Well, at least we’ve got global climate change and multiple other threats to the survival of humanity, we won’t have to worry for long.
No no…it’s going to be much worse than that.
It’ll be a subscription just to play the game you already own.
This is silly. Valve is already a profit driven company. You don’t see the walled garden? The DRM? Valve supports proton because it’s in their monetary interest to do so.
Capitalism bad. Support Epic Games instead. /s
Since it’s not publicly owned it doesn’t have to focus on quarterly profits.
If it gets sold to Microsoft they’re probably going to start stripping it down to please investors banking on how most people will be too lazy to leave it. We’ve seen the same thing happen with reddit and twitter. I’m pretty sure enshittification is inevitable.
There’s “profit-driven” and “seeking exclusively the profits of the next quarter”. While capitalism has a lot of downsides in the long run, the vast majority of bullshit people get outraged about is due to publicly traded companies being organized in such a way that their CEOs and shareholders sacrifice all sustainability and instead try to loot your kitchen.
Whatever Steam policies you think are bullshit right now (and I can name a couple more, too), they’re not too much in comparison to what they’d be under more typical management.
How is it walled garden when you can add any non-steam game to your library?
You’re thinking in reverse. Walled gardens keep you in, not out. Without logging into your Steam account (pretending you don’t have one), try to download a mod for a game you bought on GOG and see how it goes for you.
I have seriously no idea, but can you take them out easily? If not, it’s a walled garden.
Categorically wrong since Gaben lost weight.
Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.
Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source.
Don’t just thank open source; thank copyleft for the fact that Valve couldn’t make a closed-source fork of it even if it wanted to.
Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.
What? Proton (i.e., WINE) has been LGPL Free Software since before Valve even touched it.
Sorry, what I mean is, if Valve wasn’t forced to keep it opensource, I think a big factor against would be the extra work
Who’d have thought not actually owning the games you purchase was a bad idea?
Even if you buy them on gog you don’t own them. Download and keep - sure, but you could do that with many games on steam too (also you could download torrent versions which wouldn’t be different from buying on gog). The point is about actually keeping these copies alive, properly updated and working, for which these services exist.
So, I think owning a disc is also risky, that means your copy can degrade. Owning games in this context have lost its meaning for me.
When you own the game you have the choice whether to back up the game and whether to keep a computer that can run it.
Can’t Gabe do what John Bogle did with Vanguard and transfer ownership to the employees and clients?
I think I have enough to worry about already without worrying about what ifs.
This isn’t a what if, it’s a what when.
No, that’s an assumption. Probably correct. But if you can see into the future you should buy some lotto tickets or some stocks.
Technically we’re assuming Gabe is mortal, yes.
It is funny that people think Valve would sell out instead of becoming the big evil.
As Valve continues developing an OS agnostic platform, they start building into various tools that require a Steam account to play games in order to defend their app store. Maybe they buy Unity and make it a Steam exclusive, maybe they make their own engine that can be played on Windows or Linux.
Integrate Chromecast technology to make a console like multimedia device to compete against XBox and PlayStation. Then, start selling video and integrating streaming access.
Push the Steam Store to become bigger. Sure, you aren’t forced to use the Steam Store on most Valve developed hardware, but it is default.
Then, like Google did with Android, pull the tech stack from the open source tools to become wholely integrated with Steam Services.
You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.
Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same
Most of this already exists and they haven’t taken that tack, though. SteamOS is just Arch and KDE, with access to anything Arch has access to. If you don’t like that, Valve made it trivial to put another OS on the Deck, like Bazzite.
Steam Play is already a streaming technology, which works great and is free to use and has been for like at least a decade.
Steam Store is already gigantic, despite having some well funded competition who has to resort to exclusives and free game giveaways to entice users. It’s already the de facto default game store for PC, and provides lots of extra features beyond just game delivery.
Most of the technology Steam uses (like Proton or GameScope or Arch) are open-source. We can (and do) fork their work for our own purposes regularly.
I don’t think Valve is perfect, but I do think they value their open approach to technology. I think as long as the company is never publicly traded, I would imagine anyone who currently works at Valve would share that attitude with GabeN, otherwise I imagine they wouldn’t work there long.
If they go public and have to report to shareholders, then I completely agree that the enshittification will be swift and merciless. I hope Gabe makes Valve an employee-owned co-op or something when he decides to retire. I can only imagine he has strong plans for the transition of power.
I don’t know why Gabe Newell would die before 75
Cryogenic suicide to preserve his brain for a robotic body?
Good news. Unreal Engine 4 is usable on Linux and works pretty well too.
Learn some C++, get some ppl and make good games.Also, GoG means old games don’t die. (well at least the non DRM ones)
Ue5 as well, not sure why you went back a version
I haven’t tried UE5
Also, they changed their licence midway, so a little unsure about it rn.
The change doesn’t apply to games
The film industry previously was completely free, in versions 5.4 and above. It is now $1850 per seat for companies making over a million per year
Every game that I have seen that runs on UE5 either looks like a vaseline smeared blur or runs like crap.
Do you know one that runs great AND looks great? And I don’t mean in the trailer.
Do you know one that runs great AND looks great
If you make one, then I’ll know one. ;)
I am not sure of the relevance, we are talking about the engine having a linux native version
Most engines can build on Linux. Even CryEngine. Maybe OP mentioned UE4 because it runs better than UE5.
GoG does DRM free, and not just old games. Not many new AAA because convincing a big company to sell their game DRM free is hard, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is on there.
I’m waiting for BG3 to make a Linux thingy. Until then, it’'s on the “maybe” list.
If it’s not native on Linux, it needs to be exceptionally good for me to buy it, considering GoG doesn’t have regional pricing.
I’m playing BG3 on Linux on a laptop with integrated graphics, and I haven’t had any issues other than not being able to run it with graphics set to ultra (expected since there’s not graphics card).
How about “Customers in low income countries will pay the same full price for your game.” as a pitch.
Its nice seeing more people using the license.
As a tip when I started doing this I started using a text expander so I didn’t have to copy and paste all the time.
Well, KDE Clipboard seems to make it easy enough for me for now, but perhaps I will set a compose key for it if required.
My main problem tends to be forgetting to add it because I got too emersed in typing the comment.
And it’s kinda useless to add it after the fact, so most of the time, it works because I copy the license first.
Having a hard time understanding what low income, sales price, and AI have to do with Valve.
- The license is for the content of the post. Here, I put a separator.
- Valve has regional pricing, making some games cost a tenth of the price in some regions. GoG does not, so you pay the US price.
- e.g. I bought X4 for ~4x the price of Average AAA console games.
- Though, in case of X4, it seems to have a similar price on Steam, most games tend to be cheaper with regional pricing.
Don’t use the dumb footer link. It doesn’t do anything other than make sure everyone else points and laughs. You’re better than that.
What’s the problem with some laughter.
If there’s nothing to laugh at, people usually pick a loner, harass them until they are angry/miserable and then laugh at them.
I’d rather, they laugh at this, which might also throw a wrench in the works of companies trying to get data without sifting through it properly.
And of course the ones they (i.e. CD Projekt Red) make themselves. The Witcher series, including Gwent spinoffs, and Cyberpunk 2077
Yeah, and lots of new popular indie games. Some recent oneish I’ve got are DREDGE, Rimworld and Stardew Valley. OK not super recent but not all the games are 20 years old or more. Even Skyrim Anniversary is on there.
Yeah, I recently bought X4, which is so badly implemented (at least on Linux) that it gives the same FPS (in the 30s) on Low settings as it does on Ultra.
I even went ahead and bought a new GPU just for that and hardly see a difference, even being suspicious of there being a miner in it.
Fun game nonetheless.
x series has largely been cpu limited by single main thread as long as it’s existed fwiw
Wait, so all I had to do was disable my underclock and I would have gotten the same marginal perf gains that I got by upgrading both my CPU and GPU?
Will Egosoft hire me if I offer to refactor their code into something multithread friendly?
I mean if you’re german you could try working for them lol
That post is pure hysteria. First no one knows when Gabe is going to die, and even if he live very long he may step down due to old age still.
- also worrying so much about something that may happen 14 years later according to op is unnecessary and distorted thinking.
- why assume there is going to be a power vacuum? can’t he and his leadership make pans of succession?
- then believing a whole made-up story going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario is again unnecessary and distorted thinking. Is okay to think of worst case scenarios but to take them as if they were real is gifting ourselves anxiety for free.
- in any case, the mental exercise of thinking of some undesirable possibilities allow us to take precautions and prepare to the extend that is appropriate and reachable. Which would be the most efficient behavior that thwarts “actual fear” as OP writes it.
Sucks being old.
Is it just prejudice? Stereotype? Laziness?
You see this happen to everything. It all gets enshittified. These corps that started out for the end user all end up selling out for profits.
It’s not a secret, not a revelation, nothing new.
Yeah I do have a similar fear. Valve is something special. I tried to hate them, they’re filthy-rich corpos after all, but I can’t. Something of value will be lost when Valve finally succumbs to enshittification, which cannot be said of a lot of other big companies.
But my fear isn’t necessarily about Steam. I have like 20-30 games in my library. Steam is simply the least shit way to play games you have/want to pay for.
I love valve, I have 1000+ games in my library. I also have every crack for every game I could fine. For the rest, I have live virtual machine snapshot of the running game. Of course anythibg live service will not work without a server simulator. To do that we need to, for each games, using wireshark, record all server and peer traffic while also saving all privaye encryptions keys used in the session.
Once games start using TPM processor, they will become uncrackable. Make sure to use a compromised TPM in that case.
I kind of hope gaben has set up something smart for his death. Eg Valve is owned by a trust.
