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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

#851

Post by mitkebes »

Gormo wrote: post #743
dmos62 wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?

> So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be. > Or, is…

A lot of Linux ports have serious issues, it's quite common to get better performance/fewer bugs by forcing a Linux native steam game to run the windows version through Proton instead.

Realistically a lot of devs aren't going to make Linux versions at all (or be able to spend time actually fixing issues with them) unless Linux users make up a bigger market share. Valve's efforts are helping to grow Linux market share, which is a necessary step before we can ever hope for most devs to focus on Linux compatibility.

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

#852

Post by mitkebes »

john01dav wrote: post #803
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.

Their absurdly high 30% cut combined with having the only otherwise decent store with real network effect driven market share is a very real criticism

To be fair 30% is the standard.

As far as I know, all of the following stores take a 30% cut:

* Steam * GOG * Microsoft store * Xbox store * PlayStation store * Nintendo eShop * App store * Play store * Kindle store

There's also stuff like Audible where Amazon takes a 75% cut unless you agree to exclusively sell your audiobook through them. And there was a lawsuit over that because it turned out Audible was actually only paying authors a 15% cut, while keeping 85% of sales for themselves.

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

#853

Post by pjmlp »

bigyabai wrote: post #843
pjmlp wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubisoft doesn't own one of the top three games console, and the most sold desktop operating system in history.

Ubisoft made games people wanted to play. It's not a ton of leverage, but more than you can say for Microsoft studios. What can Microsoft even threaten? No more Fallout 76 and Halo Infinite ? Linux is banned from Bedrock Edition? They'll re-cancel the Perfect Dark reboot? Every punishment I try to imagine is like death-by-pillow-fighting.

Pillow fights hurt as well, it is a matter of pillow mastery.

Microsoft studios can eventually only be available in non-Steam stores for example, like PS, XBox console and PC app store.

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

#854

Post by Nition »

YmiYugy wrote: post #812
Nition wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Settings -> Interface -> "Notify me about additions or changes..." to disable it, by the way.

Thanks, but it's still pretty scummy how hidden that is. This could have just been a checkbox on the pop up.

Yeah absolutely, I don't disagree.

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

#855

Post by M95D »

monerozcash wrote: post #845
M95D wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GoG should also directly support Linux. GOG is an online shop. It shouldn't support anything but browsers, bank cards and download managers.

The charitable interpretation here is that GOG should ship linux binaries, whether native or wine-wrapped installers. This would be a perfectly reasonable ask despite GOG being a webshop that only supports browsers.

Wine wrapped installers for ... which distro? They ship a shell script that extracts the linux game binaries to user's home dir. Works on all linuxes.

GOG ships what's available. If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?

Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux. If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".

BTW, you can set up your linux to directly execute Windows binaries using binfmt_misc, but that may also be too hard for some...

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

#856

Post by monerozcash »

M95D wrote: post #855
monerozcash wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The charitable interpretation here is that GOG should ship linux binaries, whether native or wine-wrapped installers. This would be a perfectly reasonable ask despite GOG being a webshop that only supports browsers.

Wine wrapped installers for ... which distro? They ship a shell script that extracts the linux game binaries to user's home dir. Works on all linuxes. GOG ships what's available. If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game? Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the win…

> Wine wrapped installers for ... which distro?

I don't see why that should matter. It's games, you'd practically have to ship your own libraries anyway.

>If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?

Personally I couldn't give less of a shit, I'm an adult and have better things to do than play videogames.

I certainly do think it's not an unreasonable wish, and it wouldn't even be particularly hard. If GOG wanted to, they could provide pre-configured wine-wrapped installers for games that just work.

I do not know whether or not this would make financial sense for them, but Valve seems to think so, and I suspect GOG could do with a few cheap European software engineers wrapping games for them. Hell, they could even cut costs further by just open-sourcing their wrappers and largely relying on user-submitted patches for maintenance.

>Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux.

If you'd ever used Wine you'd know how fiddly it is, there'd obviously be a lot of value in having someone else handle that fiddling for you.

> If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".

I don't know if GOG shares your poor attitude, but that certainly wouldn't be a good way to run a business. Try coming out of the basement every now and then.

The question for grown-ups with things to do in their lives is usually not whether or not something is too hard, but whether or not it is worth spending their time on. If I ever wanted to play a game, looking up some workaround for a wine-related crash is the last thing I'd want to spend my time on.

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

#857

Post by Sophira »

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"

I feel like many other companies would have bought out the technology and then applied for patents to stop anybody else from developing similar things.

This is what you get when you go completely the opposite direction, and it's wonderful.

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

#858

Post by Sophira »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #771
squigz wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell. Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.

Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying to read or watch something. On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would…

Just because most advertising is abusive doesn't mean that all of it is. The popups that Steam shows when you open it are definitely still advertising, as are the recommendations for other games and things like that.

Ironically, this is exactly the reason why most other ad networks go to such lengths to track you, because they think they want to show you ads you'd find relevant and thus worthwhile to click on.

Unfortunately, the way the ad networks go about doing this means that they're actually incentivising making money by any means necessary over actually showing relevant ads, so you get ads that are psychologically abusive, full-screen ads that pop up in the middle of a game, ad networks selling off the data they have on you, etc.

That is why I will permanently have an adblocker - since this is how things work now - but why I don't care nearly as strongly about the Steam ads.

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

#859

Post by tedd4u »

duped wrote: post #529
johnnyanmac wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't an "issue" so much as a feature. Apple had some vulkan support until move to the full A1 architecture had them only make Metal a first class citizen to the GPU. Concurrently happening was a pretty nasty breakup of Apple with the Khronos group. This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.

It's an issue for me, a Mac owner. All the games I want to play have buggy graphics on Mac. I have a PC just for playing with my friends. Apples decisions are often wrong when it comes to third party software.

Apple's view on your situation is probably that you still bought / keep the Mac (not intended flippantly).

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

#860

Post by Telaneo »

pjmlp wrote: post #853
bigyabai wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubisoft made games people wanted to play. It's not a ton of leverage, but more than you can say for Microsoft studios. What can Microsoft even threaten? No more Fallout 76 and Halo Infinite ? Linux is banned from Bedrock Edition? They'll re-cancel the Perfect Dark reboot? Every punishment I try to imagine is like death-by-pillow-fighting.

Pillow fights hurt as well, it is a matter of pillow mastery. Microsoft studios can eventually only be available in non-Steam stores for example, like PS, XBox console and PC app store.

Even Sony is releasing their games on Steam since they finally figured out that releasing their games for the PC is a more profitable venture than having them be console exclusives. Good luck convincing Microsoft of doing the opposite. Sure, they can make their games Xbox or MS Store exclusives, but it would be an irrational decision even if their end-goal is nothing but profit, since exclusivity clearly will lose them more sales than they can earn back in not having Steam be a middleman.
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