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Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

theverge.com

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Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#221

Post by jsheard »

Krutonium wrote: post #198
jsheard wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in development. https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...

They also said there was nothing coming for SteamDeck in terms of better hardware about a week before they launched the OLED.

Did they? AFAICT what they actually said was not to expect a faster Steam Deck any time soon, which was true, because the OLED version had basically the same performance as the original and in the two years since they still haven't released anything faster.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#222

Post by ceedan »

jimbob45 wrote: post #214
nialv7 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar). Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/ [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak... [1]: https://c…

To be fair, they may have just wrecked the CS lootbox economy permanently.

They need to keep wrecking it. Skins should just be fixed cost items.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#223

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #219

Hypothetically, if Valve made a strong push to make SteamOS compatible with all Windows programs, not just games, could they make a serious run at knocking down Windows?

And why would they care? Not even Microsoft really cares about Windows licensing for consumers and businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows.

There is no real business case.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#224

Post by vablings »

cuvinny wrote: post #195
vablings wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big portion of that is the rather poorly made anti-tamper solution they are using called 'Theia' most cheat developers are too unintelligent to correctly reverse engineer this kind of binary obfuscation

I'm curious, what makes it poorly made if it is working? I don't know anything about it or the game or the state of cheating in the game.

Poor performance and not super advanced. There are better options on the market that have less performance impact and better obfuscation

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#225

Post by charcircuit »

ninth_ant wrote: post #159
charcircuit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.

Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.

It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper support for ARM to make out the most performance on the most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games, but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#226

Post by lukan »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #215
lukan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban." Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter, that you can spot it in game data reliable to apply automatic bans?

Anisotropic mouse movement? Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data? There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.

Like another commentor mentioned, I think that only works for a specific cheat(engine) - as long as they don't adjust (and randomize more for example). If it could be solved with some statistics, I think it would have been done already. I ain't a statistician though, but if you feel confident, I think there is quite some money in it, if you find a real world solution.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#227

Post by lunar_rover »

the__alchemist wrote: post #78
jitl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This system allows playing unmodified production x86 executables on arm64. It doesn’t have anything to do with the developers.

That's great, but begs the question: why not just compile the games for ARM?

So Valve won't need to convince developers to do anything expensive and old games will also work. Most games on Steam Deck aren't tested by the original developer at all.

Windows on ARM games are extremely rare. Linux native means dealing with Linux desktop APIs and poor support in commercial engines.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#228

Post by charcircuit »

ohdearnopls wrote: post #113
charcircuit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for the…

Your argument is illogical. If devs don’t want to support it, they simply will not support it—as evidenced by the thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified, but either run just fine, or don’t run at all with the devs not giving it a second thought. Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows,…

I never said they were forced to support, but that they are forced to fund such a thing for their game as opposed to their being an option for Valve to fund it.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#229

Post by tombert »

adverbly wrote: post #98

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.

All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#230

Post by jaggederest »

nialv7 wrote: post #210
TulliusCicero wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.

Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar). Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/ [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak... [1]: https://c…

I'd guess that there's markedly different margins on lootboxes versus running the entire steam store.

I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).

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