Valve Launches "Steam Deck Verified" Program For Games That Run Well On The Steam Deck

[pal666]

In my excitement in that SteamOS is just glorious open sourced everyday ordinary dekstop Linux with the Steam app, I completely forgot about the Steam app itself. Thank you.

i don't see how it matters, considering most games are not better

[CTown]

i don't see how it matters, considering most games are not better

Most games are not better than what?

[pal666]

Most games are not better than what?

are not more opensource than steam app

[CTown]

are not more opensource than steam app

It's a shame how true that is. However,

(1) I think that ideology only contributes to the status quo. There was a time where we really only had a closed source office suite, StarOffice. Like how we eventually got StarOffice's code (which eventually moved on to become LibreOffice) as it was deemed non-competitive with Microsoft Office, developers have open sourced older gaming engines. ID Tech has open sourced up to version 5 of their engine (though it seems they have no plans to ever open source versions 5, 6, or 7).

(2) Having those engines easily working on Linux could also lead to code preservation as we run just start running older runtimes (since the underlying OS is open sourced) in containers for compatibility. (I love reading about emulators and code preservation projects myself.)

(3) Things can not get better without a foundation to build on. If no one took video games seriously in this community we would not even have Godot as a game engine. The easier it is to run games on Linux, the more likely people will use Linux based tools to make those games. It really is a chicken and egg problem.

(4) Most importantly we can use the size of the gaming industry to get users of SteamOS (where many of them will be new to Linux) as more eyes for bug reports.

[Vorpal]

are not more opensource than steam app

Apart from a few open source games, with even fewer standout excellent titles (OpenTTD comes to mind, but this is to some extent a matter of personal taste), the world of games is proprietary. Why is that?

My analysis is that most games are not produced by individuals in their free times as a hoby. Thus the need for income, either for an individual or for a team. While for non-games, companies has managed to figure out alternative revenue streams (e.g. business support contracts for RedHat, Google publishing library code as open source, because they don't money directly from that part of their business, etc), it seems less clear how such a thing could be done in the realm of games.

Also, even if the game has an alternate revenue stream, open sourcing the code could endanger that. Consider for example if the company used microtransactions (*shudder*)? If the code was open source, someone would likely just make an alternative version without that. Same if the income stream was hosting multi player servers. Why not just host your own then instead?

To me it seems that for now, the most open a company can be when it comes to games, is to allow and encourage modding. A few small teams or individuals could probably survive based on donations, patreon or similar. However, that would not scale to AAA games, and even then releasing the source risk splitting the fan base and reducing the income for the original creator.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, if someone comes up an alternative sustainable business model for games! And I would love to see more old games released as open source a few years down the line.

[CochainComplex]

chupacabras ?

I'm not into cryptozoology....but is there any possible overlap between the territory of big foot and the chupacabra? Just in theory there could be epic fights?

Back ot Considering that a lot of indigames do not have the resources to build a complex engine up from scratch I would imagine that unity, ue etc based games are more or less running out of the box once triple AAA game powerd by it got enough proton support. If it is a 2d game I would also assume that basic wine might be already enough to run it.
AFAIK the game breakers are usually DRM which is also more used in AAA titles