It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
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Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#2Steam really has done an amazing job making Linux systems viable gaming platforms.
The manner in which they've done so shows a delightful understanding of the "unix philosophy" in so many ways, too.
Last month I was doing hardware changes on our home systems, my daughter's steam install and mine copied to new systems with a quick "tar" and no fuss; which was a very pleasant discovery.
They've rarely if ever (that I've seen) gone to extra effort to introduce warts the user has to deal with. Opening up the new deck hardware to show us how to do so, etc... Good eggs there.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#3Steam really has done an amazing job making Linux systems viable gaming platforms. The manner in which they've done so shows a delightful understanding of the "unix philosophy" in so many ways, too. Last month I was doing hardware changes on our home systems, my daughter's steam install and mine copied to new systems with a quick "tar" and no fuss; which was a very pleasant discovery. They've rarely if ever (that I'v…
Yeah I rarely ever “like” a company but Valve has done so much it’s honestly amazing. The 30% they take is soooo worth it for developers who don’t have natural Linux support.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#4Steam really has done an amazing job making Linux systems viable gaming platforms. The manner in which they've done so shows a delightful understanding of the "unix philosophy" in so many ways, too. Last month I was doing hardware changes on our home systems, my daughter's steam install and mine copied to new systems with a quick "tar" and no fuss; which was a very pleasant discovery. They've rarely if ever (that I'v…
Yeah I rarely ever “like” a company but Valve has done so much it’s honestly amazing. The 30% they take is soooo worth it for developers who don’t have natural Linux support.
Reaching a single digit percentage larger user count in exchange for 30% of your revenue is questionable accounting
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I rarely ever “like” a company but Valve has done so much it’s honestly amazing. The 30% they take is soooo worth it for developers who don’t have natural Linux support.
Reaching a single digit percentage larger user count in exchange for 30% of your revenue is questionable accounting
Anecdote: some one else's account of this was that it was really helpful because the Linux portion of the community (while much smaller than other segments) provided consistently high quality feedback/bug reports.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#6Now if only AMD didn't treat ROCm as an afterthought the graghics card landscape could see an interesting shift. Steamdeck with ML capabilities wolud be pretty cool.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I rarely ever “like” a company but Valve has done so much it’s honestly amazing. The 30% they take is soooo worth it for developers who don’t have natural Linux support.
Reaching a single digit percentage larger user count in exchange for 30% of your revenue is questionable accounting
Valve does quite a bit more than just proton.
0. They manage the most popular games store in the western world.
1. They provide a community forum for your users.
2. Host downloads of games (sometimes 100s of GBs). They distribute the content all across the world and handle region specific laws about what can be sold, etc. They host content at edge so downloads are super fast.
3. Process refund requests.
4. Have one of the better VR abstraction layers for game devs.
5. Provide networking and social integration (chat, anti-cheat, friends, etc).
6. They allow you to generate steam keys (at no cost to you) and sell them on your own website.
7. They process payments (PayPal charges ~3% for this, Stripe is 2.9%)
8. Achievements, time tracking, etc. These are useful for game devs who iterate on their formula (most use achievements to see what percent of a user base does X).
That's what I can think off the top of my head benefits the game developers. The list of things that benefits the users is also pretty big (steam sales).
I don't think any company is good or bad but Valve's offer to game devs is a pretty decent one.
> Anecdote: some one else's account of this was that it was really helpful because the Linux portion of the community (while much smaller than other segments) provided consistently high quality feedback/bug reports.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#8A whooping 1% in 9 years, great achievement.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reaching a single digit percentage larger user count in exchange for 30% of your revenue is questionable accounting
Valve does quite a bit more than just proton. 0. They manage the most popular games store in the western world. 1. They provide a community forum for your users. 2. Host downloads of games (sometimes 100s of GBs). They distribute the content all across the world and handle region specific laws about what can be sold, etc. They host content at edge so downloads are super fast. 3. Process refund requests. 4. Have one o…
>0. They manage the most popular games store in the western world.
I do not like the app store model. I rather buy from the developer.
Re: It‘s been 9 years since Valve rolled out the Steam Linux beta
#10Steam is a trap though, no?
You buy software, but if you leave, you lose it all.
Is that correct? there's no way to retain what you've bought?