I hate DRM, I hate monopolies, I welcome competition, but if one builds a massive empire by just creating a bonafide good platform, single-handedly making open source desktop better, with good customer support and treating users with respect, they deserve the money honestly.
If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1]
Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on. They can give away all the free games they want, but Steam and Valve have done much more than offering games on sale.
(I got a 13 year old account on Steam, more than 500 games bought, almost $10k spent on the platform. No Windows partition for the past 3 years)
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1: I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
Yeah, pretty much all my PC game purchases go to either Steam (for their work on Linux gaming) or GOG (for their DRM free stance). Luckily my financial position is such that it really doesn't matter what sale is on Epic or Uplay or Origin to change that.
I won't say that epic didn't delivered for the gamers. UE5 is honestly a technology marvel and bring so much values for players. I don't even talk about lumen/nanite but all the others tools made for developers to push the limits of what is doable in a game, at runtime.
With UE5.3 we even get more productivity tools, which means we can deliver faster or bigger.
Don't get me wrong, many features are experimental since 4.26 but getting them production ready is the game changer.
I like Steam too but at the end of the day I'll buy games wherever they are cheapest. I don't care about multiple platforms like apparently some people do, GOG Galaxy solves that problem cleanly by making all my games from every platform show up in one interface. I also don't use features like achievements so I don't really care beyond just being able to play the game.
>Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on.
I mean, with these criteria is Epic really that far behind? They made desktop a better experience for devs, have decent enough customer support, and they don't exactly shit talk their users like other parts of the industry. The only arguable part is good platform, but it depends on what you need out of the platform. Does a platform have to offer a way to play windows games on linux to be "good"?
>I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
hard to find platforms like that, but there are certainly creators that stayed small and humble despite growing huge in influence and pull.
When they buy out any game exclusivity (so the games are only sold on Epic store on pc), they would make the game drop linux support even when the games previously can run on linux natively (e.g. rocket league, payday 2, etc). That's a huge negative in my book, enough to make me never consider using Epic store.
I was starting to diversify my store fronts before Valve came out with the Deck.
But the release of it and the message it sent (that they take this seriously), made me reverse course and now I always buy my games on Steam, even if it costs 10 euro more.
FWIW many game developers would genuinely rather you pirate the game than buy keys on the ‘grey market’ sites. If you’re not going to pay anyone who deserves it, you might as well just not pay anyone..
It's not the shady sites that resell free or international keys, etc. I specifically didn't link to those (they're easy to find, but of questionable ethicality and usability).
FWIW if the dev offers a Steam key on their own site, I'd just buy it that way. But otherwise if it's Steam or one of those authorized resellers, there's no reason to prefer Steam itself. GMG, Humble, Fanatical, etc. have great deals that let me try games I otherwise wouldn't bother with. If they turn out good, usually there's in app purchases and cosmetics I'm happy to support. IMHO this is a good form of price differentiation, letting the base game be widely available for people to buy but selling supporter packs and cosmetics for people who really like it.
>I just hate that so many games I want are exclusive to Epic.
I miss the days when PC games weren't tied to some online webstore but came on a CD and the only DRM was a CD-key, no always online, no proprietary web store, just physical media that you could share with your friends.
Sure, Steam and GoG are probably the best kind of on-line webstore so far, bur I still love my collection of .ISO games that I can mount and play whenever I want without depending on any invasive DRM, accounts or internet connection.
Valve have funded some good work on the underlying compatibility code, but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they themselves created. Lots of games expect to be able to call back to the Steam client for a license check, and this used to require running the Windows version of Steam which didn't work well (huge compatibility issues and it really didn't like being run at the same time as the Linux version). One of the big things enabling easy Linux gaming was a Valve-approved way to run Windows games under a compatibility layer and have them still connect to the same Linux client used to run native games.
> but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they themselves created.
I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say it’s a problem they created - they were just a victim of their own success. They can’t force developers to write games in a particular platform, and making games work under Linux is no small task.
It was probably easier to stream games from a Windows machine, which was their first approach with Steam Link and Steam Machines. It kinda sorta worked, and what they saw was enough encouragement to go and build the Steam Deck. On top of that, CPUs/GPUs just weren’t good enough 10 years ago to do what Valve wanted to do.
So I think it’s a little unfair to say they “created” this problem.
Valve may have contributed to the issue initially, but can you blame them? There wasn't exactly an abundance of Linux Support before Valve came along either. Why would they support a Linux Steam client and the whole compatibility layer when the demand just didn't exist.
Valve becoming big enough to break into the hardware market (first Steam Machines and then the Steam Deck) was the first time they had any incentive to care about the OS layer. They could've made some deal w/ Microsoft but instead went the open-source route to the benefit of everyone. Kudos to Valve.
Sure I can. They decided ultimately to make an indirect dependence on Windows instead of encouraging devs to make good native linux ports. They more or less made the deal with Windows without having to get their hands dirty.
Are you saying, that it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows with Proton?
I already have Steam Deck, and love it. But if I want to play games in better resolution, I might boot my Windows Laptop. Have not tried Linux with Proton.
On Linux laptop I have a NVIDIA some kind of 3xxx series card.
> it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows
Not a laptop, but I am livestreaming games from a Linux desktop. In the roughly two years since I've started doing this on a regular basis, I have played 23 games on stream using Steam Proton. My experience matches what Steam Deck owners told me about compatibility. It's not been completely glitchless, but all the problems I ran into were minor graphics glitches. When I buy games, I check protondb.com in advance, and it's always either Platinum or Gold for me these days.
I will note though that all the games I played were either single-player or cooperative multi-player. With competitive multi-player, there is an entire can of worms because of anti-cheat software. Valve's own anti-cheat should be fine, but if the game developer is using a different anti-cheat, it usually relies on Windows kernel drivers or some other shenanigans that conflicts with Wine in a major way.
For me it is. Partly though that's because I boot windows so rarely that when I do I have to sit through a whole bunch of updates.
I prefer linux to windows generally so the ability to game without re-booting is a bonus on top of that. If I preferred being in windows I wouldn't run linux just for gaming.
I would disagree, as someone who have a Steam Deck and has a desktop connected to the TV for couch gaming it is amazing.
However most distros still install Grub, and (although not their fault) have a crusty UEFI boot sequence making that startup sequence worse than it needs to be.
Steam also haven't officially released SteamOS 3, so unless you are going to do a bit of modification, it won't quite be as slick.
On the other hand, even with all that it is vastly better than the Windows experience.
I found that Elden Ring ran better on Proton on Linux than on native Windows on the same device. Loaded faster and ran more smoothly. I do not know why.
There was a while around release for Elden Ring where Valve was able to rapidly deploy fixes that resulted in the Steam Deck running without stuttering issues that were effecting powerful Windows builds. https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-ring-b...
I'd hope that those issues eventually got resolved on Windows too...
In the case of Elden Ring, not really, it was due to DXVK (whose developer is sponsored by Valve) having custom patches to workaround the weird DirectX streaming logic of the game that caused constant frame hiccups.
So, on day 3 or something of release, Linux was the best platform to play the newest AAA game.
The year of Linux gaming has been here for a while.
It usually has to do with a translation layer, converting DirectX to Vulkan (there are a few different ones, depending on the version of DirectX).
And yes, gaming on Linux has been infinitely smoother and gets leaps of improvements every year. We're at a point where unreleased games already play on Linux, and typically with better performance than naively on Windows.
Controllers, audio, etc, all play out of the box, perfectly, since years now
I switched to Ubuntu for my gaming PC over a year ago and from my Steam library of hundreds of games so far I only found maybe 1 or 2 that did not work on Linux, but worked on Windows. All the others work flawlessly*
* there is one caveat to that though - if you have a VR headset, then there are many people reporting performance issues on Linux with those headsets. And personally I also find VR performance subpar on Linux (although it still improved in the last year).
Gaming on a Linux laptop with AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU was pretty good for the 2 months I did it. Not great but definitely good. Biggest problem was with a AAA game on launch day. It actually worked decently, but had a crashing bug that was quickly fixed, and the performance was never as good as what it was once I switched back to Windows and ran that game. Another game had an issue with connecting to multiplayer games that I never resolved, but otherwise worked as well as Windows (for single player.) Everything else I played seemed basically the same as my experience in Windows.
The games I play like CSGO work very well*, you have a steamdeck so you know how game support especially with anti cheat is.
However, I've had many bugs.
Nvidia on linux is painful. Just linux things - I get a bar at the top of the game when starting sometimes and have to change my resolution back and forth to fix it, I've had to restart pipewire to get my audio to reappear, I've had to replace pulse with pipewire (mid game).
Linux is not smooth, ESPECIALLY with nvidia. If the games you play are well supported, use AMD graphics, and doesn't tinker with their system at all, on a very stable OS - maybe you could call it stable?
Also if you want smooth - for the love of god don't use a rolling distro. If you check the arch wiki you'll see various nvidia/steam/wine/proton issues occur every few weeks. Many completely break playing games for several days unless you downgrade packages.
tl;dr - I would not recommend linux as a desktop to anyone who doesn't mind having their nose in their terminal desperately trying to figure out why you have no audio while your friends grow tired waiting for you.
The steamdeck specifically is very well managed by valve and I'm incredibly impressed that they made it work so well.
I've had a better experience since I switched from arch to ubuntu. For example steam remote play works w/ my Apple TV upstairs. Under arch I couldn't ever get it to work.
I've had mixed experience with AMD vs Nvidia. I bought a 5700xt which was way less reliable than my old nvidia 980ti, which never once crashed under linux. I upgraded to a 6700xt last year and that's been smooth. I'd originally bought the AMD card hoping to run Wayland but am still on X11.
Let's assign blame to Nvidia, though. It's their drivers that are crap, it's their decision to keep their hardware so heavily NDA'd that others can't write good drivers for it.
I'm not going to excuse Nvidia - their driver is buggy and they're still missing DLSS3. Many of the problems I had were nvidia specific, especially anything touching wayland.
However my audio issues, or a bug where if you click the selection of applications when you alt+tab would lock gnome up and you'd have to kill the application from the terminal - those were not nvidia specific AFAIK.
I've also heard of non-smooth experiences from AMD hardware.
I don't think it's fair to recommend linux to anyone who would be scared off by the terminal.
I'm not at all saying it can't be relatively smooth sailing though, especially without a rolling os.
For me it is supported better on Linux than on Windows because my GPU (RX 5700 XT) does not actually have HW raytracing but Mesa has a software fallback for it :-P. If nothing else i was able to see what the fuss was all about[0][1][2].
Though, well, performance was a tiny bit lacking as you can see (i actually had to modify the Quake RTX code to let me use lower resolution scale than the official binary allowed :-P).
Varies from game to game. I know it works in Cyberpunk 2077 but you need to include some special launch parameters. Portal RTX just worked. RTX in Control doesn't work even with config changes.
I haven't booted into Windows since 2009, thanks to Wine. Proton certainly expands its compatibility and support though, and I'll support any company that supports Linux, and Valve is one of the best ones.
I love Steam, Valve and Proton, and what they've done for Linux gaming, but nothing will make me compromise on DRM. To me, ending DRM is just as important as supporting free operating systems, so unfortunately no amount of good will gives Valve a free pass in my eyes.
So I've started buying games from DRM-free platforms like GoG and adding them to Steam as non-Steam games. Same compatibility and no need to use an external tool to maintain Wine/Proton prefixes. With the boatloads of money Valve makes from Steam, they probably won't miss me too much.
If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1]
Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on. They can give away all the free games they want, but Steam and Valve have done much more than offering games on sale.
(I got a 13 year old account on Steam, more than 500 games bought, almost $10k spent on the platform. No Windows partition for the past 3 years)
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1: I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.