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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

igalia.com

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Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#11

Post by palata »

zem wrote: post #5
stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

I had barely played games for years, and got a steam deck just because it seemed like a cool linux device I could use both for gaming and tinkering. it has definitely gotten me back into gaming in a big way, the experience really is very nice.

Same here! I actually stopped playing when I moved entirely to Linux, and have been running on laptops without a good GPU solution since then.

I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#12

Post by layer8 »

stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

There’s probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy physical products you won’t use. That has pretty low monetary efficiency for the purpose.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#13

Post by stavros »

layer8 wrote: post #12
stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

There’s probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy physical products you won’t use. That has pretty low monetary efficiency for the purpose.

But maybe I'll use them!

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#14

Post by righthand »

stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision.

Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#15

Post by charcircuit »

huseyinkeles wrote: post #7
stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

That’s what happens when you don’t need to please the shareholders.

Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#16

Post by layer8 »

stavros wrote: post #13
layer8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s probably a better way to sponsor Valve than to buy physical products you won’t use. That has pretty low monetary efficiency for the purpose.

But maybe I'll use them!

Well, you did state “just to support their OSS efforts”. ;)

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#18

Post by bryanlarsen »

stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games...

They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.

Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#19

Post by troupo »

Igalia is a superhero company doing a lot of great work with surprisingly little fanfare.

Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#20

Post by ryandrake »

wronglebowski wrote: post #6
fidotron wrote: post #2

> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing. Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.

It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.

So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.
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