431–440 of 876 posts
> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future. Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
kinda funny that Microsoft has tried and failed multiple times to make Windows on ARM work and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment
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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…
You hypothesis then is that there is not a _single_ public company that has a healthy relationship with its company? Not one, in the entire global public space? When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy cu…
It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some companies that are more likely to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA, sometimes Apple. But I don’t trust any of those companies to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or Verizon.
Can someone tell me how much more power efficient is ARM actually? Like under load when gaming, not in a phone that sleeps most of the time. I've heard both claims, that it's still a huge difference and that for new AMD Zen it's basically the same.
It's workload-dependent. On-paper, ARM is more power-efficient at idle and simple ops, but slows down dramatically when trying to translate/compose SIMD instructions.
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> At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The nex…
My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption. We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores. Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the St…
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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.
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
They have few employees and massive revenue.
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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"
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.
I was also delighted to see Steam has an effort underway for Android on Linux, allegedly a fork of Waydroid, that they are working on. Tentatively delighted because it's unclear if this really will be open source, but hopefully! https://steamdb.info/app/3029110/info/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valves-version-of-andr... I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for the options here to expan…
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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…
You hypothesis then is that there is not a _single_ public company that has a healthy relationship with its company? Not one, in the entire global public space? When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy cu…
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I still put them in the same box as Apple until they fix the price parity and/or adjust their cut. Even Apple is finally having their hand forced there. They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
The difference is that you aren't forced to buy a game from steam.
We should remember our history so we aren't doomed to repeat it.