciting world of janitorial or food service, because you are exceedingly bad at the whole "software thing" and you should be ashamed of yourself and how much damage you have cost the entire world with your utterly incompetent software.
they still do it because you can't play all the multiplayer games with kernel level anticheats
Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and everything works as it should. With developers noticing SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80% starts growing to 90%.
Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable though, which pulls the percentage down again.
Of the top 1000 games it seems 77% are playable. 40% of it needing "some tinkering" but I dont know what that means
Wine meanwhile works perfectly with 80+% of games, and those 20% that don't are all newer stuff or stuff that's never going to get a Linux version short of the Linux desktop actually getting of the ground.
Also Microsoft Games Studios owns enough studios to make an impact.
Also Proton means zero game studios have to care Steam OS exists, they target Windows, use Visual Studio, and Valve is the one that has to make the needful if they care.
The same studios might even be using game engines that support GNU/Linux, yet letting Valve do the work is much more appealing.
Microsoft has been absolute dogshit at releasing newer program APIs for developer to use. Wine doesn't support UWPs/appx just because there's no demand, since no-one uses the Windows Store. You expect that same Microsoft to get game devs to jump on their new DRM scheme?
Microsoft released even their darling Halo in 2020 and 2021, and have committed to release Halo: Campaign Evolved in 2026 on Steam. I can't think of any new titles under the Microsoft umbrella that hasn't also released in Steam. They've realised that battle is lost. They can change course, but that doesn't mean they'll get anything out of that.
Developers are already doing sanity checks and patches specific to SteamOS. That trend will continue if SteamOS or Linux gains ground. It doesn't matter that the foundation is Microsoft, because even if Microsoft goes bankrupt tomorrow, that foundation doesn't disappear, and even the most malicious Microsoft can't unmake reimplementations or translation layers of their APIs.
That same studio would prefer to make a stable Windows version than an unstable Linux version that might not even work in 5 years since it used some stupid dependency. ANd if they're sensible about it and do a sanity check with Proton, Valve doesn't even have to do any work for them outside of what's already been done.
WinRT now runs on Win32 side as well, that is what new APIs like Windows ML, the abstraction used for all kinds of AI infrastructure now use, just as one example.
Microsoft Games Studio will do whatever they need to make shareholders happy, and if Steam gets in the way of XBox handhelds, maybe a change of heart will take place.
Who knows, Valve is the one that needs to worry, not Microsoft, they control the technology.
What can Microsoft even threaten? No more Fallout 76 and Halo Infinite? Linux is banned from Bedrock Edition? They'll re-cancel the Perfect Dark reboot? Every punishment I try to imagine is like death-by-pillow-fighting.
Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows devs more than halfway.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an exploitive company
I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.
Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with me everywhere anyway.
I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably be different companies.
Exactly, and the same goes for Steam.
That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
If Steam didn't have nominal DRM, I'd imagine they wouldn't have been able to grow to the point they're at now, and we'd instead have many stores each with their own exclusives, but most of them have worse terms than Steam. That world is worse than the one we have now.
And if you really care, there's always GOG, or the skull and crossbones.
Google makes money with ads and at least takes this serious.
Apple just exploits.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...
Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)
They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.
Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…
Steam wins because it provides a superior product for the end-user, not because of lock-in. Games purchased through Steam can be vetted with user reviews, supported with user-created guides and steam input configurations, streamed across devices, shared with family members, and even modded; all within the Steam experience.
There are plenty of other stores to get games from. They're just consistently worse than Steam.
Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...
You need friends for a lack of friend systems to matter :)
So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.
Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.
there's no lock-in in any of the contracts
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.
Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more than a little bit pointless.
But companies themselves are just organizational paradigms used by people to pursue human intentions, and the reason you offered as to why we shouldn't "worship companies" was based on the possibility of people acting on bad intentions within those organizational paradigms.
But the possibility of people acting on bad intentions is present in all contexts of human activity, regardless of what organizational paradigm people are using to coordinate their activities.
So if "worship" resolves to "express approval for", and "companies" resolves to "organized human activity", based on a failure modality that's always present in all cases, then you are actually saying that people should not express approval for organized human activity.
I mostly meant “let’s look at this stuff with a healthy amount of cynicism”. This isn’t to say we can’t like the good things.
But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior.
So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.
I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.
To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.
Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly that nobody even knew they tried.
I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve hasn't abused their status yet, and maybe they never will, but all it takes is a change in management for that to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to squelch, they still might just decide they want more money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games, and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years, I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about it and take out my credit card and just pay it.
Stuff like this has already happened with other companies (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).
I'm not saying that it will happen, but at this point Steam has so much of the market and so many people have their entire game collections on there that I don't think we should discount the possibility that it could happen.
I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)
Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."
That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).
(To be clear, I'm not saying it's a matter of ownership and personal brand. But someone needs to start the project and form a team around it. I don't think they're worried about personal brand, it's more an issue of reverence for the franchise.)
https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a theater sized screen is nice enough.
Entirely different situation than bundling a finished HL3 + Steam Machine to achieve big sales.
Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?
OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.
Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.
DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?
I copied FTL, and Into The Breach out of my steam directory to another machine
and they work fine
To download and update Steam games you obviously need Steam, but once DRM free games are downloaded you can keep playing them without Steam.
Heck, we even shared some drm-free games someone bought in my friends-group over a personal torrent among us, so we could play coop with each other to test the game out before we bought it ourselves.
It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to dethrone Duke Nukem Forever.
There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up. I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from releasing an another new entry in the series that uses revolutionary new technology or whatever.
They have only one chance of publishing HL3, and I hope put in it the same love and care they put in 1 and 2.
I'd be very disappointed if they just released it just for the sake of releasing it.
But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve releasing virtual card games today?
Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now, they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.
I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
From what I see it seems like the culture of the company is shared between the leadership roles so it might be possible for the company to continue doing as it has been doing after Gabe.
I think the people at valve are smart and they understand their business and the company very well and that this issue is being taken seriously too.
Good governance exists, it's just that for most companies there's not really an interest in having that because it gets in the way of personal interests of people that are already entrenched in power.
Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.
No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be.
> Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work".
The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be.
It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.
Realistically a lot of devs aren't going to make Linux versions at all (or be able to spend time actually fixing issues with them) unless Linux users make up a bigger market share. Valve's efforts are helping to grow Linux market share, which is a necessary step before we can ever hope for most devs to focus on Linux compatibility.
As far as I know, all of the following stores take a 30% cut:
* Steam * GOG * Microsoft store * Xbox store * PlayStation store * Nintendo eShop * App store * Play store * Kindle store
There's also stuff like Audible where Amazon takes a 75% cut unless you agree to exclusively sell your audiobook through them. And there was a lawsuit over that because it turned out Audible was actually only paying authors a 15% cut, while keeping 85% of sales for themselves.
because that's the foreseeable trajectory at this point
And people have forgotten that they existed. I mean it is 18 years since the orange box.
(answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).
it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.
there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
A properly designed game should not send the position of ennemies out of view
This is generally the anti-cheat problem. Certain genres have gameplay that cannot be implemented without trusting the client at least some of the time.
I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to play those games because of it. There is a benefit to making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it impossible.
The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient, unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, the act of bypassing kernel-level anti-cheat will become commoditized just like every other anti-cheat prior.
Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating completely, they just need to capture enough cheating (and ban unpredictably) that average people are mostly discouraged. As long as cheat-creators have to scurry around in secrecy and guard their implementations until the implementation is caught, the "good" cheats will never be a commodity on mainstream well-funded games with good anti-cheat.
Cheat-creators have to do the hard hacking and put their livelihoods on the line, they make kids pay up for that.
Having some anti-cheat is better than no anti-cheat but my point is it’s not a shield. It’s a cheese grater.
I would beg to differ. In the US at least, there does seem to be a hidden arms race between safety features and the environment (in the form of car size growth)
VAC is still a laughing joke in CS2, literally unplayable when you reached 15k+. Riot Vanguard is extremely invasive, but it's leaps and bounds a head of VAC.
And Valve's banning waves long after the fact doesn't improve the players experience at all. CS2 is F2P, alts are easy to get, cheating happens in alost every single high-ranked game, players experience is shit.
Not anymore for the competitive gamemodes. This was reversed a while ago.
And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness or self-preservation. Only a select few are truly committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their accounts on the line.
Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western countries).
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security.
You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far.
But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
And the SOTA anti-cheats now use IOMMU shenanigans to keep DMA devices from seeing the game state. The arms race continues.
The vast majority of cheaters in most games are not sophisticated users. Ease of access and use is the biggest issue.
Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.
I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop all crime so you may as well not even try"
Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)
The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.
For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.
I don't hate the lack of cheating compared to older Battlefield games if I am going to be honest.
Not only does this present a huge security risk, it can break existing software and the OS itself. These anti-cheats tend not to be written by people intimately familiar with Windows kernel development, and they cause regressions in existing software which the users then blame on Windows.
That's why Microsoft did Windows Defender and tried to kill off 3rd party anti-virus.
I'm curious, does anyone know how exactly they check for this? How was it actually made unspoofable?
I think the biggest thing is that the anticheat devs are using Microsoft's CA to check if your efi executable was signed by Microsoft. If that was the case then its all good and you are allowed to play the game you paid money for.
I haven't tested a self-signed secure boot for battlefield 6, I know some games literally do not care if you signed your own stuff, only if secure boot is actually enabled
edit: Someone else confirmed they require TPM to be enabled too meaning yeah, they are using remote attestation to verify the validity of the signed binary
There are two additional concepts built upon the TPM and Secure Boot that matter here, known as Trusted Boot [1,2] and Remote Attestation [2].
Importantly, every TPM has an Endorsement Key (EK) built into it, which is really an asymmetric keypair, and the private key cannot be extracted through any normal means. The EK is accompanied by a certificate, which is signed by the hardware manufacturer and identifies the TPM model. The major manufacturers publish their certificate authorities [3].
So you can get the TPM to digitally sign a difficult-to-forge, time-stamped statement using its EK. Providing this statement along with the TPM's EK certificate on demand attests to a remote party that the system currently has a valid TPM and that the boot process wasn't tampered with.
Common spoofing techniques get defeated in various ways:
- Stale attestations will fail a simple timestamp check
- Forged attestations will have invalid signatures
- A fake TPM will not have a valid EK certificate, or its EK certificate will be self-signed, or its EK certificate will not have a widely recognized issuer
- Trusted Boot will generally expose the presence of obvious defeat mechanisms like virtualization and unsigned drivers
- DMA attacks can be thwarted by an IOMMU, the existence/lack of which can be exposed through Trusted Boot data as well
- If someone manages to extract an EK but shares it online, it will be obvious when it gets reused by multiple users
- If someone finds a vulnerability in a TPM model and shares it online, the model can be blacklisted
Even so, I can still think of an avenue of attack, which is to proxy RA requests to a different, uncompromised system's TPM. The tricky parts are figuring out how to intercept these requests on the compromised system, how to obtain them from the uncompromised system without running any suspicious software, and knowing what other details to spoof that might be obtained through other means but which would contradict the TPM's statement.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...
[2]: https://docs.system-transparency.org/st-1.3.0/docs/selected-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module#Endors...
Afaik there have been wallhacks and aimbots since the open beta.
It might just be the game too - I do think the auto aim is a bit high because I feel like I make aimbot like shots from time to time. And depending on the mode BF6 _wall hacks for you_ if there are players in an area outside of where they are supposed to be defending. I was pretty surprised to see a little red floating person overlay behind a wall.
Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
Is it ever? No.
Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human.
In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly) legitimate player data.
It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.
Ive played at the pro level. Nobody prefires with perfect robotic consistency.
I dont care if it takes 50 matches of data for the statistical model to call it inhuman.
Valve has enough data that they could easily make the threshold for a ban something like '10x more consistent at pre-firing than any pro has ever been' with a high confidence borne over many engagements in many matches.
Then all you need to do to fool this anticheat is to add some randomness to the cheat.
You've made them the same as the best players. Otherwise we're banning the best players.
Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter, that you can spot it in game data reliable to apply automatic bans?
Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two.
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data?
There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.
As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting good features and data. In this case one difficulty is measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with.
In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if someone is around the corner and start shooting when they come close. For far away targets, lots of people camp at specifc spots and often shoot without directly sighting someone if they anticipate someone crossing - the hit rate may be low but it's a low cost thing to do. Then you have people not hiding too well and showing a toe. Or someone pinpointing the position of an enemy based on information from another player. So the question is, what is the starting point for you to measure the reaction?
Now let's say you successfully measured the reaction time and applied a threshold of 80ms. Bot runners will adapt and sandbag their reaction time, or introduce motions to make it harder to measure mouse movements, and the value of your model now is less than the electricity needed to run it.
So with your proposal to solve the reaction time problem with KL divergence. Congratulations, you just solved a trivial statistics problem to create very little business value.
You arent eliminating cheaters, that's impossible, you are limiting their impact.
This is one of the cases where ML methods seem appropriate.
My world is pretty fine, as I don't play games on servers, without active admin/mods that kick and ban people who obviously cheat.
ML solutions can maybe help here, but I believe they can reliable detect cheats, without banning also lucky or skilled players, once I see it.
A human can't really, which is why you need to bring in ML. Feed it enough game states of legit players vs known cheaters, and it will be able to find patterns.
A suitable game engine would have knowledge of when a shadow, player, grenade, noise, or other reactable event occurs for a given client.
Especially if games arent processed in real time but processed later based on a likelihood of cheating drawn from other stats.
Looking at you Rust.
Edit:
And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
Then I saw the arewe…yet url and thought you meant Rust the programming language
Then I visited the arewe…yet link and realized it was the Rust game you meant after all
The only non-generic word you see in the crash message is "SQLite".
You look it up, find SQLite, and you bother the developers for help.
The problem is as old as labels.
More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where either one could be valid.
It's because the Linux versions of those anti-cheats are significantly weaker than their Windows counterparts.
FACEIT is significantly more effective.
Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct.
Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there (which is not as common as people make it to be on high trust factor).
You think tournament organizers or pro players know the first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing just like everybody else.
I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.
Anyone that's not dumb will know (maybe after the heat of the moment) why they lost, but the vast majority of people will blame anything they can instead. Teammates, lag, the developers, etc. Cheating is merely one of these excuses.
> I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
This entire idea is so dumb it makes my head hurt. You can't eliminate bad actors no matter how hard you try. It's impossible in the real world.
All these "if only we could prevent X with more surveillance/control" ideas go up in flames as soon as reality hits. Even if a single person bypasses it, we can question everything. Then all we're left with are these surveillance systems that are then converted into pure data exfiltration to sell it all to the highest bidder (assuming they weren't doing this already).
I applaud Valve for not going down the easy route of creating spyware and selling it as "protection".
I predict that hacker news in particular will dislike using facial recognition technology to allow for permanent ban-hammers, but frankly this neatly solves 95% of the problem in a simple, intuitive way. Frankly, the approach has the capacity to revitalize entire genres, and theres lots of cool stuff you could potentially implement when you can guarantee that one account = one person.
Plus, there are some really simple side channel exploits that your whitelisted app have vulns that you can grab a full-access handle to your anticheat protected game, rendering those kernel level protection useless, despite it also means external cheat and not full blown internal cheat, since interal cheat carrys way more risk, but also way more rewardings, such as fine-level game modification, or even that some 0days are found on the game network stack so maybe there is a buffer overflow or double-free, making sending malicious payload to other players and doing RCEs possible. (It is still possible to do internal cheat injection from external cheat, using techniques such as manual mapping/reflective DLL injecction, that effectively replicates PE loading mechanism, and then you hijack some execution routine at some point to call your injected-allocated code, either through creating a new thread, hijacking existing thread context, APC callback hijack or even exception vector register hijacking, and in general, hijack any kinds of control flow, but anticheat software actively look for those "illegal" stuff in memory and triggers red flag and bans you immediately)
From what I've seen over the years, the biggest problem for anticheat in Linux is that there is too much liberty and freedom, but the anticheat/antivirus is an antithesis to liberty and freedom. This is because anticheat wants to use strong protection mechanism borrowed from antivirus technique to provide a fair gaming experience, at the cost of lowering framerates and increasing processing power, and sometimes BSOD.
And I know it is very cliche at this point, but I always love to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". I therefore only keep Windows to play games lately, and switched to a new laptop, installed CachyOS on it, and transfered all my development stuff over to the laptop. You can basically say I have my main PC at home as a more "free" xbox.
Speaking of xbox, they have even more strict control over the games, that one of the anticheat technique, HVCI (hypervisor-protected code integrity) or VBS, is straight out of the tech from xbox, that it uses Hyper-V to isolate game process and main OS, making xbox impossible to jailbreak. In Windows it prevents some degree of DMA attack by leveragng IOMMU and encrypting the memory content beforehand to makd sure it is not visible to external devices over the PCIe bus.
That said, in other words, it is ultimately all about the tradeoff between freedom and control.
A similar concept, trusted computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's what I think will happen.
> they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits.
part is wrong. From my observation, they are protecting their business through protecting their customers' benefits.
Plus, they're building a moat collectively and from an open source stack. So, given the stack gets enough momentum, having Valve or not as a company won't matter anymore.
It's trying to get the elephant out of the bag, and once it's out, then there's really no way to put it back, because it's being out is better for everybody. Game companies and gamers alike.
Yeah that's what I mean too, that's why I put the "accidentally" in a double-quote.
This sounds like what Red Hat is doing, they created an open-source software, prove the importance of it in the community then sells the support package to enterprise who interested in using it.
Hope that they will not close the door when Microsoft, AWS or Oracle making their own GabeCube and call it SatyaCube, BozosCube or LarryCube
AWS has tried to get into the gaming market and only succeeded in creating giant money sinks even if some of their products were technically appealing.
Oracle making anything consumer-facing, much less something that isn't a total nightmare, seems inconceivable.
Valve is able to completely outmatch competitors in a chosen field because of what they are like as a company. No shareholders that expect quarterly growth. No massive bureaucratic corporate structure, just highly skilled engineers for the most part.
More broadly, AAA gaming as a whole is also moving away from hardware exclusivity. Third-party developers (like Square-Enix) have been making recent releases for all major platforms, and even some first-party console titles are now coming to PC (eg, the Horizon games from Sony).
I'm optimistic about the future of non-locked-down gaming.
Public companies as an asset class have to compete with an open market of other investments, so the incentives drive a min-maxing approach to revenue and value. The shareholder mandate dictates the company pursue maximal return in order to stay competitive amongst a sea of other potential investments.
A private company doesn't have this same concern. They still need to pursue profit, but not necessarily MAXIMUM profit. This means that in a sea of hypothetical directions, they are free to choose one that is slightly less profitable but has an abundance of positive externalities, vs. one that is maximally profitable but carries many negative externalities.
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
> This is seen by commentators, external to be a reference to the inclusion of a Windows Store in the Microsoft operating system.
Having an open platform is good for consumers, but Valve is primarily looking out for themselves here. Gabe realized that windows could take Apple's IOS route (i.e. https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...) and lock down their OS, and everything he's done since has been an effort to protect his company against that existential threat.
GabeN was the lead developer on Windows 1, Windows 2, and Windows 3. When Windows 95 launched, he was a bit upset that no one was making games for Windows. He did a rough port of Doom to prove the viability. Around the same time Alex St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom were building DirectX, GabeN saw the potential, left to create Valve, and proceeded to try and making Windows gaming a great thing.
I can only imagine that he was heartbroken to see Windows go the way it did with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11.
This is in contrast with EA's Origin, Microsoft's Xbox PC and Ubisoft's Connect, which everyone hates.
And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capitalism is bullshit and that makes Valve stand out.
Yes to a large extent they got those monopolies by building truly outstanding products in good faith and by being pioneers in quite a few areas. And certainly they are an exemplary case of investing that wealth into legitimately innovative and widely appreciated long-term endeavors.
My point is that Valve is not all that special for being nice, many organizations do crave to be like that but they don’t have the luxury to have hit that jackpot. For people with mountains of money, they are among the best, but it’s not exactly a high standard, and they are remarkably inefficient in leveraging that advantage.
They’ve long lost the organizational know-how to make good games, and they have delivered remarkably few public facing successes in the last decade: mainly Valve Index and Steam Deck, both still relatively niche and wide apart, both primarily attempts at expanding Steam’s dominance to fairly uncharted markets, with mixed success. The first iteration of Steam Machines was dead on arrival, as was their long-anticipated game Artifact. CS 2 was not a significant enough upgrade to Go to really count. Half-Life Alyx was popularish I suppose. Anything else of note?
They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).
They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.
I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.
I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.
Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.
Stop deifying companies.
i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some basis. but then again, what an organization is internally and how the organization behave as a whole can be different.
Until MS (or worse, Oracle) shows up with their half-baked clone (like Xbox Machine or Larry Cube) and ruins everyone's party
Environmentalists also only do what they perceive as doing good (and may as well be objectively good) because not doing so won't jive with their self-image. But that in itself doesn't devalue the thing they did.
If Valve shows anything it is that not being a pushover and trying to align your business interest with your values (and not vice-versa!) can also pay of economically.
Apple's real goal isn't even the 30% from the Mac App Store. Their vision is to build a library of games that run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and potentially Apple TV and Vision. You can connect a controller to all these devices, so any game would work (without clunky touch controls). That's why they're pushing Metal and will never adopt Vulkan. They want to make their ecosystem as strong as possible against competing ecosystems.
It's also why they've been pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst, why they don't care for web apps, why the Mac and iPad have gotten closer (they want each device just be a form factor that lets you access the same apps and files, though I expect they'll always keep the Mac as open as it is now), and why they made all their platforms adopt one design language. They probably ported Preview to iOS/iPad, and Home and Clock to the Mac, because they went through the Springboard/LaunchPad and asked themselves: "which of these apps could we bring to every OS?".
It's also why Google is dropping ChromeOS and switching everything to Android. One platform, one app ecosystem. They did it only to keep up with Apple. The tablet/desktop-ish side of their ecosystem lags far behind.
And it's why Valve is going all-in on Linux. Kickstarting an alternative ecosystem.
Maybe not 'tons', but they've got a solid reason to consider some investment: additional sales from millions of Mac users able to access a huge library of games they were previously denied.
I think the pentium compatibility stuff in the powermac was also supposed to attract gamers, but I recall not being able to progress past the installer for Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, which would have been the game that made me change my mind. Ran the installer tho, which was something.
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
It does suck if you just want to play games on hardware you own that can handle said games.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched? IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at Apple.
They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point
A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.
Current MS' approach is to not do exclusives and sell all their games on every platform available except Apple's
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.
This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.
Apples decisions are often wrong when it comes to third party software.
The real barrier is DX games.
There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.
Steam frame is more for streaming PCVR than running existing PCVR games natively.
For sure, you can squeeze a few percentage points more out if you optimize for TBDR, and there are some edge cases where it's possible to make TBDR architectures behave pathologically, but it's not that big a deal in the real world.
I also disagree that the Steam Frame is for streaming primarily. If it was, why put such a powerful SoC in it or using it as the prototype device for doing x86 emulation with Fex?
The Adreno 750 is a 3 TFlops GPU that _should be_ substantially faster than a PS4 or a Steam Deck. It'll play plenty of low-end PCVR games pretty well on its own, if Fex's x86 emulation is performant, which it is.
Like the Meta Quest 2, it's a crossover device that a lot of people will just use standalone.
Apple is a terrible choice by that metric.
Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.
I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
This is speculation but I suspect there's something in that contract that prevents Valve from competing with Crossover on MacOS.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817...
Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome, especially because it really is. Running x86 games or compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would only have to buy an iPad.
And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I would worry that removing the iPad limitations would increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news to me.
Running x86 code on ARM macOS is the most solved part of the stack, if anything needs work it's the API translation layers.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/10/apple-to-phase-out-rose...
You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.
Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.
But you can always install Linux on your Macbook.
Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.
EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment
As a Windows user you don't even need to know that it's an ARM computer. Just use it like you'd use any other Windows computer.
Don't just say stuff, man. This is not Twitter. Try to at least figure out whether you're vaguely directionally correct before writing snarky comments.
That being said, the mindshare well of "Windows on ARM" was poisoned by Windows RT, then later the objectively terrible performance of Windows 10 on ARM at launch.
Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable" devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first" headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even said not to expect a great experience playing Half-Life: Alyx locally (a nearly 7 year old title).
It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging their bets.
I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The next Steam Deck might already switch to ARM looking at what they announced last week.
x86 is on the way out. Not in two years, perhaps not in ten years. But there will come a time where the economics no longer make sense and no one can afford to develop competitive chips for the server+gamers market alone. Then x86 is truly dead.
We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores.
Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the Steam Deck conversation is the fact that AMD graphics performance is well ahead of Qualcomm, and that is extremely important for a gaming device. I'm willing to bet that the next Steam Deck goes with another custom AMD chip, but the generation after that is more of a question mark.
RISC-V is another wildcard that could end up threatening ARM's path to total dominance.
It's a distinction without a difference. x86 is not currently competitive in anything smaller than a laptop. Even in a laptop, the only reason it hasn't eaten the market is Microsoft is uninterested and Apple doesn't tell the Joker where it gets its wonderful toys.
Market forces are at play here, exactly like they were in the 90s with Intel's massive gains. ARM is making money hand over fist while x86 is getting squeezed. There will come a time where it won't make economic sense to invest in x86, technical merits be damned.
Do you have the profit margin data to back that statement up? Everything I've seen suggests that ARM is the lower-margin, less-profitable hardware averaged across all chips produced. Moreso when you count licensing costs against the profits.
This is only one of many factors, but I know that high performance instruction decoding doesn't scale nearly as well on x86-64 due to the variable width instructions as it does on ARM. Any reasonable performance OoO core needs to read multilpe instructions ahead in order for the other OoO tricks to work. x86-64 is typically limited to about 5 instructions, and the complexity and power required to do that does not scale linearly since x86-64 instructions can be anywhere from 1 byte to 15 bytes making it very hard to guess where to start reading the second instruction before the first has been decoded. Arm cores have at most 2 widths to deal with and with ARV v8 I think there is only one leading to cores like M1 firestorm that can read 8 instructions ahead in a single cycle. Intel's E cores are able to read 3 instructions at two different addresses (6 total, just not sequential) that can help the core look at predicted branches but doesn't help as much in fast optimized code with fewer branches.
so at the low end of performance where mobile gaming sits you really need an OoO core in order to be able to keep up, but ARM really has a big leg up for that use-case because of the instruction encoding.
Intel Lion-cove decodes 8 instructions per cycle and can retire 12. Intel Skymont's triple decoder can even do 9 instructions per cycle and that's without a cache.
AMD's Zen 5 on the other hand has a 6K cache for instruction decoding allowing for 8 instructions per cycle, but still only a 4-wide decoder for each hyper-thread.
And yet AMD is still ahead of intel in both performance and performance-per-watt. So maybe this whole instruction decode thing is not as important as people are saying.
It doesn't matter if there's an inherent, fundamental flaw in the ISA, if Intel can't, for whatever reason(s), develop an x86 chip that actually beats ARM on performance per watt in a broadly-applicable way.
Well, compiling ARM game binaries is actually super duper easy and just totally fine. The issue Windows actually has with ARM is GPU drivers for the ARM SoCs. Qualcomm graphics drivers are just super slow and unreliable and bad. ARM CPU w AMD GPU is easy mode.
And you're seeing 20+ hours battery under normal workloads (i.e. not spec sheet "20 hours" but day-to-day). I've been mainlining a Windows ARM laptop for six months, and am yet to run into anything I couldn't do.
Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:
* Lenovo Legion Go S
* Asus ROG Ally
But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-handheld-gaming-devices
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you literally can just use the system however you want as a desktop OS as a bonus...
Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.
[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-...
[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/qualcomms-snapdragon-x2-elite
For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-raspberry-pi5/ (random link).
Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller, buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.
Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over? There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
Currently, AMD Strix Halo based handhelds are the most powerful portable gaming devices out there, with the top three being the GPD Win 5, the OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex, and the AYANEO Next 2. Of these three, the GPD Win 5 has already started shipping. Problem is they're stupid expensive.
Personally, I will wait until I can run FSR4 natively on these portables, because FSR makes a pretty significant QoL improvement on these handhelds.
[1]: I don't think there's a way to link to it directly, but `PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1` (or a specific different version if you'd like) is documented in the README in this table: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom#modifica...
the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact" would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. And there's no way the ISA makes 20% difference.
But today I'd say "marginal impact" is less than 5% which is way more debatable.
Where are the power inefficient x86 chips? If you normalize for production process and put the chips under synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for wide SIMD/vector workloads, but more efficient at idle.
AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash cows aren't in manufacturing mobile chipsets, and neither of them have sweetheart deals on ARM IP with Softbank like Apple does. For the markets they address, it's not unlikely that ARM would be both unprofitable and more power-hungry.
Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.
Branch prediction is where the magic happens today.
Yet, on a CISC ISA, you still have to support everything else, which is essentially cruft.
"Battery life during our test period seemed to be pretty good and perhaps slightly better than many dual-core Android phone’s we’ve tested."
They weren't (except some games maybe). Most apps were written in Java and JITed.
Here's some more details: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/02/arm_test_results_atta...
(note it's a 2-part, the "next page" link is small print )
Yes, it cost Intel their smartphone contracts, but those weren't high-margin sales in the first place. Conversely, ARM's capricious licensing meant that we wouldn't see truly high-performance ARM cores until M1 and Neoverse hit the market.
Maybe, but the fact remains that they spent years trying to make an Atom that could fit the performance/watt that smartphone makers needed to be competitive, and they couldn't do it, which pretty strongly suggests it's fundamentally difficult. Even if they now try to sour-grapes that they just weren't really trying, I don't believe them.
ARM is typically [...] more efficient at idle.
I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for the options here to expand and improve. I want to say much as Proton has accelerated things, but man, I am pretty lost now tracking which projects Proton encompasses and the history of where Valve backed/helped these efforts.
I still really want to believe it's collaborative. That good work is going to flow upstream, to collaborated Valve + crowd spaces.
There is no real business case.
why not? If it's cheaper and compatible, why not?
Businesses will happily throw a few million to make tech support another businesses' problem. Cheaper than maintaining a team in-house.
Besides businesses have an all in one contract with Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL Server, Office, a certain number of seats for MSDN for their developers, Azure DevOps (separate from Azure - it’s the modern equivalent of Team Foundation Server), and the list goes on. They don’t care about saving a couple of dollars on Windows license.
Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay for it?
I guess improving compatibility with general-purpose Windows apps might help them sell a few more Steam Machines, but it's hard to think that it's really going to move the needle.
Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the store. SteamOS is presumably free to install on your own hardware once it has a general release.
Right, so my question is how does better compatibility with (non-game) Windows apps help them make more money?
Valve wants independence from Microsoft Windows, a better Linux desktop is part of that.
I’m sure there are lots of businesses that dislike Microsoft and the freemium model they’re using.
They definitely aren’t going to trust the long term viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing operating systems and supporting business for almost half a century.
$20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you support every Windows APi forever. You’re not going to tie your horse to valve
Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ
TL;DR:
* The most skilled workers are the most undervalued
* Make products to serve the customer
* Management is a skill, not a career path
* The only people they consider themselves to be unable to compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient way of producing things.
As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.
You can even omit that part and the result is the same: nothing
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.
This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU support.
ARM is Western
RISC is China / Eastern
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. It's roughly as Western as West realistically gets, short of being made in Hawaii.
> That's a geopolitical question
Sure, but that's not actually about where RISC-V is from. It's that it's a purposely open platform -- so much so that its governing body literally moved to Switzerland.
The reason it's a geopolitical question is more to do with what we did to their supply chains with sanctions on companies like Huawei and ZTE, and what COVID did to everyone's supply chains independently of that. Both of those things made it really evident that some domestic supply chains are critical. (On both sides -- see: the CHIPS Act)
Where RISC-V comes back in is that open source doesn't really have a functioning concept of export restrictions. Which makes it an attractive contingency plan to develop further in the event of sanctions happening again, since these measures can and have extended to chip licenses.
(Edit: I'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with valid concerns about Huawei, raised by various other sources. I'm less familiar with ZTE's history, but my point in either case is more of a practical one.)
That doesn't matter any more than, IDK, the first maid cafes being American. China is where RISC-V is getting adopted, they're the ones who are running with it.
Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading picture in bad faith, please consider this: - https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu - https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... - https://riscv.org/about/ -> "RISC-V International Association in Switzerland"
US policy makers are actively attacking RISC-V and dissuading its use.
China has an increasingly large upper hand in the RISC-V ecosystem and can use that to remove Western surveillance and replace it with their own.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/regarding-proposed-u...
I suspect that many projects—such as BOOM—have stalled as a consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved, including stakeholders in Western countries.
While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5 is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source collaborative effort could, in the long run, significantly change the situation. For example, current versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz (early where at ~9).
Stuff tends to stay open until a new leader emerges. Then the closed source shell appears.
We've seen this with the hyperscalers and in a million other places.
Use open to pressure and weed out incumbents and market leaders. Then you're free to do whatever.
So we'd be replacing NSA spying with MSS spying.
That's why this is geopolitical.
The DoD and Five Eyes prefer ARM, where the US maintains a strong lead.
ARM is a RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_comput...
Which is reducing the complexity of control schemes to either nothing or mortal kombat like combos.
Forward, down, forward, high punch to build a new city in a 4X in a few years?
Hmmm I don't know. I did play Elden Ring & Clair Obscur with a controller but I also played Baldur's Gate 3 on mouse and keyboard. I also play VR games with controllers or hand tracking. Basically I play with whatever the game recommends.
To me it's like saying PC game is dead because mobile phone is so popular. Sure a LOT of players, and thus money, goes into mobile gaming but that doesn't prevent proper AAA and indies games on PC to have interesting mechanics.
PS: if you are into these kind of things checkout exotic controllers in events like Amaze. I remember a collaborative where you had to blow in pipes to push a rocket in the right direction and plenty of weirder stuff. Really cool but totally niche.
I play soulsbornes on consoles with a controller, of course. Because From doesn't know how to do any other control scheme, they have "console DNA".
But how do you play Civilization (<= 5, the good ones) with a controller?
Like "kill 100.000 mobs" ?
With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)
And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.
I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
It was back in the days when we gathered at the kid whose keyboard could actually support so many simultaneous keypresses and did tournaments.
There is not so much support from companies to this project that I know of, but the people behind box64 manage to make it a solid and fast solution to running windows game on arm.
But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.
Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).
I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at the edge anyway.
One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2. Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.
In a recent Linus Tech Tips video, Linus Torvalds (original Linus) was asked, "if you could go back in time and start the Linux project from scratch, what would you do differently?" He had two answers, one was "nothing," and the other was "if I knew how much work this was going to take, I never would have started this project."
It makes me wonder, is there some kind of blissful ignorance required to kick off a project that will take you years to see through? How many times have I self limited myself, stopped myself from starting something, because I put on my lead hat and did some estimations and thought eh, not worth it?
At which point does this pay off the emulation overhead? Fex has a lot of work to do to bridge two ISAs while going through the black box of compiler output of assembly, right?
The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans notwithstanding.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.
Context?
The Windows Store and its apps were so bad that Microsoft eventually scaled back their ambitions, but Valve has not forgotten.
2012: https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-i-think-windows-8-is-a-c...
This could have pushed Steam out of the market if it had succeeded. Valve then spent the next decade building up Linux gaming almost from scratch to reduce their dependance on Microsoft.
The exception I see is if SIMD intrinsics.
They may provide an option for developers to distribute a native ARM build (which some are already building for Quest titles that can be brought over to Steam Frame) but one of Steam's main advantages is their massive x86 games catalog so they certainly don't want to require that
Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in commercial engines.
You need all your 85 3rd party middlewares and dependencies (and transitive dependencies) to support the new architecture. The last 10% of which is going to be especially painful. And your platform native APIs. And your compilers. And you want to keep the codebase still working for the mainstream architecture so you add lots of new configuration combos / alternative code paths everywhere, and multiply your testing burden. And you will get mystery bugs which are hard to attribute to any single change since getting the game to run at all already required a zillion different changes around the codebase. And probably other stuff I didn't think of.
So that's for one game. Now convince everyone who has published a game on Steam to take on such a project, nearly all of whom have ages ago moved on and probably don't have the original programmers on staff anymore. Of course it should also be profitable for the developer and publisher in each case (and more profitable & interesting than whatever else they could be doing with their time).
Same argument can be applied to Linux. Why not just compile the software for Linux. Not that the most companies couldn't do it, it's just not worth the hassle for 1-3% of userbase. Situation with Linux also demonstrates that it's not enough to have just the OS + few dozen games/software for which hardware company sponsored ports, not even support for 10 or 30% of software is enough. You need a support for 50-80% of software for people to consider moving. Single program is enough reason for people to reject the idea of moving to new platform.
Only way to achieve that is when a large company takes the risk and invests in both, build a modern hardware and also builds an emulation layer to avoid the complete lack of software. Emulator makes the platform barely usable as daily driver for some users. With more users it makes sense for developers to port the software resulting in positive feedback loop. But you need to reach a minimum threshold for it to happen.
Compilation for ARM isn't the biggest issue by itself. You also need to get all the vendors of third party libraries you use to port them first. Which in turn might depend on binary blobs from someone else again. Historically backwards compatibility has been a lot more relevant on windows, but that's also a big weakness for migration to new architecture. A lot more third party binary blobs for which the developers of final software don't have the source code maybe somewhere down the dependency tree not at the top. A lot more users using ancient versions of software. Also more likely that there developers sitting on old versions of Visual Studio compared macOS.
If you compare the situation with how Apple silicon migration happened. * Releasing single macBook model with new CPU is much bigger fraction of mac hardware market share compared to releasing single Windows laptop with ARM cpu.
* Apple had already trained both the developers and users to update more frequently. Want to publish in Apple Appstore your software need to be compiled with at least XCode version X, targeting SDK version Y. Plenty of other changes which forced most developers to rebuild their apps and users to update so that their Apps work without requiring workarounds or not stand out (Gatekeeper and code signing, code notarization, various UI style and guideline changes)
* XCode unlike Visual Studio is available for free, there is less friction migrating to new XCode versions.
* More frequent incremental macOS updates compared to major Windows versions.
* At the time of initial launch large fraction of macOS software worked with the help of Rosetta, and significant fraction received native port over the next 1-2 years. It was quickly clear that all future mackBooks will be ARM.
* There are developers making macOS exclusive software for which the selling point is that it's macOS native using native macOS UI frameworks and following macOS conventions. Such developers are a lot more likely to quickly recompile their software for the latest version of macOS and mac computers or make whatever changes necessary to fit in. There is almost no Windows software whose main selling point is that it is Windows native.
* Apple users had little choice. There was maybe 1 generation of new Intel based Apple computers in parallel with ARM based ones. There are no other manufactuers making Apple computers with x86 CPUs.
Just look at all the "native macOS" games from the 2010s that are completely unplayable on modern Macs. Then look at all the Windows games from the 1990s that are still playable today. That's why.
But game devs (at least of a certain type) are notorious for thinking about low-level hardware performance right from the start. As a class I'm pretty sure game devs use godbolt much, much more than your typical developer.
Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
Plus, it looks like upstream FEX doesn't play very nice with Apple Silicon in the first place.
KDE supports Wayland: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
Nvidia has had Wayland support for a while. Here are their latest beta drivers. The first item of the release notes is about Wayland: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/258750/
You're not speaking for the "average user" here, you're speaking for yourself. We have a benchmark for what the average user thinks about Linux, and it's called a Steam Deck. You know what those users never mention? X11, Wayland, Xwayland or any of the stereotypical 2012-era boogeymen you're complaining about.
It's almost as if... you haven't used Linux in years. I won't accuse you outright, but my suspicions are mounting. (posted from an RTX 3070 on Wayland)
Linux desktop is non-existant, compared to Android
I saw the mention of Fex then too, but absolutely nowhere, before now have I seen any information that they'd been working on this for the best part of a decade.
How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't they just avoid doing that?
Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows, then I’m all up for it. It’s a win for everyone.
Otherwise, I can't remember the last time they funded a game they didn't make themselves. Maybe in the very early Steam days, but that's long past.
the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows Phone and the Epic Store
both of which were runaway commercial successes
These days the only context I hear "Playstation exclusive" in comes from people trying to analyze how much money Sony lost developing Concord.
Astro Bot is a personal favorite too. That one would be tricky to get the true experience on in terms of PC platform.
Neither one of them is a system-seller though. I don't think anyone feels FOMO because they missed the Day 1 release of Gran Turismo, or didn't play Astro Bot with 7.1 Surround and HD haptics. Bloodborne was a magnum opus, Persona 5 had people lining up outside Best Buy to reserve a copy. The PS5 exclusive library is down right impoverished by comparison, to say nothing of the PC exclusives it lacks.
All those true "seller" series were always 3rd party and they've all pretty much abandoned console deals mid Gen 8. Bloodborne was truly the lasst of its kind.
The real "system seller" for the ps5 is a bunch of Japanese games that will never really be on Xbox and can't run on switch. So that depends on your taste. Japan's mostly come around on PC though, so it's not truly "exclusive" outside of the shaky optimization.
iOS and Android less so (even if there is a one time charge for Android and a yearly charge on Apple). OTOH I have not heard of them usually reaching out to more than a handful of devs for promotion purposes.
The one time model from Apple/Android really is just a tax that gets you nothing but access in comparison. It's a full advert model where the biggest players throw millions at Apple/Android for visibility.
Valve's somewhere in the middle of the two. No "p2w" adverts but it's not doing too much to draw devs (except reducing the tax for AAA devs). It doesn't need to. A lot of its community models are "we're having a party, you bring the food and drinks".
A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.
Also Valve does fund plenty of games, such as all of the first party games you might have heard of, like Half Life, and its long tail of sequels and spin offs.
[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativead...
I don’t quite understand the logic behind your argument. Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up? That’s ridiculous, utterly consumer-hostile.
>Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
Other platforms could be profitable enough that developers could target and support them on their own volition.
And that's why Linux market share is a tiny drop in the pool. Devs have enough on their plates and being forced to do support for an attitude like this isn't in their budget.
>Are you advocating pro-monopoly?
Quite the contrary, I'd love for Valve to be taken down a notch.
> Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?
If they want to be profitable, yes. If gamers really cared, they had 20, 30 years to put their money where their mouths were. Reality is often disappointing, though.
My future endeavors actually want to have a Linux-first development stack. To make a properly Native linux game, not this sham of compatibility not-emulation layers. But I know that will take some adjustment and me not using the two most popular game engines to help. I'm definitely not doing this because I hope to maximize revenue. I simply am tired of being trapped in the confines of billionaires who have actively made my society worse. But that stand has an opportunity cost, one a business like Valve won't truly make.