Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community
Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community
This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn't even built a linux client after all these years.
Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.
I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it's become so widely unsupported that I can't really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there's a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there's just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.
Win ≥8 is awful; I've helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I've ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don't see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.
So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?
Valve almost makes me believe in capitalism.
Just run the company in a way where you don’t really care about maximizing profit. As long as you’re not at a loss and are liked, you will be successful.
Valve could probably be much more profitable at the expense of being a bigger dick, but Gabe is chill.
But they do run it to maximize profit. There's just allowed to do it creatively instead of obsessing over short term gains.
I mean the company essentially gave up on AAA games for well over a decade because they were making more money from steam, and Gabe famously only approves projects that have a plan to turn a profit or expand Valve's market.
They didn't spread into Linux out of sheer principle. It gives them more control and influence over the market to separate themselves from Windows. And they've done tons of shady stuff with steam like refusing to give refunds until they were sued by state governments.
It helps that they aren't struggling to keep the lights on.
You can't really do what you want if youre constantly worried if you can pay bills. Same for people, same for companies.
Valve is far from a typical company. While technically not, they operate pretty much like a worker owned cooperative. Have a look at their employee handbook: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
(and Igalia, the company presenting in OP is really a worker owned cooperative).
If you remove stock market as a whole, maybe capitalism can work a little in a soc democracy, with stock market is impossible
Stock markets are socially acceptable ponzi schemes
A stock market can still work. The ultra high speed market we have now is a problem. Ultra fast trading encourages fast, short term thinking.
A stock market with an update once per day could work better. It would take all the fast impulse trading out of the market, while still allowing price adaptation. When runs and crashes take weeks to play out, it's a lot easier for cooler heads and logic to prevail. This, in turn would favour the sort of traders favouring long term stable investments.
Valve is the prime example of rent seeking behavior. It's a private company that collects economic rents on a market thanks to that market being the biggest. They're a private company and their only goal is to preserve those rents. They do that by fostering goodwill. They're everything I hate about capitalism, but I don't hate them for doing it.
They are also a good example of positive middleman behaviour. While they take their cut, the value they provide to both sides is huge.
They are also in a position where they are still easily replaceable. Their dominance is from doing it well, not because they have an absolute lock in.
Part of why this works is because they don't have to prioritise short term profit over long term. Most companies like this get brought up and pumped dry. Valve seems to be the exception.
I don't think Steam is rent-seeking because:
- no cost to maintaining an account
- no cost for keys if you sell stuff outside the Steam store
- no cost for downloads
- no cost for improvements to games
Valve's customers are publishers and devs, and they're charging a finder's fee for connecting customers to the games. To me, that's not rent seeking, that's a direct exchange of money for a service. If you don't think the service is valuable or think you can do better, then generate keys and sell them elsewhere and you won't need to pay Valve a cut.
Valve is capitalism done right imo. You only pay when you receive a service, and only when you profit from the service. Steam also has a fantastic refund policy as well, which is surprisingly rare in the digital goods market.
Unlike every other company in their position they're not complete assholes to consumers :
- steam deck not locked down at all and reparable
- steam and valve games support Linux very well
- they don't sign exclusivity deals for games to only be on steam
Most companies in their position would lock their users in, they don't. That doesn't mean they can't be abusive though. 30% of game revenue is huge!
somebody doesn't understand what rent seeking is.
Valve is not doing rent-seeking...
they have created a service that didn't exist that's beneficial to both the consumer and the seller, they don't do any anti-competitive shit with it as far as I am aware.
in what world is what they do rent-seeking?
are you an edgy 15 year old that just learned a new word and didn't understand it?
Well, Valve is privately-owned company and it's investing a lot of money into the free software ecosystem right now. Yes it's capitalism but very different in principles to the rest of the market.
One of the few companies I've purchased digital good from - and they haven't enshittified themselves yet
Well they did try to sell paid mods and push pay-to-play in the steam marketplace with Artifact, but luckily they ran it back. Steam is super good now but don't get too comfortable.
Yeah, I've been burnt before and know it's only a matter of time. Enjoying it while I can.
I remember the outrage at the time but just because it's paid doesn't mean it's bad.
It's because they're a privately owned company.
The pressure for enshitification mostly comes from shareholders. Without them, the company can actually think about their long term future and decide exactly when and when not to increase profit.
I tend to avoid proprietary things whenever possible these days, but I found most things by small, privately owned companies are pretty good towards their users.
I don't game regularly, and Steamdeck is probably not something I'm going to be purchasing anytime soon. However, I was hopeful that Valve's investment into Linux would be beneficial and to the larger Linux landscape.
I'm hopeful that more companies will look at Valve's success and start building more on Linux in a way that will benefit the upstream community.
To a certain degree sure, I'm still miffed at what they did for the steamdeck. Having custom drivers and configurations they never open sourced and have not declared any intention to open source. See https://gitlab.com/open-sd/acp5x-ucm-files#notice .
Valve is still a good advocate for open source, the support they've given to dxvk alone is worth praise. But they ain't no angels.
Is what they're doing causing issues to users of their devices? If not, then no one should care. It's the same for nvidia, if no one is affected, then whatever. But nvidia does cause measurable harm to the FOSS ecosystem and makes adoption worse, so they deservingly get shit from the FOSS community. But don't just criticize companies purely for closing their sources.
valve has done a lot of great things for foss but keep in mind they do those things for money like everybody else
Define users of their devices? As a steamdeck owner my experience for installing an alternative os was terrible because theirs specific hardware configurations that valve made for the device and never bothered to upstream it so they were applicable outside of their environment. I'm not criticising valve for closing their resources, I'm criticising them for exploiting open source software to get a usable os up quickly and then not contributing to the same ecosystem that let them do that... not even assuring anyone they would eventually do that. Valve is a for profit company like any other, if you wanna waste time defending their less savory actions than go ahead but don't pretend they aren't what they are.
I bet Linus still thinks their code is shit tho
Always has been