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The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

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Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#31

Post by forrestthewoods »

oarsinsync wrote: post #19
forrestthewoods wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive. Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive. Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.

> Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price. One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.

> Note the use of ‘store’ here

No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer.

> One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com

Just checked, $35 on both.

Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pleased and there would be consequences.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#33

Post by sylens »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #22

No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons wo…

> I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps.

I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#34

Post by PaulHoule »

glenstein wrote: post #4

It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS. It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with wh…

The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#35

Post by accurrent »

I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller). I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than bundle the crapware that is windows.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#36

Post by Brybry »

phoronixrly wrote: post #6
whytevuhuni wrote: post #3

They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.

I hope Gabe Newell outlives me, because I don't want to see Valve go down the road of other game studios...

My main long term worry with Steam is that Gaben will die and then Valve will IPO.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#37

Post by mazork »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #26
whytevuhuni wrote: post #3

They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.

I find it funny that every time other publishers try to recreate Steam with their own catalogues, a good chunk of gamers (myself included) just refuse to buy "exclusives" on other platforms, to the point they eventually crawl back to Steam. EA held out for a LONG time. I broke my reluctance only once because I wanted to play the latest FarCry game, but otherwise, I've kept all my games on Steam. They eventually caved…

Deadlock is absolutely not a Team Fortress spiritual successor, it has much much more in common with Dota 2 than TF2, and is really full of interesting features and polish for where it's at in its development.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#38

Post by lolinder »

whytevuhuni wrote: post #3

They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.

> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of

They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).

The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#39

Post by TehCorwiz »

paradite wrote: post #20

I might be missing the point of the author, but what's the difference between Steam Deck and a normal Windows gaming laptop in terms of software freedom? Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2). I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security…

I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of "Software freedom". It refers more to the process and transparency of the software than to the choice. That said, the Steam Deck is just a handheld PC. And Valve gives instructions on how to install Windows on it should you want to do that. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA...

Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#40

Post by zuminator »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #13
sneak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is Steam not a monopoly, TFA mentions how it’s possible to easily install alternative app stores on the Steam Deck. It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.

They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive. Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive. Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.

I'm genuinely curious. If that's the case, how is it that I have bought dozens of games on the humblebundle store (for Steam) that were far cheaper than the retail price on Steam itself?
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