Valve Reaffirms Commitment To Linux, SteamOS

[audir8]

No, and it's good. You Wine-users need to realize that Wine is not bringing any more game studios (or other software vendors) to Linux than if you set up a extra computer/VM with Windows or dual boot. Wine is a workaround and will never be the solution. You are fueling the Windows ecosystem. The day you all start voting with your money is the day you see more vendors interested in actually investing in your platform.

There are emulators for every other game system out there.. why shouldn't there be one for Windows apps/games?

[blackiwid]

I think games are the one area where there is a very compelling case for a proprietary model as opposed to FOSS:

1. No-one depends critically on games. It is unacceptable to rely on a non-free OS, office suite or compiler, because that puts you and your business at the mercy of the software vendor. Games are just for fun, if the game vendor tries to screw you over, nothing bad will happen. Grab a book or go to the swimming pool for a few laps instead. Or play another game.

2. Games have a very short life time. A development environment or a video editor don't become less useful after you used them once, but after you played through a game, it loses some or all (depending on the game) of its appeal and charm. Games can cost a lot of money to develop, but they must make for that investment over a very short period of time and can't rely on dedicated longtime users with deep pockets to sponsor them, donate to them or contribute to their development.

Well there are two things, of course Valve can't force all the game devs that they have on steam to switch to libre software lisense.

But then we have to look at what individual companies could do including Valve with their own games:

1. it depends heavily on the kind of game, but all this AAA titles that rely 99% on Artwork, could easily release the source code but still sell the cd with the artwork, Sure a black copy would be easier to do but it would still be illegal, and if they really fear that, they could release it 1 or 2 months after release at this point for this typical AAA games a cracked version is out in the internet anyway. So it would not impact them negatively on the sells, but they had a differentiater some people would buy it or prefer it over similar games because of that "feature".

2. there are maybe some games that have only garbage artwork some indie games, here I see a case to wait maybe a bit longer, but still its a feature to have it opensource. Maybe wait here a year or so, whatever.

There is at least 1 game particularly that shows you how much proprietary software sucks for customers. Ark, sold extremely well, even under windows its horrible (not at all) optimized on speed, it basically is still alpha at best beta quality.

And to top that even more under linux its even slower. And it's not only the speed no matter if you have a 2000 dollar pc it still runs really crappy with maxed details or anything. Its very very simple bugs that each Dino will still bug on every thing, on dead bodies on trees...

3. it will happen its a question of competition, at some point some companies will try that model out, they see they loose nothing because without artwork for many games the source alone is not worth much. But their games will not be endless banana software.

Take Ark I bought it only for 10 bucks or so, but I will never buy from that companies anything else, because it was a big scam. They stopped all development after reaching beta status and instead of finishing the game they excluded their work in a dlc.

And now we are completely powerless, we have a somewhat nice game, that never will run good, because it will forever stay in beta quality. I am sorry I am done with that.

4. also they could release a opensource streaming client that you could at least on the streaming machine have a full opensource setup. that would cost them again nothing.

[trek]

No, and it's good. You Wine-users need to realize that Wine is not bringing any more game studios (or other software vendors) to Linux than if you set up a extra computer/VM with Windows or dual boot. Wine is a workaround and will never be the solution.

it's a chicken-egg problem: few games means few users and few users means few games studios find it profitable to develop a linux version of a game

wine helps linux exactly this, it makes the linux userbase larger and then more profitable to develop something for linux

[Michael_S]

you are posting bullshit. steam does not mandate proprietary or drm

What? Steam currently lists 22685 games/mods/apps/whatever. A search for "open source" in Steam gets 64 hits. A search for DRM-free on Steam gets around 250 hits.

No, Steam doesn't mandate proprietary or DRM. But they're above 99% proprietary and DRM. Steam is a game store, and being a game store does not mandate proprietary software or DRM. But Steam is built to facilitate DRM and supporting proprietary software is a byproduct. If all you were offering users was a sale, a download, and 'cloud' saves, you would build your store very differently. DRM is central to their business model.

[justmy2cents]

How do you do that? Is there such filter?

one way is this http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=drm+free

the second is https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=drm%20free%20games%20on%20steam

[jacob]

it's a chicken-egg problem: few games means few users and few users means few games studios find it profitable to develop a linux version of a game

wine helps linux exactly this, it makes the linux userbase larger and then more profitable to develop something for linux

I don't think wine grows the user base. No one installs linux on order to be able to run wine. But there are relatively many people whi have linux on their computers, and a relatively small number of them want to play games AND don't want to keep a second computer or a console for that, or use a dual boot. Wine is for those, and it's a fantastic solution for this specific situation. But it won't affect the market in any meaningful way. If anything, should the linux gaming market become significant one day, studios will find it easiest to develop for Windows only, because their games will then work on Linux too thanks to wine.

[audir8]

... If anything, should the linux gaming market become significant one day, studios will find it easiest to develop for Windows only, because their games will then work on Linux too thanks to wine.

Pure speculation and opinion, also provably wrong. In fact, since Wine has been around the number of Linux games has only increased, and until fairly recently, you couldn't get an AAA titles on Linux like you can now. Wine has only gotten better and better during this time, and porting/making native games has also grown significantly.

I think Wine has played a role in bringing better gaming to Linux, just how big would be debatable. I don't think you can make the opposite case at all rationally.

Michael_S You can disagree with Steam's business model, but this is how most app stores today are run. Google play services are no less of DRM than Steam. You can find DRM-free content on Steam and treat it like GOG.

[jacob]

Pure speculation and opinion, also provably wrong. In fact, since Wine has been around the number of Linux games has only increased, and until fairly recently, you couldn't get an AAA titles on Linux like you can now. Wine has only gotten better and better during this time, and porting/making native games has also grown significantly.

I think Wine has played a role in bringing better gaming to Linux, just how big would be debatable. I don't think you can make the opposite case at all rationally.

Michael_S You can disagree with Steam's business model, but this is how most app stores today are run. Google play services are no less of DRM than Steam. You can find DRM-free content on Steam and treat it like GOG.

It's not pure speculation. There is a precedent called OS/2. It could run most Windows applications perfectly, in some cases it actually ran them better than Windows itself (we are talking about win 3.1 or 95, of course). The result? No-one needed to bother developing for OS/2 because by releasing a Windows app they had that user base covered too.

I'm certainly not against Wine at all. I use it myself, I'm grateful for the amazing work its developers are doing and it definitely makes my life better. But I don't think that the modest but real takeoff of games on Linux has anything to do with Wine. The Linux platform has matured enormously. Besides, in many cases, the games themselves are developed to be multi-platform, so bringing them to Linux requires much less effort than it once did and in some cases, the prospect of earning brownie points with the Linux community, ensuring that the code really is portable and maybe making an extra 1% sales might be enough to justify it.

Wine is probably contributing to that indirectly, though, by putting Linux's graphics stack through hell, making DirectX work on Linux and exercising all sorts of corner cases and bizarre scenarios that the Linux video driver developers wouldn't be able to test extensively without it. Yes, Wine has definitely been a great asset for Linux, no question for that, but if Linux gaming eventually booms one day, assuming that such a day actually comes, it won't be because of Wine. When Linux conquered the server market, it similarly achieved that because of its own advantages, not because of the SCO kernel personality it once used to support.

[coder]

I'm guessing they are planning a real release of a console-like machine later when things are more mature. Such machine will probably be running on an AMD APU and using SteamOS.

See Atari VCS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_VCS_(2018_console)

[shmerl]

Such as?

GOG / itch.io.