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

Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

igalia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 327 posts

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#21

Post by stavros »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
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 t…

I do buy quite a few games, which usually end up unplayed. A few times I do binge one, so it's generally worth it for me. I'd like the Steam Machine for playing games in my living room with friends etc, even though it might end up unused, but the OSS support really swings the scale towards "take my money".

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#22

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
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 t…

> 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.

I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#23

Post by sabellito »

charcircuit wrote: post #15
huseyinkeles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd like to see that comparison tracking the number of devs and how much open source software each company uses.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#24

Post by TingPing »

righthand wrote: post #14
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.

What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#25

Post by crooked-v »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #22
bryanlarsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power li…

Anybody who has a gaming PC isn't the target market for the Steam Machine. They're going after the console market with the value add of "also it's a real computer that can do real computer stuff".

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#26

Post by amazari »

troupo wrote: post #19

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"

Indeed, their work on WebKit, Servo, Mesa drivers, the kernel, and more is seriously impressive!

Their customers, Valve, in this case, deserve credit for being good FLOSS citizens (even if they are building a DRM walled garden on top of it :/), but the actual workers are the real unsung heroes. Them, Codethink, Collabora, and other open-source consultancies I might have missed are doing the community a huge service."

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#28

Post by bryanlarsen »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #22
bryanlarsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power li…

I assume Value is happy if you buy just 1 or 2 games for your Steam Deck or Steam Machine. It's the people that buy exactly 0 games that they claim to be worried about. IOW, not consumers, but companies buying work PC's.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#29

Post by _aavaa_ »

charcircuit wrote: post #15
huseyinkeles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They seem to be skimping out on their contributions to FFmpeg.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#30

Post by ozarkerD »

ryandrake wrote: post #20
wronglebowski wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.
Post reply on HN