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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

#371
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translat…

These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games. You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer…

That's easy to say. But they do prevent some cheating. Don't believe me? Consider the simplest case: No anti-cheat whatsoever. You can just hook into the rendering engine and draw walls at 50% transparency. That's the worst case. Now, we add minimal anti-cheat that convolutes the binary with lots of extra jumps and loops at runtime. Now, someone needs to spend time figuring out the pattern. That effort isn't free. Now, people have to pay for cheats. Guess what? Visa doesn't want to handle payment processing for your hacks & cheats business. So now you're using sketchy payment processors based out of a third-world country. Guess what else? People will create fake hacks & cheats websites that use those same payment processors, and will just take people's money and never deliver the cheats. You get to try to differentiate yourself from literal scammers, how are you going to do that? You can't put the Visa logo on your website. Because you're legit, and you don't want to get sued. Then, the anti-cheat adds heuristic detection for cheat processes. The anti-cheat company BUYS the cheats and reverse-engineers them and improves the heuristics. then the game company makes everyone sign up with a phone number, and permabans that phone number when they're caught cheating. Now some gamers don't want to risk getting banned. Saying that these factors simply don't exist or are insignificant is certainly one of the opinions of all time.

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

#372
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.

Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof... Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Win…

> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement

So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.

Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

I'm not really a fan of this reasoning when in the same breath: Epic is also a private company but has its share of stuff. It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.

I think the point was about publicly traded companies becoming inevitably evil due to shareholder expectations, not about private companies being inherently ethical.

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

#374
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).

Oh it’s not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse. If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it. In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.

There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was discussed here just this past week.

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

#375
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arc Raiders is a great example of a modern and popular multiplayer game that works with proton. I haven't heard about it having a problem with cheating.

Marvel Rivals, Age of Empires 2 DE, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys are other such examples. In fact, Marvel Rivals even explicitly mentioned Bazzite in one of their changelogs! I can't recall an instance when a major game name-dropped a (relatively) minor Linux distro like that.

[deleted]

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

#376
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof... Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Win…

One wonders why other, well funded games stores can't compete on features and sales pricing with steam? Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...

They also don't support having a space character in your password.

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

#377
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it’s not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse. If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it. In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.

There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was discussed here just this past week.

Yeah, Winboat, I might be part of that conversation you're referring to.

I haven't ruled that out yet. I am planning on trying to convince them on this next time they ask me for tech support.

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

#378
post #354

The best thing Valve could do is nuke Wayland/X11/Xwayland from orbit. Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs. X11 is ancient and screen tears. Xwayland is the worst of both worlds.

What do you use or recommend?

I don't use Linux on laptops or desktops, only servers. I've been through all that pain. The userland has a long way to go to be a good OS everyone can use.

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

#379
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>businesses are never going to use computers running fake Windows. why not? If it's cheaper and compatible, why not?

That’s not how Big Enterprise works. “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”. Can you imagine the reputational risk of whoever decided that when something goes wrong they didn’t go with Microsoft? No one is going to trust a gaming company when it comes to their entire IT infrastructure. Besides businesses have an all in one contract with Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL Server, Office, a cer…

I don't think they'd target businesses. I think they could totally ride the current gamers "Switching to Linux instead migrating to Windows 11" wave. Those users would definitely appreciate better compatibility with Windows apps.

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for the…

Your argument is illogical. If devs don’t want to support it, they simply will not support it—as evidenced by the thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified, but either run just fine, or don’t run at all with the devs not giving it a second thought. Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows,…

It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs. stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions, X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa, PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.
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