The reason why Valve does all this cool shit is because it's a private company and not publicly traded. It owes nothing to no one.
As soon as a company goes public, it owes its shareholders its profits and has an obligation to make as much as possible and use whatever means it can to do so.
Gabe doesn't care. He does what he wants and he knows what his customers want.
This is super true in so many ways. I worked for a private company for several years and about 2 years ago they were bought out by a public company. Things changed real quick lol. The original owners swore they would never sell too. I til they did one day lol
Well, things change. With time I became more wary of people who claim they will "never" or "always" do something. It's not a realistic thing most of the time
Definitely, though when they inevitably change their mind, it stings like an implied promise broken.
Don't forget the part where they're able to do that because they basically own the Windows market so pursuing projects that won't see a RoI in the short term is possible for them but wouldn't be for others.
Private companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders just the same as public ones. The big difference is that they tend to have far fewer shareholders and they usually all have some personal relationship. So it's less likely to result in a lawsuit.
Gabe apparently owns 50.1% of Valve. I don't know who owns the rest (I'm reading some places that he got divorced, so possibly his ex-wife?), but if they're not happy with how it's being run they could certainly sue. That being said it seems like a money making machine at the moment, so why would you.
“HE kNoWnS whAT CuStoMeRs WaNT”
No he doesn’t, people kept saying HL3 and there’s no HL3. The company committed crimes and illegal activities in many countries.
Stop the propaganda nonsense.
Those are quite the claims. Got any sources to back them up?
I put an admittedly low amount of effort into searching (skimmed a couple dozen links or so) for evidence of crimes and came up empty. I'd be curious to see trustworthy sources about this as well.
Re: HL3. It's a particularly infamous example of a game cancelation, and it does suck but studios canceling games happens.
Edit: Excepting antitrust lawsuits. I wasn't surprised to see that and glossed over it, but it does qualify as a crime and I would say is a reasonable accusation. I didn't read more in to it than that, yet.
Edit 2: The TL;DR: of the antitrust lawsuit if you weren't aware (I wasn't) is that Steam is taking a cut of up to 30% which they're arguing is excessive. Game makers don't really have a choice given that Steam is the market leader. Here's a random newer article, more about Gabe having to appear in court, but it covers the basics. https://www.techspot.com/news/100969-gabe-newell-ordered-testify-person-valve-antitrust-lawsuit.html
Hl3 will come out if and when valve comes up with interesting new engine tech. The story of hl1 was the pitch the gravity gun and physics of source was the reason for hl2. If vr had seen mass adoption hl alyx would have been a Main line game or maybe include more post hl2 content.
People don't even know what people want. Gabe knows people expect HL3 to be some godly game and he knows what they make will in all likelihood not live up to that image. Why bother if it will just bring disappointment to everyone? Just save the effort and enjoy the memes.
*and free publicity
What makes you think he doesn't know people want HL3? Even you know, and you don't strike me as the brightest bulb in the knife drawer.
regardless of Gabe knowing what people want, the point about being privately owned stands. it really is the publicly traded companies that are the problem. at least private ones aren't legally obligated to pursue profits over all else. they have the choice to be evil. they may still make that choice, but public companies can be sued by their investors for being "charitable to customers" instead of maximizing profits.
You're not very good at this
Half-Life Alyx wasn't good enough for you? Sheesh, go play ANY of the HL mods or many other new games released. Bad hill to die on...
I generally avoid liking any companies or brands, but it’s difficult to not appreciate some of the things Valve does.
They do things for their own benefit, but it benefits everyone because they don’t try and lock things down quite like other companies.
Agreed! They make it very difficult to dislike them. I suspect a time will come when they start losing touch, and I've always wondered how much of their general direction is associated with Gabe specifically.
Having seen some of the things Gabe has done, like personally delivering the first Steam Decks and constantly speaking at gaming conferences and doing panels, etc, I think a lot of it is him. I do worry about whether he has a succession plan in place.
I've heard that the company internally functions a lot like a co-op. That's your succession plan right there. Mondragon lights the way.
Well there was the whole dollarization for less wealthy countries that made them a no-fly-zone. A friend of mine was recently telling me about how he bought Deep Rock Galactic for 600 pesos and since the dollarization the same game now equates to 30 thousand pesos.
Yeah, they've got a monopoly and it sucks, but they don't seem to have a desire to push it to the point of drawing attention. I know why Epic does what it does, because they have to compete with the near complete market dominance of Valve. However, it's not like Valve has used their position to increase prices or anything like that. They also invest in doing things that improve the experience rather than just trying to harm the competition.
I don't like the monopoly, but I do appreciate Valve as a company.
I keep seeing "Monopoly" repeated, but I'm having a hard time understanding the logic.
They haven't bought competitors. They don't do anything to hinder others progress in this market, sometime to the detriment of their customers (see: Steam launches another launcher, to launch the game). They haven't openly shown anything anti-competitive, in fact they have stuck to their guns (30% cut) when others have attempted to compete.
What they have done is cultivate the best platform that continues to evolve, add features, and maintain stability. Consumers continue to choose to use Steam overwhelmingly, but outside of Valve's own games, there is no threat of exclusivity or punishment.
It's the opposite of monopolistic behavior. Any company is free to compete, build their own platform, and offer software. It's expensive, and tricky to get right, but nothing is stopping them, Valve included.
A monopoly doesn't care about actions. There's only one place people think about when they think to purchase a game on PC. That means it's a monopoly. Sure, it's not a horrible situation, and they don't seem to be significantly exploiting their position, but that doesn't change that they have no real competition.
If we're going deep into the literal meaning of monopoly, the "mono" prefix means "one" but they have several legitimate competitors so that's simply untrue.
For launchers there's Epic, GoG, Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft Gamepass, R*. If we're talking game sales there's a litany of other websites to purchase games from Humble Bundle, Fanatical, Itch.io, Green Man Gaming.
Players can buy directly from the publisher in most cases. For outside those, there are options of DRM free or whatever Epic supposedly has to offer.
Steam may have a dominant position, but I'm not entirely sure that's a monopoly. If we had no other options? Sure. We have multiple other options. Steam Keys are the most common for a number of the sites, but I'd also consider that none of these launchers have the set of features that Valve offers with theirs.
Does people choosing a better service make it a monopoly? I think if Steam didn't have even 1/3rd of what it offers then the other options would be more widely used. Rather, if the other options put as much effort into the quality of life of their launchers, they'd be more popular.
But personally I also think the Epic-backed Wolffire lawsuit claiming Valve has a monopoly is kind of BS, unless it comes out to be true that Steams market power forced developers to keep games off other stores and keep it on their own. If Valve were forcing its competitors to be shit, then sure it's a monopoly.
Up to this point, it seems to me that Steam has dominated the market because of reliability. The consistent sales, refunds are consistent, the program has a number of uses from communities to guides to per-game control schemes, to little things like the soundtracks of games being in one spot.
Is it a monopoly? Or is it the people's choice?
It's just a shame the competition kinda sucks. Epic is pulling some good moves with all the free games and some really competitive prices but their launcher sucks and GoG have an abysmal launcher while rarely having newer titles because of so many companies holding tight to DRM
Valve doesn't set prices on the store in the first place. They are giving more margin for big sellers now too.
Well they kind of have used their position to indirectly increase prices... If they take a 30% cut then the games need to sell for more to make the same profit (and there's the geolock and anti price-competition thing too)
Yet they also allow developers to sell generated keys with 0% cut either directly or to key sites if they desire.
Ah yes, the monopoly, a business with competitors such as ea origin, Ubisoft dunno what they called it, epic store, gog. The word monopoly must break down like monopol-y as in like a monopole, a magnet with only one polarity that is separate from the other polarity.
I would argue they do many things that are against their own benefit.
I was going to say something to the effect of "I'm thrilled for what they've done for the state of gaming in Linux, even if it is in self interest, but I wish they'd contribute their code upstream. ".
I did a little search and turns out a lot of it is, so that's cool. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Upstream-Everything-OSS
They do lockdown things.
On EU they tried to geolock customers.
Steam Deck works on selected Linux systems, Steam Deck operating systems isn’t open source after many people demand it to be released for the public.
Alyx is still VR only game and must buy VR game, unless you mod it. Valve refused to release PC version.
Exclusivity is the number one reason they are making money. You can not buy certain games outside of Steam and Valve hasn’t released their own games outside of Steam.
Valve isn’t the good guys and they are criminals with multiple history of lawsuits and abuse to their employees. You shouldn’t keep supporting them.
Most of these are either misinformed, straight misinformation or just weird nitpicks.
The steam deck works perfectly fine with windows and should also work just fine on any linux system. It is literally just a x64 PC in a hand held format. Nothing has been done to limit the devices functionality on systems that aren’t SteamOS.
AFAIK SteamOS 3 will be dropped in the future. Also afaik, development is currently focused specifically on the steam deck first so it’s not particularly useful outside of that.
Thing is though, there’s nothing stopping people from using any other distro other than the belief that SteamOS is some super special distro filled with gaming secret sauce. It’s just a fork of arch with deck specific tweaks. A lot of the work thats been put into SteamOS has also made its way to linux at large.
Alyx is built from the ground up to be a VR game. There really isn’t any way to convert it to a flatscreen game without completely doing away with what makes that game what it is. There’s no flatscreen version to release. Though something to mention is that SteamVR (and by extension alyx and any VR game on steam) supports all VR HMD’s provided they’re compatible with OpenVR.
The games that are exclusive to Steam, aside from valve’s own games, are there entirely by publisher/developer choice and are not enforced by valve. Unlike a certain other storefront that pays for timed exclusivity rights which is, ironically for them, a monopolistic move.
There are legitimate reasons to criticise valve, they’re not innocent by any means.
But the things I’ve pointed out really aren’t issues.
Also valve being criminals and being abusive to their employees are massive claims. Would be nice to see some proof of that. Not a fan of making up things to be angry about when there are legitimate issues that we can be angry about instead.
Source on
Steam Deck works on selected Linux systems, Steam Deck operating systems isn’t open source after many people demand it to be released for the public.
?
In reading this article https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/linux-on-steam-deck-what-you-need-to-know-what-currently-works/ the only limitation that stuck out is you're supposed to install your distro on a different partition.
Alyx is still VR only game and must buy VR game, unless you mod it. Valve refused to release PC version.
It's a matter of opinion if this is good or bad I guess, but I think VR specific titles are a good thing. More of an opportunity to take advantage of the medium rather than shoehorn the functionality on to a desktop game.
You can just ask for the source code, if anyone can get the source code if they get the binary and can modify and redistribute it, its free, as is steam os
PC gaming on Microsoft Window's is Xbox gaming. It's baked into the OS and we're a generation away from MS charging is you want a "secure" OS.
Linux + Valve means PC gaming won't be behind a paywall anytime soon.
"Linux" already charges for a "secure" OS. RHEL is the quintessential example and Canonical have their enterprise oriented Ubuntu variant. And smaller orgs have other offerings. Likely, we would see the same happen with windows... and already sort of do with the professional versus home SKUs that nobody understands.
PC gaming is highly unlikely to be "behind a paywall" basically ever because there is too much money in it. But, speculation, Valve's increasingly strong push toward Linux is a mix of three things
I like Valve and love Steam. But it is important to remember that they are "a company" first and foremost.
There’s nothing in RHEL or enterprise Ubuntu that’s inherently more secure than any other distro.
I am more familiar with RHEL than Ubuntu (I still can't grok what the hell they advertise when you try to update home ubuntu...). But you are generally paying for a more curated selection of packages in the default repositories as well as active support for the more "bleeding edge" stuff.
Which DOES provide "security". Both in the sense of having more vetted third party packages (rather than do your own research on which solution to use, you use the one that the people you threw money at decided on for you) but also in response time. Because if someone manages to sneak malware into a popular package, you don't just have people on call to roll that back and implement mitigations/recoveries immediately. They are also on call to call you to say "Yo, gimp is gonna shove bitcoin mining goatse into every single picture you make. We suggest you do the following..." at 2 am.
I'll be honest I'm not that familiar with Ubuntu either. I do have pretty extensive experience with RHEL (though mostly through CentOS back when it was effectively a RHEL clone) and even more with Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based).
you are generally paying for a more curated selection of packages in the default repositories
You seem to be implying that having fewer packages in the default repos somehow increase security. I don't buy that. Packages that are not installed on the base system are fully optional (and even some that are, if you're willing to do some cleanup!). Not having them installed doesn't decrease your attack vectors. Having them in the repos means they're going through the distro's security process, patching, etc.
Should the user choose to install that piece of software (otherwise it doesn't matter), that process should mean increased security vs. the alternative - installing those packages either from upstream or from a third-party. Either solution may have on-par security practices with the distro's but more likely have worse. Furthermore, upgrades could become more perilous for essentially 2 reasons:
apt upgrade or similar).stable or Ubuntu LTS where security fixes keep coming for years.having more vetted third party packages
Surely the mass of independent security researchers are more likely to find and file CVEs than the limited staff at Red Hat who probably have better things to worry about. On top of that, whatever CVEs RH do find, they will likely submit to the CVE database so it doesn't matter.
They are also on call to call you to say “Yo, gimp is gonna shove bitcoin mining goatse into every single picture you make. We suggest you do the following…” at 2 am.
That sounds like a nightmare scenario (almost literally!). Please don't wake me up we're bleeding money, reputation or potential revenue. Everything else can wait until next morning. My sleep can't.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.
FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.
This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.
This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Rocky Linux Shares How They May Continue To Obtain The RHEL Source Code Following Red Hat's decision earlier this month to limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code and that leading to downstreams scrambling to figure out their paths forward to avoid tracking CentOS Stream instead and still aiming to offer 1:1 RHEL compatibility without being restricted by the Red Hat Customer Portal, the Rocky Linux distribution today expressed a few of the ideas they are considering.
The original article contains 1,112 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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