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The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

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Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#41

Post by globnomulous »

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…

I wonder whether this kind of discounting is healthy.

It's surely healthy for Valve's bottom line, but it introduces an element of unpredictability into pricing, creating an inconsistent reinforcement regimen, which is the kind that most effectively reinforces a behavior (namely the purchase of games).

Discounting also debases the perceived value of something, which, in addition, I suspect, to reducing the joy of ownership and use, should further encourage consumption.

I find myself more and more bored of video games, and I wonder whether this is partly because Steam and Humble Bundle's discounting practices have ruined the experience of acquisition and ownership, reducing it to a kind of gluttony and buffer-style gorging.

I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#42

Post by FirmwareBurner »

sylens wrote: post #33
TehCorwiz wrote: post #22

No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons wo…

> I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up

Do something more useful with your money like lighting it on a bonfire. That flop of a game isn't even worth pirating, that's why it came for free.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#43

Post by cma »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #31
oarsinsync wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price. One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.

> Note the use of ‘store’ here No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer. > One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com Just checked, $35 on both. Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pl…

Isn't that only true for selling steam keys, not the whole game? Bigger problem with the monopoly is less sales on steam means less visibility in steam's algorithm, so you get punished for having people buy off steam.

Same if you want a video on your site: if you don't YouTube embed and instead host yourself, you get less amplified by youtube even if people want to watch it just as much. YouTube ends up getting to plaster ads interrupting your website trailer as much as they do on YouTube.

If you spread your marketing to a steam competitor with better cut you get the same problem, less amplification on Steam. Steam is today stone soup, Valve used to put in more of the meat and veggies but now that's more and more up to the captive devs. For a time Valve was the most profitable major company per employee in the US from this stone soup arrangement, but they did eventually have to drop their rates on the biggest devs, announced either a few days before or after the Epic Games Store launched.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#44

Post by jerf »

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.

I would agree that the Switch's really big feature at this point is that it is where Nintendo games appear, and in that family-friendly-but-still-high-quality niche they are still worth chasing if you want them.

I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one. Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's literally everything else. In particular, the XBox exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam as a first-class citizen, for instance.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#45

Post by LightHugger »

> 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 well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#46

Post by TehCorwiz »

INTPenis wrote: post #12
paxys wrote: post #9

Does that mean it can run Steam games offline and DRM-free?

You can run steam games offline on a regular PC. But I think you're trying to make a point about Steam DRM. Someone once said; there are two DRMs that everyone loves, Apple and Steam. And I have to say it's true. I am normally not a proponent of DRM, I've been pirating since TURBO 250 tapes on c64, but I do love Steam. I love it for what Gabe has done for us gamers on Linux. In my opinion he deserves 30%.

Neither of those DRMs have ever prevented me, the owner, from using my content. Ubisoft once locked me out of some Star Wars game while I was trying to install it because it kept crashing during the install and consumed all of the "licenses". I returned the game.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#47

Post by jerf »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #39
paradite wrote: post #20

I might be missing the point of the author, but what's the difference between Steam Deck and a normal Windows gaming laptop in terms of software freedom? Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2). I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security…

I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of "Software freedom". It refers more to the process and transparency of the software than to the choice. That said, the Steam Deck is just a handheld PC. And Valve gives instructions on how to install Windows on it should you want to do that. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA... Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source d…

I'd also call out that Valve is probably running the biggest managed Linux install base in the world now. They manage the OS and update it. If you really want to get in there and root the thing, you can; you can install other OSes including Windows if you want, it's open, it just defaults to managed.

And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS image and the default image ships with the Flatpak market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot of freedom, and the fences are just advisory.

I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#48

Post by nottorp »

lolinder wrote: post #38
whytevuhuni wrote: post #3

They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.

> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim…

> by being very very good to their users

For example, I still don't use Epic. And I've probably even paid on Steam for games that Epic gave away for free.

What's worrying is Steam has enough mass to preclude me from buying games on GoG to a point. Linux support, for one. Frictionless playing on a Deck if i choose to get one in the future, for two. Steam built in streaming, for three.

I bought GoG first for a couple years, but now I'm agnostic again. Esp with games that have Linux versions.

------------

Still, the only games you really own are those you've downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM free.

And only if you have a good backup strategy :)

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#49

Post by lawn »

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.

An impossibly high bar given that the Zelda games are some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.

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