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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

#401

Post by tehjoker »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #264
usefulcat wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Private ownership is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to have a business which has a healthy relationship with its customers. You also need the owners to be people of reasonably good character who understand that the best way to run a business is a win-win approach on both sides, not people who see nothing wrong with extracting maximum profit from the business no matter whom it hurts. The PE horror stories…

Could also consider: employee ownership and public ownership

People complain about the latter because they have higher expectations because the institution is supposed to serve them and often has all the diseases of true scale without being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry skates by because people assume it's out to screw them and they can cherry pick.

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

#402

Post by Telaneo »

stavros wrote: post #398
Telaneo wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you as a developer don't touch the footguns. Avoid those, and your game works fine with no problems, no intervention from Proton or Wine needed.

Oh that's very interesting. Given the large compatibility tables I see, I thought Proton had to cater to almost a majority of games.

It's the Pareto principle doing its thing. 80% of games were fixable by not a whole lot of fixes to Wine (I mean, it's still a lot of work, but once the work is done, you don't need to redo it for 1500 other games), while the remaining 20% are out there doing weird stuff and needs manual fixes of some kind.

If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and everything works as it should. With developers noticing SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80% starts growing to 90%.

Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable though, which pulls the percentage down again.

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

#403

Post by dataflow »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #217
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…

There's an argument that loot boxes that give you cosmetics just aren't that big of a deal, at least if we're talking about adults. Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic. There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are peopl…

> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"

Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.

> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.

I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.

For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.

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

#404

Post by ThatPlayer »

strbean wrote: post #278
Xss3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

There's well analyzed video of a pro player streaming who got temporarily banned for something like this. It might not even have been pre-fire, but post-fire at a different enemy retreating at the same position

https://youtu.be/SFyVRdRcilQ

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

#405

Post by ghurtado »

quitit wrote: post #395
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

>We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract. We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be t…

That's not unique to AI though. That's very common for tech startups.

If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.

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

#406

Post by danbolt »

charcircuit wrote: post #35

I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility.

The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.

A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.

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

#407

Post by groby_b »

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.

The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making games as their calling.

No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.

Passion matters.

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

#408

Post by shmerl »

cedws wrote: post #354

The best thing Valve could do is nuke Wayland/X11/Xwayland from orbit. Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs. X11 is ancient and screen tears. Xwayland is the worst of both worlds.

No, thanks. That's the worst Android did, creating their own incompatible thing. We don't need another NIH like that.

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

#409

Post by shmerl »

cedws wrote: post #378
paulryanrogers wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use or recommend?

I don't use Linux on laptops or desktops, only servers. I've been through all that pain. The userland has a long way to go to be a good OS everyone can use.

You clearly didn't use Linux any time recently.

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

#410

Post by lmm »

bigyabai wrote: post #301
IshKebab wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's still highly debatable. Intel and AMD claim the instruction set makes no difference... but of course they would. And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips? Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact" would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. An…

> And if that's really the case where are the power efficient x86 chips? Where are the power inefficient x86 chips? If you normalize for production process and put the chips under synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for wide SIMD/vector workloads, but more efficient at idle. AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash cows aren'…

Intel spent years trying to get manufacturers to use their x86 chips in phones, but manufacturers turned them down, because the power efficiency was never good enough.
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