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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

#711

Post by account42 »

Telaneo wrote: post #387
tombert wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad. That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyon…

Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked. You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.

That kind of logic is exactly how morals get eroded and all bad practices get excused with "it's just business".

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

#712

Post by kryogen1c »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #156
levocardia wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> gambling/loot box [...] legit ethical concerns

I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?

Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.

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

#713

Post by simonh »

safety1st wrote: post #668
palata wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when Capitalism has favoured monopolies for decades and is actually closer to Feodalism.

There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations. It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might…

On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU country; Russia.

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

#714

Post by noirscape »

kasey_junk wrote: post #415
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not impossible to run a publicly owned company in the US that isn't insanely hostile towards it's customers or employees... it's just really damn difficult because of bad legal precedent.

Dodge v. Ford is basically the source of all these headaches; the Dodge Brothers owned shares in Ford. Ford refused to pay the dividends he had to pay to the Dodge Brothers, suspecting that they'd use the dividends to start their own car company (he wasn't wrong about that part). The Dodge Brothers sued Ford, upon which Fords defense for not paying out dividends was "I'm investing it in my employees" (an obvious lie, it was very blatantly about not wanting to pay out). The judge sided with the Dodge Brothers and the legal opinion included a remark that the primary purpose of a director is to produce profit to the shareholders.

That's basically become US business doctrine ever since, being twisted into the job of the director being to maximize profits to the shareholders. It's slightly bunk doctrine as far as I know; the actual precedent would mostly translate to "the shareholders can fire the directors if they think they don't do a good job" (since it can be argued that as long as any solid justification exists, producing profit for the shareholders can be assumed[0]; Dodge v. Ford was largely Ford refusing to follow his contracts with money that Dodge knew Ford had in the bank), but nobody in the upper areas of management wants to risk facing lawsuits from shareholders arguing that they made decisions that go against shareholder supremacy[1]. And so, the threats of legal consequences morph into the worst form of corporate ghoulishness that's so pervasive across every publicly traded company in the US. It's why short-term decision making dominates long-term planning for pretty much every public company.

[0]: This is called the "business judgement rule", where courts will broadly defer the judgement on if a business is ran competently or not to the executives of that business.

[1]: Tragically, just because it's bunk legal theory, doesn't change that the potential and disastrous consequences of lawsuits in the US are a very real thing.

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

#715

Post by account42 »

hamdingers wrote: post #171
thatguy0900 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company

He lives on a yacht and fills his days diving and doing marine research. I'm pretty sure Valve is mostly running itself.

That doesn't mean he isn't still making the important decisions.

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

#716

Post by tomovo »

ohdearnopls wrote: post #117
charcircuit wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that can result in reputational damage.

Then developers should fix their games and make sure the software they are selling actually works as advertised. End of discussion. I don’t quite understand the logic behind your argument. Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up? That’s ridiculous, utterly consumer-hostile.

I don't think that's the end of the discussion. Let's try to talk separately about developers and publishers. I'm sure game developers would love to spend time making the game run on everything. But publishers work with a budget and schedule and have to consider the returns. If the potential new customers bring more support load and bad reviews, it's not worth it. That, I think, is the end of the discussion for the publisher.

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

#717

Post by _jzlw »

nialv7 wrote: post #688
aperture147 wrote: post #630

I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-w…

I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone. And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capi…

> acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone

I'm so sick of people acting like Valve is some saint that does no wrong. Their market dominance means game developers wanting to reach the PC gamer market must comply with Valve's terms. Why do you think every Japanese visual novel released on the platform is a cut down, all-ages version that requires an off-site patch to restore the full game (and often even then it's censored in weird ways)? They got sick of being delisted while Valve turns a blind eye to all the trash porn games.

Ask yourself, does a marketplace that exerts creative control over specific studios' works while threatening financial repercussions if they don't comply benefit everyone? That sounds more like the mob to me.

Stop deifying companies.

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

#718

Post by concinds »

concinds wrote: post #183
galleywest200 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not matter what Apple wants if Steam ships their own compatibility layer.

Valve is all-in on Linux and their own hardware. They have no reason to invest tons into a platform with an uncooperative vendor who culturally DGAF about gaming. Why run from Windows only to jump into a more hostile ecosystem? You can still run 32-bit x86 games on Windows ARM, you know.

Also, I'll let everyone in on an open secret.

Apple's real goal isn't even the 30% from the Mac App Store. Their vision is to build a library of games that run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and potentially Apple TV and Vision. You can connect a controller to all these devices, so any game would work (without clunky touch controls). That's why they're pushing Metal and will never adopt Vulkan. They want to make their ecosystem as strong as possible against competing ecosystems.

It's also why they've been pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst, why they don't care for web apps, why the Mac and iPad have gotten closer (they want each device just be a form factor that lets you access the same apps and files, though I expect they'll always keep the Mac as open as it is now), and why they made all their platforms adopt one design language. They probably ported Preview to iOS/iPad, and Home and Clock to the Mac, because they went through the Springboard/LaunchPad and asked themselves: "which of these apps could we bring to every OS?".

It's also why Google is dropping ChromeOS and switching everything to Android. One platform, one app ecosystem. They did it only to keep up with Apple. The tablet/desktop-ish side of their ecosystem lags far behind.

And it's why Valve is going all-in on Linux. Kickstarting an alternative ecosystem.

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

#719

Post by Telaneo »

account42 wrote: post #711
Telaneo wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked. You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.

That kind of logic is exactly how morals get eroded and all bad practices get excused with "it's just business".

Blame the bosses for wanting DRM rather than Valve for making it a default. Blame lawmakers for not regulating DRM out of existence. Valve's playing the game while still being the most consumer friendly option on most fronts, and a solid second place in everything else. Credit where credit's due.

If Steam didn't have nominal DRM, I'd imagine they wouldn't have been able to grow to the point they're at now, and we'd instead have many stores each with their own exclusives, but most of them have worse terms than Steam. That world is worse than the one we have now.

And if you really care, there's always GOG, or the skull and crossbones.

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

#720

Post by vjk800 »

aydyn wrote: post #562
ethbr1 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of this thread is that there are many things that Valve could do to increase its profits over the short, intermediate, and long terms... that it doesn't (presumably because that's not the kind of company it wants to be). As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL"). In m…

I don't see a problem with the first, if they want to outsource HL3 go ahead. Consumers can decide if they want to buy it when it releases, that's just normal economics. As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth,…

> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?

Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.

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