This is why I have respect for Valve. They’re willing to invest into changing the status quo instead of seeing it as not profitable immediately. They’re playing the long game, and they’ve put their version of Linux into millions of hands. They’ve built hardware for it, they’ve invested a ton into Wine/Proton, they’ve invested in open-source graphics drivers. They’re actively fixing up third party games to the point some of them run better on a their handheld than decent Windows PCs. And a good chunk of it is open-source and given away for free to everyone to use.
Meanwhile Sweeney is just there whining that Linux is too hard. They can’t even be bothered to try.
I would give money to Valve just so they keep going. I have no desire to buy an Epic game they’re not even willing to try to at least make it easier to run in Wine.
Meanwhile Sweeney is being litigious instead of inventive.
Not that the lawsuits don’t have merit, just very interesting to see the vast difference in focus between the two companies.
I am all for valve in terms of games, even though I don’t like the buying but not owning things stuff I would always prefer Steam over anything else. They earned my trust, something no other non-human entity will ever get. This company just has it figured out.
Valve is one of the few companies left that are not just a pure investor-pleaser and actually do some meaningful progress rather than changing the colors of their button every so often.
It’s what can be done only with a private company and some decent people in charge. Once you go public your company loses its soul.
Meanwhile Sweeney is just there whining that Linux is too hard.
I’m with you on Valve trying to be more open (in a semi-walled-garden with Steam on Steamdeck, circumventable with some effort). But gaming on Linux - practically nobody is actually writing games natively for Linux. They’re writing for Windows (or a console) and the community is making the run under Proton/Wine on Linux. Is Epic intentionally preventing them from running on Proton? Well, effectively, yes - but that’s not a Linux-to-hard problem, more of a “we don’t want to have to police cheating on another OS” problem.
Do you mind elaborating on why you think the Steam Deck is a semi-walled garden?
Sure. By default you get the Steam store. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s the only option to load games from the default Gaming interface. There is no option to load from Gog, Epic, Uplay, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, or any other 3rd party store. If you are not willing (or able) to manage the deck in desktop mode, you can’t install non-Steam games so - as a console - it’s a walled garden. I say semi- because it’s not terribly difficult to switch to desktop mode and install other applications, launchers, and games - but if you’ve never used Linux and are not computer savvy, Steam is the only way to get games onto the device.
Thanks for answering and explaining.
I feel like you’ve just described a garden. There are no walls. You can just walk out of the carefully curated garden and nobody will stop you. Heck, you can even bring things from outside of the garden back with you. Yes, things aren’t as pretty outside the garden, and yes, it may be a bit intimidating if you’re not familiar with the wild lands of Linux, but that’s just the nature of modern computing (regardless of what OS you’re using).
By default you start in Steam Big Picture mode, but you can, without doing anything unusual, likely without even needing to read a manual or follow a guide, easily get to Desktop Mode. From there, you can easily install anything that’s available for Linux. You can even install an entirely different OS. At no point does Valve do anything to stop you - if they did, that would be the “wall” in question. And they make it pretty easy to add anything available in desktop mode to Steam, which means you don’t even have to leave the “garden” to play those games.
You can also, once in desktop mode, easily install Heroic or Lutris (which enable installing games from other third party stores, like GOG and Epic), EmuDeck, or Chiaki via the Discover Store. (You can even install RetroArch directly via Steam.) AFAIK, the repo Discover uses isn’t maintained by Valve, so everything available there is “outside the garden,” as it were.
If you’re not computer savvy and aren’t familiar with all this, there are tons of resources out there that can help. But even if there weren’t, I struggle to understand how the Steam Deck would be different from any other computer, with the exception being that it provides a console like experience with Valve’s storefront emphasized - and every modern OS I can think of has an app store or GUI package manager, so… that’s not really all that different.
So I guess my follow-up question is: how could Valve change the Steam Deck to make it not a “semi-walled garden” (optimally without making the experience worse for the people still in the garden)? I can’t really think of anything other than somehow enabling anyone (e.g., GOG or Epic) to add their store as a Steam app and then letting those stores add games to your Steam library - and unfortunately that would be problematic for a number of reasons (both legal and practical).
Valve doesn’t want to support Apple computers for their own games. No, Valve is not better, the two companies CEOs are just jerks.
They tried. Then apple dropped 32bit binaries support.
Apple is a very expensive partner to have. They do whatever they want with their ecosystem and many developers have been burned when apple decides to make their work obsolete or outright copies it and makes part of the bundled in apps.
So. It would be amazing if valve updated every one of their games for new versions of macOS and if they would kept MacOS proton support. But macOS is a moving target that will break backwards compatibility whenever it suits apple. So I understand that is hard to justify the investment.
In the end MacOs and Linux where less than a 1% of the Steam user base. But one is an open ecosystem where there is competition and some semblance of respect for backwards compatibility and the other is a closed and sometimes hostile environment.
If we only had a few more programmers
Poor, poor Epic, a tiny startup barely making it to the next month with their 3000 employees and $5B annual revenue
Jokes on him. There is a whole infrastructure to make windows games work on linux, except those that are explicitely programmed not to work on that.
Translation, “You do all the heavy lifting and then I’ll jump in to enjoy the results while I complain about it.”
Sweeney does not want to contribute in any way towards making the steam deck more profitable.
I think he actually wants a monopoly. He wants to be, functionally, the only digital storefront on PC. And doing anything that could help Valve, even in another market, would detrimental to that goal.
I’d rather not play games at all if Epic ever gets a monopoly. Though I would of course keep playing games, just without paying for them. Epic won’t see as much as a single cent from me.
Not related to Steam Deck, but this caught my eye:
As soon as we thwarted their effort, they went around to 27 different developers and offered each one a payoff to undermine any effort we had to get their games onto our store exclusively. Activision and Riot and Supercell had direct distribution plans that they were planning on; Google paid them not to pursue those plans. Just direct blatant violations of anti-competition law, it’s crazy a company of Google’s scale would do that.
So Tim is stating that Google making exclusivity deals with applications developers is breaching laws and should be stopped, but Epic having exclusivity deals on their own stores is okay and not anti-competitive. Hypocrite much, eh?