Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Valve Introduces Proton Next

linuxgamingcentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 264 posts

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#211

Post by SkyMarshal »

musicale wrote: post #99
SkyMarshal wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Steam's downstream fork of Wine, which is not an emulator.

1. An emulator is a system which implements another system's functionality so as to serve as a usable replacement. Examples include in-circuit emulators for hardware components, or software emulators for game system hardware. In each case, the emulator is a usable replacement for the original system. 2. WINE reimplements the functionality of Windows, as exposed by the Windows ABI, as software running on Linux. 3. The…

From the source: https://www.winehq.org/

> Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.

QED

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#213

Post by themoonisachees »

musha68k wrote: post #183
themoonisachees wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically anything recent but not the latest components will work well. If you want hassle-free then going with amd everything is the most efficient IMO. I'm running a ryzen 3600 and a radeon rx5700xt, and i've not had any driver issues, be it with x11 or wayland. I've been playing a bunch of games from my library but there are still some games that aren't compatible (for ex. Vermintide 2 has non-compatible anticheat…

Interesting point about VR. I guess the sets and controllers are married even more so to the Windows APIs and will incur stark penalty on immersion for even slightest lag (due to API translation)? A bummer for sure. I also honestly was leaning more towards buying a used RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 from one of the (ex) Ethereum miners. I actually played through Cyberpunk 2077 on Geforce Now "RTX 3080" and am definitely spoil…

I think the VR limitations are more due to graphics. Controllers are just simple bluetooth devices with custom drivers, but graphics is understandably hell. Wayland can't understand how to handle my index being plugged in, and x11 fucks up in ways i didn't think possible.

Hopefully valve is doing what i think they are doing, which is making the steam deck as a test for their hardware platform in order to make a standalone VR headset with a similar chip.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#214

Post by hellonc »

MikusR wrote: post #83
zamalek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> treat your customers well That's why it took a lawsuit to get refund support for Steam.

Because of the policy, games with under short but high quality gameplay are getting hit with refunds. If the playtime is under 2 hours, the refund request goes through with very minimal abuse protection. I've seen people try to do speedrun where the goal is to finish the game in under 2 hours and get a refund. Publishing a short but high production value game on Steam has become a lot less profitable.

Not to mention that the refund policy can be useless as the playtime includes load screens when the server is busy, which happens regardless of the studio size.

That being said, I do believe that the refund policy improved sales volume overall because people buy games knowing that they can always refund if the game isn't for them. Return of the demos I guess?

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#215

Post by hellonc »

neura wrote: post #141
jlund-molfese wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales through the store, yes. You’re welcome to sell Steam keys on your own website, and Valve won’t take any cut at all, while still providing the same services as a purchase through the store. See https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys , at face value, it’s a completely reasonable policy.

Still comes back to "can you sell enough keys on your own to make up for the amount of sales you get through Steam, even after the 30%?" It's great if you think you have a hot game or product that will be sought after by a large enough audience vs people seeing a game show up in their feed or on sale or a friend is playing it or however it ends up in front of you on Steam, a game that maybe you've never heard of befo…

While that's valid, I want to point out that Steam accepts a wide variety of local payment methods that have exorbitant transaction fees compared to Visa. Pretty sure I've seen them cover a particular payment method with 10% fee. Steam takes 15% for big publishers I think and that's not a large profit margin in those scenarios. A lot of younger customers do not have an international credit card and Steam makes purchasing games accessible to them.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#216

Post by stubish »

zamalek wrote: post #194
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success? Because they lack the simple business mantra. Everyone is trying to copy Valve's monetary success without considering the good will expense. GoG garnered a lot of good will by being DRM-free, which accounts for its mediocre success. Epic? They introduced exclusives to PC and, let me tell you, that shit doesn't fly with the PC gamer culture - Epic is where…

Microsoft Store and Gamepass support mods now. At least a year I think.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#217

Post by hellonc »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #12

Proton was instrumental in my move from Windows to Linux. With over 400 games in my back catalog, I didn't want to lose thousands of dollars not to mention thousands of hours on games which I enjoy. Thus far, 92% of games have ran flawlessly for me on Fedora (4 failures in the last 50). The main issues have been related to games that have kernel mode drivers for copy protection or other exotic types of anti-cheat. Pe…

There's a popular online video game that I wouldn't name that seems to be turning a blind eye on Linux users stripping out the anticheat to run the game through Proton, which is very nice of them.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#218

Post by stubish »

hellonc wrote: post #214
MikusR wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> treat your customers well That's why it took a lawsuit to get refund support for Steam.

Because of the policy, games with under short but high quality gameplay are getting hit with refunds. If the playtime is under 2 hours, the refund request goes through with very minimal abuse protection. I've seen people try to do speedrun where the goal is to finish the game in under 2 hours and get a refund. Publishing a short but high production value game on Steam has become a lot less profitable. Not to mention…

People rushing to finish your game in under 2 hours to claim a refund are not your market. If they make up a large enough percentage of purchases for it to matter, you are going bankrupt anyway. They are not playing at beating your game. They are playing at beating the system. Like all those pirates who collect huge libraries of software, movies or music that they are never going to use or care about so little they would never pay anything at all for it.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#219

Post by _cenw »

zamalek wrote: post #25
manchmalscott wrote: post #19

Valve's continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released eight years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it's things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck. The only th…

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).

Though, let's be honest, that's not the reason for Valve investing in Linux. Users wouldn't care what's running underneath their games as long as the games run reasonably well.

Back about a decade ago there was real concern that Microsoft might lock away modern graphics APIs behind some sort of entitlement and Valve simply didn't want to be dependent on Microsoft.

Re: Valve Introduces Proton Next

#220

Post by _Cr15py_ »

I've been out of the loop with Steam for a while. I used it back in the Half-Life, CS Source, and Team Fortress 2 days. However more recently I've been a Stadia user... it just made a lot of sense with a busy life schedule. Grab a controller and sit down on the sofa to play amazing games. With Stadia coming to an end in Jan 2023 I started to look for an alternative... none, for me, came close to what Steam is offering. So I went for a Steam Deck (with a dock) and a PS5 controller. Valve truly is for the gamers.
Post reply on HN