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Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

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Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#31

Post by iwontberude »

echelon wrote: post #12
modeless wrote: post #4

Valve's hardware products will be successful but remain niche. And that's ok. They are unwilling to pursue business models that require locking down hardware in order to subsidize it with software purchases, and I love that about them. As a result their hardware will always be more expensive. They will not outcompete Meta in VR or Sony/MS/Nintendo in consoles because price is king for the mass market. Valve's hardwar…

Valve's products are 100% designed to punch a hole through Windows Store monopolization. It encourages developers to write for Linux. Microsoft has been trying to corner Valve. Valve is finding clever ways out by getting developers to finally make their games Linux compatible. If Valve's consoles become broadly successful, that's an added bonus. The real win is to outflank Microsoft. One of Microsoft's biggest mistak…

Microsoft and Nvidia (amongst many others) are happy to leave their gaming customers hanging for years in order to inflate the AI bubble further. They don’t care about gaming in any significant capacity. Valve is still a great gaming focused company and they will be successful.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#32

Post by teddyh »

> (2011, proxied quote from The Cambridge Student via The Escapist; the link in that article is dead, and a search on the site for “Newell” turns up no results)

Here’s the latest copy of the original article in The Cambridge Student:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220924191721/https://www.tcs.c...>

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#33

Post by debugnik »

echelon wrote: post #12
modeless wrote: post #4

Valve's hardware products will be successful but remain niche. And that's ok. They are unwilling to pursue business models that require locking down hardware in order to subsidize it with software purchases, and I love that about them. As a result their hardware will always be more expensive. They will not outcompete Meta in VR or Sony/MS/Nintendo in consoles because price is king for the mass market. Valve's hardwar…

Valve's products are 100% designed to punch a hole through Windows Store monopolization. It encourages developers to write for Linux. Microsoft has been trying to corner Valve. Valve is finding clever ways out by getting developers to finally make their games Linux compatible. If Valve's consoles become broadly successful, that's an added bonus. The real win is to outflank Microsoft. One of Microsoft's biggest mistak…

> It encourages developers to write for Linux.

Valve actually encourages devs to only provide Windows builds compatible with Proton, or at least it used to, to the disappointment of some professional porters. Mainly because several devs kept leaving their Linux builds abandoned while still maintaining their Windows ones.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#34

Post by ryandvm »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago, since that could have reduced the stranglehold of Steam on the gaming marketplace. Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself. Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform. Still: are consumers better off today than…

I tried to use Microsoft's Game Pass and the Xbox store on a Windows machine with multiple users.

It was astoundingly unusable for sharing Microsoft's own game within my own household with my own family members. Completely broken user experience.

It's not hard to believe that Steam was able to thrive because Microsoft has just done an amazingly bad job with this. I've been in software dev for 20 years and it still baffles me that companies with tens of thousands of engineers can produce such shitty software experiences.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#35

Post by potatolicious »

Are they actually running the Apple playbook in reverse? It seems to me that they're actually running Apple's playbook pretty squarely, just in another domain.

First-gen product that seemed to not know where it's going? Check.

Continued quiet iteration behind closed doors despite first-gen being a flop? Check.

Sticking with the product line over many years, where most other companies would have written off and thrown in the towel? Check.

Multi-pronged GTM strategy where other products prove out key bits of next product? Check. (see: SteamOS and Proton setting the stage for Steam Deck, which in turn sets the stage for Steam Machine 2)

Deep software-hardware integration in ways that are highly salient to users? Check (see: foviated streaming for Steam Frame, Steam Deck "just works")

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#36

Post by kemayo »

CharlesW wrote: post #28
kemayo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they've got Apple targeted so much, because Apple has been so thoroughly not-invested in gaming. The place they're closest to colliding is VR, but Apple's Vision headset is doing something really different from Valve's VR products, which are far more directly lined up against Meta's Oculus. Valve could branch into Apple's areas, but they don't seem particularly interested in doing so yet. EDIT: rather, A…

> I'm not sure they've got Apple targeted so much, because Apple has been so thoroughly not-invested in gaming. And yet, Apple controls the world's largest gaming economy (~$78B in 2025), dwarfing Sony's (~$31B) and Microsoft's (~$24B).

I could amend to "Apple is thoroughly not-invested in the kind of gaming that Valve is invested in".

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#37

Post by wetpaws »

cHaOs667 wrote: post #15

"ProtonDB tracks compatibility, and counts 7000+ games that are verified to work as well or almost as well as on Windows" - I always laugh when a media outlet uses ProtonDB as an example as the reality is something different. I have a ~1500 games big Steam Library and I'm also a Linux User for 20+ years - yes, I do use Windows only for gaming and on my work pc. When I fire up my linux workstation or steam deck and br…

[dead]

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#38

Post by agoodusername63 »

sand500 wrote: post #11
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago, since that could have reduced the stranglehold of Steam on the gaming marketplace. Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself. Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform. Still: are consumers better off today than…

Not just usable, better performant than Windows too. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...

It really depends on your GPU drivers.

If you're using nvidia like 75% of Steam's hardware survey reports, it's a mixed bag and 1% lows are fucking abysmal compared to windows.

But try getting nvidia to care about Linux beyond CUDA. They'd rather just stop selling GPUs to normal people before they do that.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#39

Post by k4rli »

cHaOs667 wrote: post #15

"ProtonDB tracks compatibility, and counts 7000+ games that are verified to work as well or almost as well as on Windows" - I always laugh when a media outlet uses ProtonDB as an example as the reality is something different. I have a ~1500 games big Steam Library and I'm also a Linux User for 20+ years - yes, I do use Windows only for gaming and on my work pc. When I fire up my linux workstation or steam deck and br…

gamer!==gamer. These are your own choices. For me Assetto Corsa + other racing games + CS2 work perfectly. And with sway/i3, unlike in Windows, I can throw the game around in whichever way I wish. No laggy alt-tab or random crashes that my Windows user friends often have.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#40

Post by entropicdrifter »

bigyabai wrote: post #26
deltoidmaximus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this was more in support of their new VR headset which has an ARM processor. I actually doubt we'll see a Steam Phone even if the idea is interesting to me (since it would be a linux phone). At least, I don't think we'll see it any time soon.

> since it would be a linux phone It doesn't have to be. Proton runs fine on Android.

On the other hand, Valve has built a compatibility layer for ARM Linux to run Android APKs, so if anyone could make a jank-free Linux phone it would be them
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