| >but your plan is garbage. I sure wouldn't getting YC funded with that plan. But it's not a profit motivated plan to begin with. >Gamevevs will milk you for all the money you have to develop for a non-existent market Yup, that's the goal. Even from an altruistic perspective, I'd probably creep up the savings in this alternate universe as Linux market share improved. Or cancel if after some 5 years no one bites. Still, nothing ventured... >Better to create that market with a fixed-cost translation layer so you can offer them something real. I wager if it was between 15% revenue gains for a native port and "make sure if works on proton for a million more users", that the medium-large studios would target the 15% rev gains 7 days out of the week. But maybe reality would disappoint me even here. >They'd have been lucky to sell any of them at all without wine-enabled games. on the contrary, they'd probably be called the new Apple if Valve targeted Windows and passed the licensing cost to users. $500 would still be undercutting a lot of the portable PC market. I'm under no illusion that Linux c. 2020 was some profitable market to take advantage of. I guess that's what makes the Steam Deck this interesting, half-altruistic model to work in. Instead of just making a Windows PC, they took the time and effort to maintain a fork of WINE and integrate it into their store, and then spend years on making tweaks to the point where 3 years later they can claim 75% compatibility. Where an out the gate Windows platform would be 98%+ day one. It's still technically a walled garden, but it's not the most profitable walled garden. Certainly not something any other hardware manufacturer would have done. |