This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn’t even built a linux client after all these years.
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I mean, I’m not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation. That doesn’t mean I (and the overall linux community as a whole) don’t greatly benefit from it. I want to incentivize their actions which benefit me. I love that I have been able to not boot into Windows for close to a decade because of proton, so I buy from them. I hate that GOG for all their drm free policy don’t support linux, and that I have to jump through hoops to get their games working on linux (which is again made easier because of valve’s proton), so I don’t buy from them.
I agree GOG and Valve have different objectives. GOG’s objective is to provide drm free games, where as Valve’s objective is to make linux a viable gaming platform so they can stay independent of Microsoft. My objective aligns with Valve, so they get my money.
I’m not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation.
I’m really not one for optimism but Valve really does seem to do things that are not entirely to their benefit. Compare the stark contrast to publicly-traded greedy companies like Apple, for instance.
When it comes to hardware, Apple goes out of their way and invests their vast resources into ensuring you have to trash your devices prematurely while Valve goes out of their way to make their components modular, attach with screws, and make first-party parts available through third party storefronts.
Apple maintains complete control over every piece of software you can install on your device, and even the operating system itself. Valve builds onto an open source OS, adds a “return to desktop” button, and while they don’t help you install 3rd party stores, they don’t put up any artificial barriers to doing so yourself.
Valve could absolutely do all the scummy shit that Apple does and get away with it because they have a similar amount of influence over their industry, and they would probably make buckets of money doing it, but they choose not to.
You could say similarly scummy things about EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc. etc., but not Valve (not to say that they’ve never done anything ethically questionable).
It really seems like they just don’t want to be scumbags, which is incredibly refreshing in these times.
Valve is a private company and hasn’t been contaminated by modern, investor focused mindsets. Valve is a company that tries to earn a profit by selling a service people want to pay for. This is becoming increasingly rare with more and more companies focused on investor return rather providing goods and services in exchange for their profits.
I’m most anxious about what happens to valve post-gabe. You can bet there are tons and tons of crappy wall street types just drooling to ruin Steam for the rest of us.
You are right now that I think about it. Valve are a throwback to when companies actually had to make the best product to make the most money.
With these public traded companies the incentive is just to make a line on a graph go up by any means necessary, normally to the detriment of the consumer. They are only there to appease their shareholders, and get more investors.
Private companies, on the other hand, can only make the line go up by making products that more people want to buy, and both the consumer and the company benefit.
I hope he hands it over to someone who will continue his legacy
@HughJanus @greenskye I agree that gog is not supportive of games running on Linux unless that game is already a Linux game. Funny enough, said games may even be playable on Linux but gog will just have the windows port of that game on gog (Alien Isolation for example). So, I agree, if you are on Linux and use steam, then it’s clear to use steam like an iPhone user using Apple Music. It just works.this is where I say that steam should be more open so drm games on steam don’t need steam launcher
Yeah I did not and would not say that. I prefer GoG, all other things being equal. I just bought 6 GoG games this morning.
Valve is a company that tries to earn a profit by selling a service people want to pay for.
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,”
I love my Steam Deck and have recently made small steps in my journey away from Windows. I installed Pop OS on a laptop. Do you have any tips that might make that transition easier?
Thanks in advance. 👍
There’s a key point in the article that emphasizes that valve are indeed “being nice”: their policy is " upstream everything".
Yes the motives are still keeping a foot out in case Microsoft decides to screw them over in some way, but they could (as many companies do) keep the improvements all for themselves, buy developers and make a closed source version of any of the tech they have been funding, locking down steamOS to only allow steam games and so on.
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They couldn’t legally create a closed source SteamOS, but they also aren’t required to “upstream everything”.
I’m not a legal expert of any kind, but AFAIU they are only legally required to send you the changes they made to the source code on request (with GPLv3).
Though I disagree that this is Valve being nice, IMO doing this makes sense for most companies working in this space, as their code being accepted upstream means they benefit from anything the community has built up around the project, and they don’t have to play catchup with upstream.
They could have gone BSD and then done whatever they wanted.
Complete nonsense, even publicly traded companies upstream their open source code because it makes business sense. Valve doesn’t do anything to be nice and never has. They’re creating their own market to sell to in case MS locks them out.
I mean, both could be true at the same time.
And I don’t buy games out of the bottom of my heart to give those companies more money. So why should I care about their reasoning, as long as they aren’t inherently unethical? In the end it’s a win / win situation that we can both benefit from. I personally cannot compare Valve & Microsoft here, because Microsoft acts in a way that is ultimately not a win situation for me as a customer anymore. Google started similarly, but then went to shit in how they behaved, hence why I degoogled myself for at least the majority of their services, especially their search engine. If Valve continues to benefit me as a customer, then I as a customer will continue to benefit Valve. That’s our contract, or mutual agreement.
That’s not fallacious at all. I imagine the guy above knows valve aren’t a selfless charity.
There’s a guy in my area that goes around with his pressure washer and cleans grimy road signs, park benches, etc (because the council doesn’t seem to give enough of a shit to do it themselves!)
He does it because the goodwill and publicity he gets from it benefits his business (he cleans everything from walls and houses, to wheelie bins and industrial/farming equipment).
He is not acting out of pure altruism, but does it really matter? His/Valve’s actions are still benefiting people regardless.
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I only made this comment because for some reason GOG seems to be more preferred by linux users than Steam, where as Steam has done a lot more for linux, and it not just works for Steam. GOG is now easily usable on linux mainly thanks to Valve’s proton. I don’t mind if game devs don’t make as many games for linux. There is a huge chicken and egg problem with game development and userbase. Before proton they had all the reason to make games for linux but most didn’t because it didn’t make much financial sense to them. Now they don’t have to worry about it. Plus, linux is much more than gaming. Because there is more people using linux now because of gaming, software other than games would be interested in building for linux, because the userbase is getting there.
Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.
I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it’s become so widely unsupported that I can’t really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there’s a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there’s just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.
Win ≥8 is awful; I’ve helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I’ve ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don’t see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.
So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?
Valve almost makes me believe in capitalism.
Just run the company in a way where you don’t really care about maximizing profit. As long as you’re not at a loss and are liked, you will be successful.
Valve could probably be much more profitable at the expense of being a bigger dick, but Gabe is chill.
Also because valve is private, they don’t have any legal obligations to return maximise profit. They can purposefully lose money if they want and it’s not illegal. (At least to my knowledge)
It would be illegal if they did it to price out the competition, which I don’t think is something they do.
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Thats actually what valve does. Valve mandates all games on platforms must be the same retail price (e.g a game on Steam cannot be sold for 60$ retail, but be sold for 50$ on epic), not including deals and sales.
Its standard with how physical stores demand that digital copies of games must retail at the same price as physical else stores would see that as an attack on the business by the company.
There is essentially some level of price normalization.
it’s not
Ton of public companies lose money…
As long as execs get paid, it is all good.
Yeah, that’s it right there. Not being public means they don’t have to appease shareholders who want maximum growth and returns.
I’m guessing this is a big part of it. A private company can do just about whatever they want as there are not shareholders that you are working for.
Private companies can have shareholders(all nfl teams but the Packers), its just a game of finding shareholders who doesnt care about constant short term profit.
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But they do run it to maximize profit. There’s just allowed to do it creatively instead of obsessing over short term gains.
I mean the company essentially gave up on AAA games for well over a decade because they were making more money from steam, and Gabe famously only approves projects that have a plan to turn a profit or expand Valve’s market.
They didn’t spread into Linux out of sheer principle. It gives them more control and influence over the market to separate themselves from Windows. And they’ve done tons of shady stuff with steam like refusing to give refunds until they were sued by state governments.
I don’t read it so cynically, yes it’s in their best interest and a very smart play, but I don’t read malice into it though. Good business move, but also good for the communities and projects they’re contributing to.
Just run the company in a way where you don’t really care about maximizing profit.
Our system of government makes this illegal for publicly traded companies.
Valve is not publicly traded.
Our system of government makes this illegal for publicly traded companies.
Whose system of government? If you mean the USA, then no, it does not.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/
It helps that they aren’t struggling to keep the lights on.
You can’t really do what you want if youre constantly worried if you can pay bills. Same for people, same for companies.
Valve is far from a typical company. While technically not, they operate pretty much like a worker owned cooperative. Have a look at their employee handbook: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
(and Igalia, the company presenting in OP is really a worker owned cooperative).
holy crap I want to work there. I never had any idea they had such a radical structure (or lack thereof)
Is good, but is not the paradise: https://youtu.be/s9aCwCKgkLo?si=a2OGsoF-vHEbb0MH
Excellent, thanks for the link!
If you remove stock market as a whole, maybe capitalism can work a little in a soc democracy, with stock market is impossible
Stock markets are socially acceptable ponzi schemes
A stock market can still work. The ultra high speed market we have now is a problem. Ultra fast trading encourages fast, short term thinking.
A stock market with an update once per day could work better. It would take all the fast impulse trading out of the market, while still allowing price adaptation. When runs and crashes take weeks to play out, it’s a lot easier for cooler heads and logic to prevail. This, in turn would favour the sort of traders favouring long term stable investments.
The price updates whenever someone buys or sells, so doing that once a day may be a bit difficult to implement. Forbidding day-trading / imposing a minimum holding time on the other hand may be easier.
A queue type setup could likely work fine. Buyers and sellers could list their offers/requirements as a range. A round robin double blind auction matches buyers and sellers. The new price is calculated, based on this, and a new queue is opened.
Forbidding the various high profit rent seeking would be a little like trying to block a sieve. There are so many variants and workarounds, that closing them all would be difficult. It would also be a lot more vulnerable to being watered down, or declawed completely.
If once per day is too coarse, it could even work at once per hour. The key is it leaves time for people to think rather than reacting from gut instinct and high speed computer programs.
Sounds nice, but I guess the first step is to take control away from the likes of Citadel / Kenneth Griffin since they take advantage of all that information and they already get to bid against every order placed in real time.
I think our government should definitely get on that. In the meantime forbidding this kind of play aka taxing the living shit out of day-trading (like the current short-term/long-term gain system but actually painful in the very short term) should be pretty simple to implement.
I definitely agree with the need for short term fixes. Unfortunately, I suspect the core issues are inherent to the current system. Then again that applies to a lot of things at that level, and perfect is the greatest enemy of good.
Valve is the prime example of rent seeking behavior. It’s a private company that collects economic rents on a market thanks to that market being the biggest. They’re a private company and their only goal is to preserve those rents. They do that by fostering goodwill. They’re everything I hate about capitalism, but I don’t hate them for doing it.
They are also a good example of positive middleman behaviour. While they take their cut, the value they provide to both sides is huge.
They are also in a position where they are still easily replaceable. Their dominance is from doing it well, not because they have an absolute lock in.
Part of why this works is because they don’t have to prioritise short term profit over long term. Most companies like this get brought up and pumped dry. Valve seems to be the exception.
I don’t think Steam is rent-seeking because:
- no cost to maintaining an account
- no cost for keys if you sell stuff outside the Steam store
- no cost for downloads
- no cost for improvements to games
Valve’s customers are publishers and devs, and they’re charging a finder’s fee for connecting customers to the games. To me, that’s not rent seeking, that’s a direct exchange of money for a service. If you don’t think the service is valuable or think you can do better, then generate keys and sell them elsewhere and you won’t need to pay Valve a cut.
Valve is capitalism done right imo. You only pay when you receive a service, and only when you profit from the service. Steam also has a fantastic refund policy as well, which is surprisingly rare in the digital goods market.
Unlike every other company in their position they’re not complete assholes to consumers :
- steam deck not locked down at all and reparable
- steam and valve games support Linux very well
- they don’t sign exclusivity deals for games to only be on steam
Most companies in their position would lock their users in, they don’t. That doesn’t mean they can’t be abusive though. 30% of game revenue is huge!
The 30% value exists because thats what console devs charge developers for ages. Valve is essentially just matching that.
I think the epic store is much lower.
Ultimately the 30% is as high as Steam estimates they can charge before they have to fear companies leaving their platform and bypassing steam altogether. Honestly I’m surprised it has not happened yet. 30% is super high, and users are not at all locked down like they are in the console market.
Epics is much lower because theyre trying to entice devs, but they are the anomally in the sea of pricing.
Epics trying to win market by enticing devs instead of working on features for the consumer, thats their market plan. Epic wasnt the only platform to have lower than 30% cut. Discord sold games at 10% cut, itchio is similar. Devs essentially debate of the baked in features of the platform and its audience is worth the 30% cut(the existing community, game review system, steams controller api, steam workshop, steamvr). Even just the client. ESPECIALLY to Linux users, on a consumer POV, ask yourself about ease getting to use the native client. Valve offers steam natively, and does a lot of work making the consumer end (and developer end too) easier on linux. EGS for example doesnt even run natively on linux, and requires a 3rd party launcher to run. People tend to take for granted all the things Valve has done for both the consumer and Developer.
Discord massively failed to get users, and devs saw little market in it. Epic takes advatage of their position using unreal engine, and offers some devs money upfront for exclusivity, something certain audiences on PC absolutely hate.
Users use steam because it simply offers them the best user experience. There are a ton of people who just buys their games directly from valve and not a 3rd party site. To a consumer, money’s not necessarily the problem on their end, and they dont see the 30% hit that developers take. Something good for the developer is not necessarily good for the consumer and vice versa, and many people make that mistake and conflate that to be the same thing when it isnt.
somebody doesn’t understand what rent seeking is.
Valve is not doing rent-seeking…
they have created a service that didn’t exist that’s beneficial to both the consumer and the seller, they don’t do any anti-competitive shit with it as far as I am aware.
in what world is what they do rent-seeking?
are you an edgy 15 year old that just learned a new word and didn’t understand it?
Well, Valve is privately-owned company and it’s investing a lot of money into the free software ecosystem right now. Yes it’s capitalism but very different in principles to the rest of the market.
One of the few companies I’ve purchased digital good from - and they haven’t enshittified themselves yet
If anything ever happens to Gabe such that he can’t run the company, that’s the day I’m immediately downloading and backing up my entire steam library to a hard drive.
Wouldn’t those games be locked up through steams DRM?
Some games from Steam can still be used without Steam’s DRM. It’s a little difficult to pull it off, but it can be done
A lot of games don’t require Steam’s DRM, you quit Steam and launch through the Steam directory and it still works. I haven’t tried it, but I’m pretty sure I can copy that game to a computer with no internet access and no Steam client and it’ll work. I haven’t done that though, I’ve only done it when I forgot my kids were playing on my account on another computer and wanted to play a game.
A lot of games don’t work this way, but a lot do. Try it for yourself.
You’d need something like the Goldberg Steam Emulator, since a lot of games rely on services and APIs that Steam provides
Looks like it’s for MP? I almost never play MP, so maybe that’s why I haven’t run into it.
Thanks for the correction. :)
I believe it holds true for some single player games as well. I seem to remember Half-Life 2 not wanting to launch without Steam present, same for some other Source games. That really might not be the case though, I’m curious to do more testing… Either way, I watch enough Linux gaming on ARM SBCs (check out MicroLinux and LeePSPComputer on YouTube), can I see them using Goldberg from time to time to get games running with no Steam
Even then. If steam actually locks out out of your games, then I bet hacked will quickly put more effort to sidestep the drm and make that more easily accessible.
Drm on Steam is optional. It’s up to the dev whether to include any or not.
However, if the game uses any steam features, like achievements, voice chat, leaderboards, etc., then those won’t work without steam.
Yarr. Want some crack, kid? Harr.
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AFAIK steam has optional drm. If the devs dont use it you can play the games without steam. I think it says on the store page if it’s drm-free
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You can treat it like buying a CD (the first download) and being able to get another CD anytime for free from the store by verifying your identity and the extra DRM being the online check for the authenticity of the CD?
It’s because they’re a privately owned company.
The pressure for enshitification mostly comes from shareholders. Without them, the company can actually think about their long term future and decide exactly when and when not to increase profit.
I tend to avoid proprietary things whenever possible these days, but I found most things by small, privately owned companies are pretty good towards their users.
I would be so proud to be the dude who first said “enshitification” right now.
It’s probably my favorite new word I’ve ever heard in my life and seeing it widely used brings a smile to my face.
I’ve got a cousin who is probably claiming he invented it at this very moment.
It has been used so much recently that there is even a wikitionar entry for it - with a link to its original creation!
Oh hey, it actually was my cousin. Cory is always claiming he coined every cool word or phrase so haha, funny he actually did for a change. He actually claimed he popularized “epic” and “uber” in the 2000s. I mean, I know people pay attention to him but in all honesty he’s always kind of tooted his own horn wherever possible.
I’m sorry. I made all of that up. I guess my actual cousin and I aren’t that different, only he’d never say he made it up. He’d say it was a fact until he takes his last breath haha.
Hope everything is going well for you bud.
Well they did try to sell paid mods and push pay-to-play in the steam marketplace with Artifact, but luckily they ran it back. Steam is super good now but don’t get too comfortable.
I mean, I don’t have a problem with mod authors earning money for what they do instead of having to offer it for free. Especially the mods that bring the base game to a whole new level.
What’s the argument that paid mods shouldn’t be a thing?
It was pretty disastrous. As soon as money was at play tons of people re-uploaded other’s free mods and tried to sell them. They even tried copying their steam profiles to seem legit. There was another can of worms where paid mods would use assets from other games or made by other people. Aside from all the attempted theft, there was also tons of spam and fake/unconfirmed mods lying about what they are or trying to upload the same thing multiple times under different names to appear more in search… Etc…
Moderation didn’t keep up and the whole thing collapsed on itself. Mods shouldn’t be paid IMO, it just encourages terrible things rather than people making content for fun.
Using someone else’s IP for making money is generally a little questionable.
But in the paid mods situation Bethesda was for the mod makers making money from the mod they made. It wasn’t questionable then
The main issues that arose was there was no way to verify if x mod was by y uploader and quite a few mods made use of other mods like SKSE.
entitled children wanted free labor, that’s about it.
I remember the outrage at the time but just because it’s paid doesn’t mean it’s bad.
I don’t game regularly, and Steamdeck is probably not something I’m going to be purchasing anytime soon. However, I was hopeful that Valve’s investment into Linux would be beneficial and to the larger Linux landscape.
I’m hopeful that more companies will look at Valve’s success and start building more on Linux in a way that will benefit the upstream community.
To a certain degree sure, I’m still miffed at what they did for the steamdeck. Having custom drivers and configurations they never open sourced and have not declared any intention to open source. See https://gitlab.com/open-sd/acp5x-ucm-files#notice .
Valve is still a good advocate for open source, the support they’ve given to dxvk alone is worth praise. But they ain’t no angels.
Is what they’re doing causing issues to users of their devices? If not, then no one should care. It’s the same for nvidia, if no one is affected, then whatever. But nvidia does cause measurable harm to the FOSS ecosystem and makes adoption worse, so they deservingly get shit from the FOSS community. But don’t just criticize companies purely for closing their sources.
valve has done a lot of great things for foss but keep in mind they do those things for money like everybody else
Define users of their devices? As a steamdeck owner my experience for installing an alternative os was terrible because theirs specific hardware configurations that valve made for the device and never bothered to upstream it so they were applicable outside of their environment. I’m not criticising valve for closing their resources, I’m criticising them for exploiting open source software to get a usable os up quickly and then not contributing to the same ecosystem that let them do that… not even assuring anyone they would eventually do that. Valve is a for profit company like any other, if you wanna waste time defending their less savory actions than go ahead but don’t pretend they aren’t what they are.
Doesn’t this article explicitly state that they are contributing to drivers and other projects that they use? It just sucks that you overlooked all of what they did and just focused on them not opening up their hardware configurations.
Also, what hardware configurations did they close? I couldn’t find any problems when looking this up. It seems like you can just install another OS while having some hiccups. Which is understandable since most desktop OSes are geared toward a mouse and keyboard control.
I’m not saying they don’t contribute anything, they dont, they fund others contributions which is just ss valuable, I’m saying their not the champions of Foss when the modification theyve made for their own hardware is pretty opaque by their own design. It’s like praising nvidia for opening up their drivers when all they bloody is dis dump code to a public gihtub repo periodically with all actual changes squashed together. As for what they haven’t open sourced:
- The pulse audio configuration that let’s the builtin speaker system actually… you know, work. Someone else kindly looked into and contributed. it https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/pull/233#issuecomment-1372671325
- The sddm changes to support the lockscreen code. This is a valve specific feature they forked and have as of yet refused to upstream.
- The trackpad drivers for the steamdeck/controller touch sensor. You literally have to run steam itself to get this basic hardware functionality working.
I praise valve for their support of Foss projects but that doesn’t equivocate their lack of openness on the steamdeck.
I bet Linus still thinks their code is shit tho
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Always has been
