[artyom]

And I forgot to mention in-game currency.

I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.

Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.

[mikepurvis]

I had a rough time with Proton a few years ago and ended up setting up my most recent gaming rig as a Windows 11 machine. In retrospect it was probably unfair to judge it on dime-a-dozen Humble Bundle leftovers from a decade ago when most of the effort is spent on supporting new releases.

But yeah... just this week I was traveling for work and my kid reached out wanting to play a little Deep Rock Galactic with me. I couldn't believe how easy everything was from my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. Steam, proton, Discord, all of it just worked and I wouldn't even have realised it wasn't running natively if I hadn't noticed the extra proton download in the Steam client.

Very nice work.

[cybercatgurrl]

honestly, older games from humble bundle usually work really really well in my experience. i’d say give the experience a go again if you have the time

[pjmlp]

> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.

Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.

Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.

[wtetzner]

There isn't much they can do to foster native Linux support beyond trying to increase the number of people gaming on Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you need to make the platform desirable to developers before they will start developing for it.

[pjmlp]

They can do an Apple/Sony/Google/Nintendo/Xbox move, "Want your game on Steam Deck? Support Linux".

They certainly have a better card deck than Loki Entertainment used to have.

[wtetzner]

This is the chicken-and-egg problem though. If you don't get the Linux/Steam Deck audience large enough first, then that tradeoff won't be worth it to developers.

[phatfish]

Valve have the money to pay developers to make a Linux port or ensure it works with Proton (maybe they already do in some cases?), if they really wanted to put the heat on Microsoft. Well, any not owned or being published by Microsoft i suppose.

Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.

[embedding-shape]

> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.

"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.

[pjmlp]

It will get more worse, with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan, just use DirectX, and the convinience of modern GPU programming tooling in Visual Studio, HLSL code completion with CoPilot, PIX debugger, and then let Valve have to worry about running it on Linux.

[embedding-shape]

> with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan

Valve themselves seems to disagree with you here, considering they still have Linux native SDKs available for integration, and are releasing their own games with native Linux support.

I'm guessing if what you say is true, Valve would be the first to move towards that reality you paint, but we haven't seen that yet, I'm doubting we'll ever see that, but the ones who live will see I suppose :)

[pjmlp]

Valve will get their OS/2 and netbooks moment if they don't foster a proper native Linux games ecosystem, but yeah lets cheer for Windows games translation on Linux while it lasts.

[cybercatgurrl]

Valve is actively contributing upstream changes to Wine with Proton. As long as they continue to do that the scenario you envision shouldn’t happen.

[pjc50]

I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.

None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.

[ascagnel_]

Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.

Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.

[pjmlp]

That is like saying the most valuable gaming API is Dolphi, MAME, or LinUAE.

[pjc50]

Almost certainly more people playing 80s and 90s games through emulation than on original hardware, so .. yes?

[pjmlp]

Except the main reason is because 80s and 90s hardware is dead, or hard to come by and repair.

[artyom]

Not naive at all. I'm pretty well aware of the monetary incentives and that they're focusing on their own use case.

But the improvement has been so great (and so downhill in Windows camp) that now Proton is the performance benchmark apparently...

[pjmlp]

Yes, and it has provided enough heat that Microsoft finally decided it was time for the netbook-like reaction, so lets see how long it holds.

[ninjaoxygen]

Totally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place.

The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier.

Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts.

To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one.

Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels.

There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.

[artyom]

> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?

I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).

Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.

Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.

[pjmlp]

Most of the market talks Nintendo, Sony, XBox, Apple Arcade, Android.

Exactly because they aquired half the good studios, they happen to be one of the biggest publishers, people forget some of those studios keep using their own branding instead of anything Microsoft, and it would hurt Steam if Microsoft decides all those studios would pull out of it.

[ascagnel_]

Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.

[Pay08]

Which game of theirs has paid-for currency? I don't think you get more points with Dota Plus.