[captainbland]

My guess is that there are a lot of third party developed games which only work on 32-bit compatible systems and Valve either doesn't know exactly which ones are which or simply doesn't want to put the effort into organising them such that users are warned about which specific games have incompatibilities. The other option is just letting the games that would only work on 32-bit compatible systems fail with cryptic error messages and have to field masses of complaints about it while looking extremely unprofessional in the process. In this case it's not that surprising that they would just decide to drop support, especially considering that Ubuntu is a relatively small chunk of the market to begin with.

It's pretty unfortunate. I totally get Canonical's desire to get rid of the seemingly unnecessary bloat and maintenance burden from having to support 32-bit applications but this is the consequence and it's a big blow to gaming on Ubuntu, especially seeing as Steam has only been supported on Ubuntu since 2013.

[sunstone]

Ubuntu makes its money from server and enterprise clients. If Valve needs to support 16/32 bit for its customers then it's up to them to do it. I expect Valve is a much bigger company than Ubuntu, maybe Valve can contract out this work to ... Ubuntu instead of just freeloading.

[ilikehurdles]

Valve has contributed a ton of work to Ubuntu/Linux. They’ve pretty much single handedly turned around Linux gaming to the point where I can safely expect most windows-exclusive games on steam will run smoothly on Ubuntu. Freeloading couldn’t be farther from the truth.

[simion314]

This is not fair or true, Wine developers did a lot of work, the big progress happened recently because Vulkan drivers that allowed a better reimplementation of Directx11, Dx9 worked fine before Proton and Vulkan.

Valve made a big contribution now but is not correct to give them all the credit.

[cheez]

> They’ve pretty much single handedly turned around Linux gaming to the point where I can safely expect most windows-exclusive games on steam will run smoothly on Ubuntu.

Wait... What? When did this happen?

[zwerdlds]

It's called Proton and the repo is here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

[MegaDeKay]

> Freeloading couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Exactly this. For example, from Phoronix just today: "Valve Is Funding Improvements To KDE's KWin & More Work On X.Org"

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Fu...

[zwerdlds]

Not that it really matters, but Wikipedia lists Valve as being ~360 people, while Canonical is 566.

[robocat]

Valve had an estimated $4.3B in revenue; Canonical's revenues were $110M. Copied from ThrowawayR2 comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250149

[ehnto]

That is a lot of revenue for 360 people. Dang.

[cwyers]

It's mostly passive revenue from the 30% cut of games sold on Steam, and revenue from cosmetic items (many of which are user-designed, anyway).