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

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

#271

Post by gishh »

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…

Valve selling skins is just so trivial relative to dopamine-inducing doom-scrolling, social media in general, the toxicity of the news cycle, I can keep going.

It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.

We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.

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

#272

Post by strbean »

cyberax wrote: post #134
reactordev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it. If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security. You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far. But I could be blowing smoke and know…

> But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed. Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.

You'll never stop the arms race, but requiring specialized hardware to cheat is as close as you'll get to a decisive victory against cheats.

The vast majority of cheaters in most games are not sophisticated users. Ease of access and use is the biggest issue.

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

#273

Post by txdv »

levocardia wrote: post #147
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.

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

"We will make linux a viable gaming before we increment that number to 3!"

But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).

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

#274

Post by Dylan16807 »

erikerikson wrote: post #145
JoshTriplett wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/rust, the subreddit for the Rust language, regularly (every 1-2 days at most) gets posts meant for /r/playrust, the subreddit for the Rust game. I genuinely don't know how people manage to get as far as posting without noticing where they are.

It is hard to perceive that which you are not aware exists even with obvious evidence in your face

That's not a great explanation when there's, you know, rust the material.

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

#275

Post by txdv »

craftkiller wrote: post #199
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.

That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

> knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games"

they still do it because you can't play all the multiplayer games with kernel level anticheats

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

#276

Post by tombert »

socalgal2 wrote: post #246
bee_rider wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.

> like Apple: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to los…

More than a little irritating that the only real contenders for smartphones is either Google or Apple, two companies with more-than-a-little dubious business practices.

I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.

Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with me everywhere anyway.

I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably be different companies.

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

#277

Post by bigyabai »

ceedan wrote: post #222
jimbob45 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disagreed. Games like Fortnite and League of Legends went down this road and ended up at even more unfathomable $500 microtransactions. The only issue with skin trading is that people will take it more seriously than it is, which is a problem with all cosmetic systems.

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

#278

Post by strbean »

Xss3 wrote: post #126
jchw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected is the challenge. Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itsel…

Anticheat devs could REALLY benefit by having some data scientists involved. Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban. Is it ever? No. Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human. In the chess of…

> Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.

It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.

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

#279

Post by tombert »

adverbly wrote: post #235
tombert wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean you're completely correct. But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior. So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.

I just wonder if it's an inherent symptom of massive success. I'm not talking Valve level of success, but more like Google and Apple and Microsoft levels. Eventually every company has downturns in the market, and whether or not it's fair the investors/board of directors will think it's because of the current strategy, and they'll engage in terrible rent-seeking behavior.

I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.

To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.

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

#280

Post by blargey »

usefulcat wrote: post #261
xbmcuser wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

It’s definitely more than just private ownership. In fact I’d say that’s the least part of it. Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.

If you want to be specific that general idea could be elaborated as "private ownership by people that only need the C-suite salary, instead of needing a C-suite plus a fat % RoI on the company's entire valuation because that's how much they just put down as a sunk cost."

In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.

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