Any word on when their new hardware will come out? It's been 6 months since the steam machine etc was announced and you still can't order one
Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
511–520 of 632 posts
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I forgot to mention in-game currency. I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support. Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady si…
> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support. Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App. Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The market rate for this is low single digit percents. We're talking about virtually every country on Earth. Good luck trying to replicate that, the taxes/legal entity part alone will cost you an arm and a leg in setup time, not to mention ongoing costs in accounting, filing reports and dealing with other bureaucracy BS. > Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue. I'm not talking about bandwidth or a CDN…
> Good luck trying to replicate that, Why would you need to? Notice that the comment you replied to used the phrasing "market rate". The service you're describing is commoditized today and none of the major players charge anywhere near 30%.
> The service you're describing is commoditized today
Payment, yes, that is effectively commoditized. But Stripe, Paypal or cryptocoins only solve the "collect and move money across the world" part, not the "deal with the BS around taxes and tariffs in an N-N matrix of countries for publishers and consumers".
As a publisher of a game or other piece of software, I either have to use one of the global storefronts (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Steam, Epic, Microsoft Store) to abstract this problem away for me (and all of them but MS have a somewhat comparable revenue share), or I have to find publishers in each jurisdiction I want to sell and negotiate with them and have additional expenses and efforts in repatriating the income, or I have to go and create my own legal entity for each jurisdiction and deal with filing the proper taxes and other BS on my own. Oh and notably the latter case also applies to dealing with sanctions lists - can't imagine OFAC being happy when my, say, Swiss subsidiary has the sanctioned offspring of a Russian oligarch buy a game from them?
This regulatory moat of doing international business is what keeps revenue shares at ~30% across the global stores. It is extremely difficult to build a competitor for the messes I mentioned - otherwise, someone else would have stepped up long ago to capture this gigantic money spigot.
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#514It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again. Units are showing up for as much as $300 in resell-value already. What I don't get is why their shop page just gives me an "out of stock" panel, instead of the purchase button. Why won't they just let me buy and pay it, and have it ship whenever? Is having customers to regularly check for new stock (and potentially missing it) better than ... just having the…
...in the US. Other countries have stock.
Yeah I'm pretty sure there's no stock around in every single region, at least according to this: https://www.steamhardwarestock.com/history
Note that they don't check every second so they might miss some smaller restocks (or really orders which got closed and resulted in a few more units being re-added, since the actual stock is fully gone).
I've been trying really hard to get this new Steam Controller, I've been dreaming about playing grand strategies from my bed on the TV, but using a mouse in the bed is awful! This controller is essentially made for me. No luck so far at all the last few days, despite spending quite a few hours checking every few seconds! Region is also Germany. I've given up until the next restock Valve has announced will come "soon", but I'm guessing I'll miss it because there's too many bots aimed at their store page, not even sure why to be frank, are there really thousands of people willing to spend 3x for a singular controller, even if it's a nice one? The market seems to indicate that.
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that's Valve's fault. Windows is designed for gamepads to emulate an Xbox controller. All those Steam Deck competitors are implemented as an Xbox controller with a partial keyboard grafted on. That's why you need Legion Space or Armoury Crate to make them usable - they tell the controller firmware what keybindings to send for those rear paddles. InputPlumber serves this purpose on Linux. Without it, you…
Windows supports Generic HID game controllers with 8 axis and 128 buttons already. And a few hat switches. And if your devices needs more than that, you can enumerate as multiple devices if needed. Not sure if there is a HID type for rumble support though. So, there's no reason a Steam Controller couldn't operate without a special driver. Some functionality may require custom software to support though. I have severa…
It's a bit more tricky, a Generic HID just gives you a DirectInput device, while reasonably modern games use Xinput. Microsoft never provided a way to map DirectInput devices to Xinput. For Xinput to work a Microsoft specific USB protocol is needed, not a Generic HID device. Many third party controllers have a switch or button combination to switch between XInput and DirectInput modes for this reason.
Microsoft has a new API with GameInput that addresses this situation and allows mapping Generic HID devices onto game controller via config file, but it doesn't work retroactively, it only works for games that use the new GameInput API.
Valve could of course provide a way to switch and emulate other protocols too, just like other third party vendors do, but there is no USB standard that makes things "just work" in Windows when it comes to gamepads, you always need extra drivers, USB modes or other hacks.
On consoles the situation is even worse, modern consoles deliberately lock out any unlicensed third party controller. Playstation3 was the first and last console that supported standard USB controller, while PS5 doesn't even support PS4 controller.
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#516It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again. Units are showing up for as much as $300 in resell-value already. What I don't get is why their shop page just gives me an "out of stock" panel, instead of the purchase button. Why won't they just let me buy and pay it, and have it ship whenever? Is having customers to regularly check for new stock (and potentially missing it) better than ... just having the…
> It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again. "Underpriced good at it again" would be more accurate.
God forbid a company want to sell something for a smaller profit than they can make by selling it only to the people with that most money
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I forgot to mention in-game currency. I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support. Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady si…
> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support. Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App. Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.
None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day. Even GOG ki…
> The alternative isn't no DRM Says you. Steam made DRM a no-brainer for developers and even got almost all players to stop complaining about it. If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up. > Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation No, Wine gave us Windows-emulation. Even DXVK was not originally developed by Valve. They polished it all to make it more user friendly and fixed game spec…
> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.
> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.
> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#519[flagged]
Re: Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to utilize all features of an 8BitDo controller at once, you also need Steam. XInput mode means no gyro, no back buttons bindable in software, Switch mode gives you gyro but makes your triggers digital, and you still can't bind the back buttons in software. You're limited to duplicating an existing input via the 8BitDo app and binding it globally at the firmware level. If you use the 8BitDo Pro 2 with Ste…
THANK YOU It's been driving me crazy seeing all the hate Valve is getting over compatibility concerns when Valve is the only one making controller support on Windows outside of an Xbox controller work. For years I just assumed I couldn't use many of my controllers on Windows, until Steam added the ability to act as the in between and properly handle it. Microsoft has no interest in making anything other than their Xb…
This isn't even just a Windows thing either; Steam Input works pretty well on Linux for me.