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The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

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Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#231

Post by bigyabai »

dezzadk wrote: post #228
bigyabai wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's no…

>There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance. Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around…

I don't use Brave, I'm pretty clued-in to Eich's personal dysfunctions. Contextually, this is more like you saying that Chrome users are ignoring the real innovations that Google leverages like KHTML. It's certainly an important element of the program, but it's also one of the oldest, least-complex and easiest to replace. The heritage Chrome owes to KHTML is basically nothing at this point, the same really goes for Proton too if you've seen what the repo looks like today.

I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the performance deficit still persists: https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...

> You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork

Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or Proton users.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#232

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

piyuv wrote: post #162
Shacklz wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike other corporations, they actually didn't really do all that much to make it a monopoly though. It's kind of an organic monopoly simply by being better than everything else, by a wide margin. There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the frien…

The library one amasses is a huge lock-in though, you’re downplaying it

I don't see it as lock-in as you don't have to keep buying games from Steam - you can just buy games from other places if you want and then have multiple libraries.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#233

Post by agnishom »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #2

I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement? Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck. (Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported to it — and was duly impressed.)

> I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement?

Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#234

Post by blooalien »

ZeWaka wrote: post #170
lupusreal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. Eh.. It seems very common for Steam users to have libraries of thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep discounts during sales. The way Steam operates does a great job of instilling Fear Of Missing Out, and getting people to buy things they never end up using.

> thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep discounts during sales This is more of a Humble Bundle thing than a Steam issue.

> This is more of a Humble Bundle thing than a Steam issue.

And Fanatical, and (many) other Steam-friendly game bundlers, but Steam themselves also contributed to my massive game library on Steam, due to those seasonal sales bein' just too good to pass up. :)

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#235

Post by johnnyanmac »

sotix wrote: post #195
johnnyanmac wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark souls exists because Demons Soul existed. But if you ask Sony or even FromSoft, they'd never say Demons Soul was a success. It just didn't bomb so dosasteroisly as to prematurely cancel an entire sub-genre. You can have disappointments and even failures while Also admitting they lead to successes by not giving up. That was all I was saying.

It seems you’re conflating financial success with all types of success. There can be engineering successes and artistic successes in this context.

Indeed. I can name quite a few of both kinds of success and the end result was unfortunately a shattering of a studio who did get a chance to iterate on the potential.

As a business, it's clear what kind of success valve prioritizes.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#236

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

atrus wrote: post #220
candiddevmike wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW RimWorld on steam is DRM free. You can copy it and launch it without steam.

Yeah, people complain about steam DRM, but it's not even enforced. Games have to choose to enable steam drm. I'm not going to begrudge Valve for having an optional tool.

I think for me it’s less about the games themselves and more about not wanting to support a platform that embraces the concept at all.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#237

Post by dezzadk »

bigyabai wrote: post #231
dezzadk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance. Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around…

I don't use Brave, I'm pretty clued-in to Eich's personal dysfunctions. Contextually, this is more like you saying that Chrome users are ignoring the real innovations that Google leverages like KHTML. It's certainly an important element of the program, but it's also one of the oldest, least-complex and easiest to replace. The heritage Chrome owes to KHTML is basically nothing at this point, the same really goes for P…

You are still downplaying the effort of Wine massively. Wine is several millions lines of code compared to Proton and it isn't just "syscalls", its decades of trial and error and bugfixing making a mature codebase that Proton is based on. You might think only DXVK matters, just because you are one of the manchilds who buys these extremely hollow GPU-intensive soulless games at launch just to be disappointed every single time.

You just plain out refuse to see it, cuz you totally drank the kool aid.

Steamdeck have literally zero AAA-games compared to Nintendo, because thats the joy of owning a Steamdeck! Smearing diapers in Nintendos face and pirating their games like a true neckbeard, right?

Steam neckbeards are such manchilds. The "idea" of a Steamdeck sells more than the actual games and this is what this article proves. Sad, but true.

The catalog of games on Steam suck, objectively. Unpopular opinion maybe - to those that are addicted to browsing shitty new soulless games on Steam.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#238

Post by sph »

tossandthrow wrote: post #24
danso wrote: post #15

Sounds like the Switch 2 might be a bit more powerful and similarly priced to the 3-year-old Deck. But even if Switch’s hardware feature set was substantially better, Steam’s much cheaper (and more expansive) library is still the killer feature. I don’t think the Switch 1’s Zelda launch title has ever been discounted lower than $40 despite being 8 years old. On Steam, virtually every top title will be 50% within 2 ye…

My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda. Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2, mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering, which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.

> My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.

What? Given that 99.9% of all games are published on Steam, what you are comparing is Zelda against gaming as a whole, not “the quality of games on steam”

Zelda is good, but it’s not better than literally all of gaming. If you are not a die hard Nintendo fan, I’d rather use Steam and enjoy saner pricing. There is always emulation for Nintendo.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#239

Post by sph »

INTPenis wrote: post #109
butlike wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the 30%, it's about giving you the ball for $3.30 then taking the ball away sometime later saying you can no longer play with it and no, there won't be any refunds.

Playing devil's advocate here but I've had a Steam account for well over 15 years now and my library of games has only grown. I am sure there are stories and certain situations where people have lost access to games, but I think they're fringe cases.

I have an account as old as yours, and the games I have lost access to have been pulled by the publisher, never by Valve. We’re talking about one or two games in a 500+ library, and I don’t even remember which.

Yeah, it’s not a very big concern of mine either.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#240

Post by LightHugger »

michaelsshaw wrote: post #71
LightHugger wrote: post #45

> Some people have criticized that their company culture of libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important values including equity and inclusion. To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as wel…

It's crazy that, according to people like you, we've always been doing merit-based hiring and still the computer workforce is disproportionately white and male. Nothing fishy there at all.

"People like you" So prejudiced, maybe get that looked at.

It's a complicated topic, but no we have not always been doing merit based hiring. However, merit based hiring does result in imbalanced race and gender distributions due to long term societal issues and demographic distributions at earlier stages.

Basically, there is a skewed class distribution at the source. You have to fix it at the source via equality of opportunity and making our society more equal. I'm not a conservative, i'm very far left and strongly believe in making society more equal in general. However. Trying to fix it at the destination is called racial discrimination and is dehumanizing and evil and anyone who does it should suffer prosecution.

You don't get to dehumanize and discriminate against individual people for the greater good, i will personally go out of my way to see you receive consequences if you try this and you're doing it somewhere i can see. There's a lot of us with this opinion, hopefully your stance starts getting chilled from fear of blowback.

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