[ZeroConcerns]

Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago, since that could have reduced the stranglehold of Steam on the gaming marketplace.

Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself.

Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform.

Still: are consumers better off today than in the PS2 era? I sort-of doubt it, but, yeah, alternate universes and everything...

[quadruple]

I believe Valve's concerns went(or maybe go?) beyond just the Windows Store, and into "We believe Microsoft may become unable to ship a good Operating System in the future".

In a 2013 interview with Gabe Newell: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20+ percent decline in PC sales — it’s like 'holy cow that’s not what the new generation of the operating system is supposed to do.' There’s supposed to be a 40 percent uptake, not a 20 percent decline, so that’s what really scares me. When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find [Windows 8] unusable." [0]

The Windows Store probably was a part of it, sure, but looking at that quote from 2025, after having your SSD broken, your recovery unusable and your explorer laggy? It's quite bitter-sweet.

[0] https://archive.is/eBP6q#selection-3645.0-3645.729

[nitwit005]

Outside of XBox, Minecraft, and journalists trying it out, I don't think I've heard of anyone using the Microsoft store.

The Wikipedia page has quite the description of the view from within Microsoft:

> Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's gaming division, has also opined that Microsoft Store "sucks". As a result, Office was removed as an installable app from the store, and made to redirect to its website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Store

[simulator5g]

I actually use the Microsoft store before looking elsewhere for software. It’s basically a package manager with a minimal jank. It’s there on a new install and it works. It sucks that they don’t let you add other sources though.

Having an app from an exe installer sucks because you have to update it manually, or, it uses resources while you’re using it to check for updates. With the windows store I can update everything at once and don’t need a million individual update checks on startup.

[conception]

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/wi...

https://chocolatey.org

https://scoop.sh

Just in case you don’t know about these. :)

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Do you need a Microsoft account to use the store?

[skylurk]

Can you use Windows without a Microsoft account?

[arielcostas]

Yes. At least in 11 Pro installs, you can just say you'll be joining to a domain, create a local admin account and never actually join it. Then to create other users you can do it via the command line, or probably through the GUI after telling it you don't want one a couple of times

[jimmydorry]

Yes? I use my Windows 11 with a local account, no microsoft account involved.

[pjmlp]

Because games are on the XBox app store, not Microsoft store.

[ryandvm]

I tried to use Microsoft's Game Pass and the Xbox store on a Windows machine with multiple users.

It was astoundingly unusable for sharing Microsoft's own game within my own household with my own family members. Completely broken user experience.

It's not hard to believe that Steam was able to thrive because Microsoft has just done an amazingly bad job with this. I've been in software dev for 20 years and it still baffles me that companies with tens of thousands of engineers can produce such shitty software experiences.

[doublerabbit]

It's not the engineers at fault here but C-suits. Those who are out of touch or stuck up their arse within their own world. Believing their own delusional vision is it based on that they have a toddler who's four.

[arielcostas]

I'd say engineers are at fault for bugs and performance issues, as well as poor UX (not counting what's made to sell you something or collect your data)

[doublerabbit]

It can be the engineers issue, sure. Hire the wrong crew and you're sunk. However, while I might be bias, what do you do when the higher-execs don't give you time / space to fix the bugs, performance issues? No one writes genius code from day one of a project.

I've had to aggressively pitch to execs who've totally ignored the fact that $app is vulnerable. Would result in fines and if we optimized it could be pushed to milk further money offering X feature. I was denied because it's a waste of time, cost and "didn't provide anything for the company".

After finally persuading them and getting the classic response of "Oh!, why didn't you say so" three weeks later was fired for making the company waste money. This wasn't a small company in an industrial park.

Ever since I've turned down jobs that smell like toxicity. You can sort of see the companies stink when you enter reception.

[ThrowawayB7]

> "Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform."

Valve is the one putting in the effort and paying for it at their own expense. If they ever lose interest in paying for it, like GabeN retiring and Ebenezer Scrooge replacing him, then it's game over for Linux gaming (literally).

[chii]

> paying for it at their own expense

valve would recoup the cost from a bigger customer base, as well as paying it as insurance against windows/microsoft targeting them as an existential threat.

It's cheap for what they're getting. And iirc, it being open source means the foundation could be built upon by others if they do decide to call it quits.

[omnimus]

That would make very little sense business wise. Steam “consoles” are not big break just for linux but also for valve. What could easily happen though is locking down their consoles once they get profitable.

[0_gravitas]

"Sense business wise" seems to vary quite a bit nowadays, at least every other day there's a headline of a company on here doing something almost exclusively for short-term value at the detriment to long-term health.

[overfeed]

> Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago, since that could have reduced the stranglehold of Steam on the gaming marketplace

Microsoft telegraphed its intention to kill Steam. The plan was a hermetically sealed ecosystem where only cryptographically signed code could run on Windows computers, from UEFI boot to application launch. This meant users would only run software Microsoft let them, and there was no room for the Steam store in Microsoft's vision of the future then.

[sand500]

Not just usable, better performant than Windows too.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...

[agoodusername63]

It really depends on your GPU drivers.

If you're using nvidia like 75% of Steam's hardware survey reports, it's a mixed bag and 1% lows are fucking abysmal compared to windows.

But try getting nvidia to care about Linux beyond CUDA. They'd rather just stop selling GPUs to normal people before they do that.

[pxc]

They're in the gradual process of open-sourcing their driver stack by moving the bits they want to keep proprietary into the firmware and hardware, much like AMD did many years ago.

It takes a long time to become mature, but it's a good strategy. NVIDIA GPUs will probably have pretty usable open-source community drivers in 5 years or so.

[tedunangst]

Why do you link that article but not this one?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-s...

[ShowalkKama]

becuase the one he linked is from this year, the one you linked is from 10 years ago

[tedunangst]

Oh, grabbed the wrong link.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/steamos-vs-windows-o...

[ZeroConcerns]

And yet, not much has changed in that decade, right? Well, other than the Steam Deck, which is a well-defined set of hardware for a specific purpose, and which is the main driver for Linux game compatibility...

And that's great! But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?

[robhlt]

The experience on random hardware in 2025 is nowhere close to what is was in 2015. Have you tried it recently? In 2025 I can install pretty much any game from Steam on my Linux desktop with an nvidia gpu and it just works. The experience is identical to Windows.

The 2015 experience was nothing like this, you'd be lucky to get a game running crash-free after lots of manual setup and tweaking. Getting similar performance as Windows was just impossible.

[tracker1]

> But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?

Far from it... the only area you tend to see much issue with a current Linux distro is a few wifi/bt and ethernet chips that don't have good Linux support. Most hardware works just fine. I've installed Pop on a number of laptops and desktops this past year and only had a couple issues (wifi/bt, and ethernet) in those cases it's either installing a proprietary driver or swapping the card with one that works.

Steam has been pretty great this past year as well, especially since Kernel 6.16, it's just been solid AF. I know people with similar experience with Fedora variants.

I think the Steam Deck's success with Proton and what that means for Linux all around is probably responsible for at least half of those who have tried/converted to Linux the past couple years. By some metrics as much as 3-5% in some markets, which small is still a massive number of people. 3-5 Million regular users of Desktop Linux in the US alone. That's massive potential. And with the groundwork for Flatpak and Proton that has been taken, there's definitely some opportunity for early movers in more productivity software groups, not just open-source.

[p1necone]

The difference from 2015 to 2025 is enormous.

Gaming on linux in 2015 was a giant pita and most recent games didn't work properly or didn't work at all through wine.

In 2025 I just buy games on steam blindly because I know they'll work, except for a handful of multiplayer titles that use unsupported kernel level anticheat.

[ShowalkKama]

>And yet, not much has changed in that decade, right?

the performance difference between SteamOS and Windows did

>Well, other than the Steam Deck, which is a well-defined set of hardware for a specific purpose, and which is the main driver for Linux game compatibility... >And that's great! But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?

the 2025 ars technica benchmark was performed on a Legion Go S, not on a steam deck

[hbn]

I'm all for MS bashing and laughing at their incompetence, but was there really any threat there? I don't know anyone on PC who was interested in buying a game anywhere other than Steam in 2015.

[sfRattan]

It was specifically the release of Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) in 2012 that had people nervous that Microsoft wanted to lock Windows down long-term in the manner of iOS and Apple. Windows RT only ran code signed by Microsoft and only installed programs from Microsoft's store. It failed, and Microsoft let off the gas locking down Windows, but that moment was probably the specific impetus for Gabe Newell to set Valve on a decade long course of building support for Steam and the games in its storefront on Linux. Windows being locked down to the degree of iOS was an existential risk to Valve as a company and Steam as a platform in 2012. It isn't anymore.

Windows RT also drew ire from people other than Newell at the time IIRC. It was widely perceived as a trial balloon for closing down Windows almost completely. The first Steam Machines a decade ago were Valve's answering trial balloon. Both failed, but Valve learned and Microsoft largely did not... They haven't locked down Windows 11 to the point of Windows RT, but they're abusing their users to the point of potentially sabotaging their own market dominance for consumer PCs.

[pjc50]

Yes. We could have had Windows on Arm ten years previously, but Microsoft tried to use the platform transition as an opportunity for lock in. Fortunately this meant there were no apps and basically zero take up of WinRT.

[ryathal]

This was also closely related to their initial plans with the Xbox One to essentially kill used games, which they were about a decade to fast on rolling out.

[AlexandrB]

I buy games on GoG when I can, Steam when I have to. I have nothing against Steam, but they do have a near monopoly position on PC. Unfortunately the non-GoG alternatives are from even worse actors.

[0x457]

People feared that MS will make installing things not from the store harder. Like what apple is doing. It posed a serious potential threat. Given that MS had complete control over the Windows, DirectX and many other tools developers were using.

[stackskipton]

Sure, if they pulled Apple and locked everyone into only installing from Microsoft Store, Steam would have been in serious trouble.

[pjmlp]

They still can be, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers, and they can lock everything from their studios into XBox app store or Gamepass, if they feel like it.

[pjmlp]

I never installed Steam, nor I intend to.

[0-_-0]

How many games have you bought in 2015?

[pjmlp]

Enough, on physical computer stores selling those little shiny things called DVDs.

As for how many, that was 10 years ago, I hardly can remember everything I ate last week.

[ee64a4a]

> Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago...

Yeah, I briefly addressed that concern in the article as a comparison to Facebook; probably could've expanded on it, but it was already quite long and didn't feel like it fit naturally into the topic at hand

[ZeroConcerns]

That wasn't meant as a criticism, more like some additional context. With how irrelevant the Microsoft Store is these days, I can't blame anyone for skipping over it...

[ee64a4a]

Ah, okay, gotcha!

[pjmlp]

It is clearly not, as long as it depends on running Windows games, developed on Windows, running on Proton.

It is like arguing Windows is a quite-usable UNIX platform thanks to WSL 2.0.

The right way to push for Linux gaming is how Loki Entertainment was doing it.

[hnuser123456]

I'm impressed they even managed to create a game subscription that works on both PC and Xbox. It felt too much like Xbox was made by a different company than Windows for a long time. Remember Games for Windows Live?

[NuclearPM]

ADHD? What do you mean?

[chihuahua]

They probably mean that with some projects, Microsoft builds something half-assed and then moves on to something else. Instead of sticking with the project, evaluating it critically, and committing to fixing whatever sucks about it until it's high quality.

One could get that impression from the Windows Store/Microsoft Store. And also the state of the Settings UI for at least the past 13 years - Windows 8 moved a small fraction of Settings to Metro design, but 13 years later there are still some pieces of Windows 7 UI left.

Or the Edge browser fiasco - how can a company as large as Microsoft conclude "eh, I guess we just can't have a browser that works well enough for enough of the web to be competitive, let's just give up and do a Chrome branch"

Or the Kin phone: "we launched this 4 weeks ago and I guess it sucks, let's just pull the plug and never mention this again"

Or Windows features like home group, libraries, and Windows Home Server - they're around for a few years, then someone decides "we don't really care about this" and dump them.