151–160 of 264 posts
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> treat your customers well That's why it took a lawsuit to get refund support for Steam.
That lawsuit specifically had to do with meeting Australian guidelines. I personally have had zero complaints with the Steam refund system here in America.
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I watched a talk by GabeN years ago, where he explained his business philosophy (which also had to do with his exit from Microsoft). It was strikingly simple: treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well (even if the majority of customers don't understand that... yet).
The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience. My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms. They would rather buy/re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher. Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam. They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard/Battle.net aren't even…
They've certainly come a long way. I remember when they first tied the release of CounterStrike to installing Steam (CS 1.6, 2002), and that was not received well. Online auth was spotty. People were not happy about having this extra software hogging their memory.
But Valve steadily improved it, and made a worthwhile value proposition.
It's worth comparing to Microsoft's incredibly clumsy and ill-fated "Games For Windows Live". At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success? I suppose it's a management problem.
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The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience. My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms. They would rather buy/re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher. Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam. They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard/Battle.net aren't even…
> The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience. They've certainly come a long way. I remember when they first tied the release of CounterStrike to installing Steam (CS 1.6, 2002), and that was not received well. Online auth was spotty. People were not happy about having this extra software hogging their memory. But Valve steadily improved it, and made a worthwhile value proposition. It's worth com…
I want to buy a SteamDeck. But I don't think I have the spare hours. After work, taking care of the kids, and housework I _might_ have 1 spare hour a day to sit down with the wife. I'd rather watch something on TV with her. To have any kind of free time I have to stay up till 1am! I could bring the SteamDeck when I bring the kids to the park, but that just feels like I'm cheating the kids. I work from home. 8am-9am g…
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Wine is not an emulator, therefore if your definition of an emulator brands Wine as an emulator, your definition is wrong. :)
It may not be an emulator in a highly specific & technical sense used by and useful to a small group of experts. It is an emulator in the general and widely-recognized sense of "software that runs software originally intended for a different, incompatible system." You see this all the time when a jargon word enters the general non-specialist vocabulary. It doesn't make either usage wrong, though it can be confusing s…
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Wine is not an emulator, therefore if your definition of an emulator brands Wine as an emulator, your definition is wrong. :)
It may not be an emulator in a highly specific & technical sense used by and useful to a small group of experts. It is an emulator in the general and widely-recognized sense of "software that runs software originally intended for a different, incompatible system." You see this all the time when a jargon word enters the general non-specialist vocabulary. It doesn't make either usage wrong, though it can be confusing s…
There was supposedly a naming discussion in 1993 which resulted in “WINE is not an emulator”. Maybe this was to remind people that you still needed an x86 processor (WINE is not an x86 emulator), or maybe it was born from the idea that WINE does not emulate Windows—maybe it “provides a compatibility layer” or “reimplements the Windows interfaces”.
The Windows APIs are not so well-specified that a mere reimplementation of them would run so much software as WINE does.
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That lawsuit specifically had to do with meeting Australian guidelines. I personally have had zero complaints with the Steam refund system here in America.
The Steam refund system in America only exists because of the Australian lawsuit
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Valve’s customers are the studios. Only half-sarcastically.
Not really. More like hostage to distribution. If you list your game on Steam, you can't list your game for a cheaper price anywhere else on the internet. People put up with that because they still come out ahead by listing on Steam.
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Why is it magic? Wine has been around since forever. It's not like Valve wrote most of the underlying code proton runs on. And what's with all the valve/steam hype from people that should know better? At the end of the day you are using a DRM front end (steam) that fragments the mod ecosystem and obfuscates the process of installing and running the software you paid for on your own computer.
The initial release of Proton felt like magic to me. I tried many games with Wine across many years, from versions well before Wine 1.0 to 4.0, I also tried CodeWeavers something (Crossover?) when that was a thing. A few games worked very well, for example I remember running a newly-released Civ4 almost seamlessly. But most games didn't. Some would be playable but with graphical or audio glitches, performance or stab…
I haven't been able to find any info to confirm but I have a sneaking suspicion that Proton builds heavily on Codeweaver's Crossover. The vast majority of commits in the Proton repo come from Codeweavers employees