I guess "software company pays software developers to develop software" was a less catchy headline. Soon we'll be finding out that Intel, Red Hat, and even Google have been paying developers to keep their products based on open source software working.
I think what they're implying is that the difference here is that they're not Valve employees. For instance, I know that Valve pays Codeweavers to improve Windows compatibility.
Yes, I think that's what they're implying as well. All of the companies I mentioned do the same thing to a greater or lesser extent, so it's a pretty well-known practice in open source.
That isn't to say it isn't worthwhile that Valve is doing it, and the article kinda sorta touches on the scale of Valve's activities, but not really. Okay, they've contracted over a hundred devs to work on OSS projects that they rely on. Are those all full-time contracts, or part time? How long are they contracted for? How does that compare to other companies that have similarly contracted devs to work on OSS projects they rely on? As is, the article is essentially "water is wet" for anybody who pays any attention to the interaction between OSS and enterprise. I learned far more pertinent details from one comment[0] on another HN thread on this a couple days ago. PC Gamer couldn't find one of the contracted devs and ask them two or three questions to give some substance to the article?
I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors. I think this counts as a sign of their ongoing transformation to be more than a game/even software company as they now own hardware and a platform for it
I can't tell if you're serious about "Valve as big enough"
Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.
I think they keep a low profile, being a private company and all.According to wikipedia they only had 360 employees (in 2016, that might be more if they opened up a hardware division. But the fact the numbers are from 2016 also underlines how it's a private, low profile company).
I think it makes sense for them to stay smallish and outsource projects to contractors. It's a nice change from SF companies who raise funds, then are beholden to investors who Demand that numbers go up - including number of people they hired. There's been a correction of that at least this year, with tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in highly funded IT companies.
I have a company with ~0 market cap and ~0 turnover. Funnily enough it doesnt have a full time accounting, legal team and IT team - those are all contracted out.
> The Steam Deck is an incredible bit of hardware, but the software that underpins it is just as impressive.
No shade on the journalist here: to me, the software is vastly more impressive. That it can run a vast library of high-end Windows PC games on a laptop SoC running Linux is an incredible feat of software. I wouldn't have believed Proton could work so well if I hadn't seen it happen.
Seriously, I can't describe the feeling the first time I used Proton back in the summer of 2018.
I remember clearly that I was expecting the usual "everyone says it works but it will probably crash on my computer and I have to dig for a solution for 3 hours"-type of situation that we Linux users are use to
But then I launched a game with it that I had struggled to run with the normal version of wine, and everything worked like magic, with only a few glitches.
A large part of my steam library was working without issues even in 2018 with Proton and it only kept getting better
It was like a dream come true. 2018 was the year I finally deleted my Windows partition because I didn't need anymore
I often marvel st how awesome Wine is, even before Proton. The fact that we can translate Windows programs and sometimes run them without a single problem on a completely different platform speaks to the awesomeness of the software and the people who contribute to it.
And proton takes it to a different level. Proton changed the whole linux gaming situation seemingly overnight. After they released the first public versions, all kinds of new possibilities opened
And the fact that it's all open source and easy to use outside of steam (so not just steam exclusive) and the fact that valve devs are contributing to wine, the linux kernel and lots of open source projects just makes me so happy
What was the game? I bought Steam Deck this October and my first impression was nothing but - holly fucking shit it works! This is because after many years of tweaking Wine to run what could be described old school games, I have already given up on the idea that Linux could be ever used for gaming, boy I am glad I was wrong, thanks Valve for Proton.
I'm not a gamer but I'm tempted to buy a Steam Deck just to show my support for the project. Although throwing some donations to the WINE or Proton devs might be better.
Wine is a 30 year old project, but Valve's initiative has pushed it over the final mile, and transformed it from 'pretty good' to 'almost perfect'. Not only are most windows games now easily playable on linux, but many perform even better than on windows. This is due to windows games being locked to the API which they first targeted and that does not get updated. Whereas the linux stack can easily incorporate new improvements, and bug fixes. And, good news for non-gamers, this applies to most windows software. If you haven't looked at wine in a long time you should check it out.
To try and push you towards the Steam Deck side of the coin, you can escape to the desktop and use it as a normal computer, using a fairly simple USB-C dock (not apple’s, though).
This is one of the primary reasons I bought a Steam Deck. I happen to run Arch Linux on a zen 3 and RDNA 2 desktop, and quite like the idea of a team of engineers being paid to keep things running smoothly. Indeed, I've been actively following a freedesktop.org issue ticket tracking AMDGPU suspend/resume driver issues, and one of these developers found a regression while testing the next Steam OS Deck release.
I've also been enjoying using the Deck. I'm currently playing through L.A. Noire, graphics settings maxed out. It's great being able to pick it up and start playing within seconds, the game running while suspended.
I applied the same logic as you when I picked my laptop (6800U so Zen 3 and RDNA 2, using Arch) but unfortunately it has not been a very smooth sailing. It works well enough for daily driving and the performance is amazing but the GPU glitches and crashes are frequent enough to be annoying.
It seems that the firmware is to blame because only BIOS updates seem to fix the GPU bugs I encounter.
Did you muck with the kernel boot option to enable frequency and voltage adjustments? If so, the Arch wiki advice to set the bitmask to 0xffffffff will cause you problems. At some point they added an "async" driver mode that is incredibly glitchy, and it is enabled by one of those bits.
That caused me grief for many months until I figured it out. I updated Arch wiki about a month ago, and provided a command to compute a bit mask that avoids setting unnecessary feature bits.
Yeah I love this. Christmas came early for me when I heard this news. In my Fedora 36 gaming box with proprietary Nvidia drivers and games from steam every game just works. I don’t even think about it. They have gotten the whole proton stuff very seamlessly integrated. It’s beautiful.
I'm thinking of moving my gaming box from Windows to Linux, but last time I checked, things weren't as great on the hardware tuning side of things.
I'm running a Radeon 6800 XT undervolted at stock clocks and 980 mV (+ custom fan curve) and I don't think I could keep it cool without the undervolt. How achievable is that in Linux these days?
I'm also thinking of getting a steering wheel and getting back into race simming, are these kinds of peripherals well supported, or is it a game of chance?
Wow are things that good now? It's been about a decade since I've played PC games. Linux support was not great back then. There were a few titles that worked well.
Yeah, I should make a list of our dependencies and petition the bosses to give a shout-out in public to open source software and the debt we owe them, then get a budget for timed donations to all of those projects.
I mean for example, the back-end systems gave way after a doubling of requests (energy company). As a result, they spun up projects to improve performance, on the one side by enhancing the existing (commercial, expensive) systems, on the other to replace these existing systems with newer ones.
One thing they already achieved is to run API endpoints on lambdas, doubling performance (at least, I'm sure more can be achieved yet) and slashing costs by a factor of 60. While the lambdas are AWS proprietary, those too I'm sure use tons of open source software.
Github (aka Microsoft) should take notice -- Valve could be a big software player in the next decade.
"OSS dev payment pipelines / mentoring" is passé. Putting all their code into a LLM (of sorts) is not the way forward either. There's still a LOT of OS issues, and Valve seems to have surmounted a very large one, WITHOUT angering anyone.
That last bit is interesting to me. If I was a previously-mostly-closed-source company trying to wade into open source, I'd be at least wary about being perceived as stomping in and dictating my will. Especially knowing how easy it is to overrun the (original) volunteer contributors that doubtlessly they're interacting with as well, when bringing in full-time paid developers.
Yet, it sounds like they've managed? Possibly because there's a clear road forward that people generally align on, though even then, disputes about things like code architecture can easily arise.
Valve has earned my money this way. I wasn't on Steam for the longest time (among other reasons because I didn't own HW/OS combinations that could actually run things), but now I am. I'm playing even fairly recent games (Everspace, 2017) on my Dragonfly Chromebook (https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos).
I guess "software company pays software developers to develop software" was a less catchy headline. Soon we'll be finding out that Intel, Red Hat, and even Google have been paying developers to keep their products based on open source software working.
I think what they're implying is that the difference here is that they're not Valve employees. For instance, I know that Valve pays Codeweavers to improve Windows compatibility.
Yes, I think that's what they're implying as well. All of the companies I mentioned do the same thing to a greater or lesser extent, so it's a pretty well-known practice in open source.
That isn't to say it isn't worthwhile that Valve is doing it, and the article kinda sorta touches on the scale of Valve's activities, but not really. Okay, they've contracted over a hundred devs to work on OSS projects that they rely on. Are those all full-time contracts, or part time? How long are they contracted for? How does that compare to other companies that have similarly contracted devs to work on OSS projects they rely on? As is, the article is essentially "water is wet" for anybody who pays any attention to the interaction between OSS and enterprise. I learned far more pertinent details from one comment[0] on another HN thread on this a couple days ago. PC Gamer couldn't find one of the contracted devs and ask them two or three questions to give some substance to the article?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34031431
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"Software company A pays software company B to develop open source software that company A relies on".
Seems pretty good open source success story to me?
3 replies →
Shall we call them... "Uber Devs"?
I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors. I think this counts as a sign of their ongoing transformation to be more than a game/even software company as they now own hardware and a platform for it
I can't tell if you're serious about "Valve as big enough"
Valve isn't some small indie company. They're not massive in terms of employee size, as they're only in the hundreds, but remember they have some of the biggest gaming tech stacks, such as Steam in itself, but also games like CSGO, which is arguably still one of the biggest fps games. No doubt they run those things solely by themselves without contracting some of the work outside of the company.
I think they keep a low profile, being a private company and all.According to wikipedia they only had 360 employees (in 2016, that might be more if they opened up a hardware division. But the fact the numbers are from 2016 also underlines how it's a private, low profile company).
I think it makes sense for them to stay smallish and outsource projects to contractors. It's a nice change from SF companies who raise funds, then are beholden to investors who Demand that numbers go up - including number of people they hired. There's been a correction of that at least this year, with tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in highly funded IT companies.
Valve used contractors and third party studios already for the expansions of the original Half-Life.
They are now a corporation with hundreds of employees and equity in the billions of US dollars.
I have a company with ~0 market cap and ~0 turnover. Funnily enough it doesnt have a full time accounting, legal team and IT team - those are all contracted out.
>I never thought of Valve as big enough to require contractors.
I don't think this is as simple as "require contractors". It's more along the lines of compensating specific people to work on specific things.
A new company appears and in a few years invests in the open source Linux desktop as much as the few big incumbents do.
That is exciting!
> The Steam Deck is an incredible bit of hardware, but the software that underpins it is just as impressive.
No shade on the journalist here: to me, the software is vastly more impressive. That it can run a vast library of high-end Windows PC games on a laptop SoC running Linux is an incredible feat of software. I wouldn't have believed Proton could work so well if I hadn't seen it happen.
And all the tech is open-source :)
Seriously, I can't describe the feeling the first time I used Proton back in the summer of 2018.
I remember clearly that I was expecting the usual "everyone says it works but it will probably crash on my computer and I have to dig for a solution for 3 hours"-type of situation that we Linux users are use to
But then I launched a game with it that I had struggled to run with the normal version of wine, and everything worked like magic, with only a few glitches.
A large part of my steam library was working without issues even in 2018 with Proton and it only kept getting better
It was like a dream come true. 2018 was the year I finally deleted my Windows partition because I didn't need anymore
I often marvel st how awesome Wine is, even before Proton. The fact that we can translate Windows programs and sometimes run them without a single problem on a completely different platform speaks to the awesomeness of the software and the people who contribute to it.
And proton takes it to a different level. Proton changed the whole linux gaming situation seemingly overnight. After they released the first public versions, all kinds of new possibilities opened
And the fact that it's all open source and easy to use outside of steam (so not just steam exclusive) and the fact that valve devs are contributing to wine, the linux kernel and lots of open source projects just makes me so happy
What was the game? I bought Steam Deck this October and my first impression was nothing but - holly fucking shit it works! This is because after many years of tweaking Wine to run what could be described old school games, I have already given up on the idea that Linux could be ever used for gaming, boy I am glad I was wrong, thanks Valve for Proton.
I'm not a gamer but I'm tempted to buy a Steam Deck just to show my support for the project. Although throwing some donations to the WINE or Proton devs might be better.
Wine is a 30 year old project, but Valve's initiative has pushed it over the final mile, and transformed it from 'pretty good' to 'almost perfect'. Not only are most windows games now easily playable on linux, but many perform even better than on windows. This is due to windows games being locked to the API which they first targeted and that does not get updated. Whereas the linux stack can easily incorporate new improvements, and bug fixes. And, good news for non-gamers, this applies to most windows software. If you haven't looked at wine in a long time you should check it out.
https://appdb.winehq.org/
https://www.protondb.com/explore
To try and push you towards the Steam Deck side of the coin, you can escape to the desktop and use it as a normal computer, using a fairly simple USB-C dock (not apple’s, though).
The deck is the great entry point to casual games you can pick and up start and stop to be honest
This is one of the primary reasons I bought a Steam Deck. I happen to run Arch Linux on a zen 3 and RDNA 2 desktop, and quite like the idea of a team of engineers being paid to keep things running smoothly. Indeed, I've been actively following a freedesktop.org issue ticket tracking AMDGPU suspend/resume driver issues, and one of these developers found a regression while testing the next Steam OS Deck release.
I've also been enjoying using the Deck. I'm currently playing through L.A. Noire, graphics settings maxed out. It's great being able to pick it up and start playing within seconds, the game running while suspended.
I applied the same logic as you when I picked my laptop (6800U so Zen 3 and RDNA 2, using Arch) but unfortunately it has not been a very smooth sailing. It works well enough for daily driving and the performance is amazing but the GPU glitches and crashes are frequent enough to be annoying.
It seems that the firmware is to blame because only BIOS updates seem to fix the GPU bugs I encounter.
Did you muck with the kernel boot option to enable frequency and voltage adjustments? If so, the Arch wiki advice to set the bitmask to 0xffffffff will cause you problems. At some point they added an "async" driver mode that is incredibly glitchy, and it is enabled by one of those bits.
That caused me grief for many months until I figured it out. I updated Arch wiki about a month ago, and provided a command to compute a bit mask that avoids setting unnecessary feature bits.
That's great! More companies should support OSS devs, as they are making a big profit from their labour
Yeah I love this. Christmas came early for me when I heard this news. In my Fedora 36 gaming box with proprietary Nvidia drivers and games from steam every game just works. I don’t even think about it. They have gotten the whole proton stuff very seamlessly integrated. It’s beautiful.
I'm thinking of moving my gaming box from Windows to Linux, but last time I checked, things weren't as great on the hardware tuning side of things.
I'm running a Radeon 6800 XT undervolted at stock clocks and 980 mV (+ custom fan curve) and I don't think I could keep it cool without the undervolt. How achievable is that in Linux these days?
I'm also thinking of getting a steering wheel and getting back into race simming, are these kinds of peripherals well supported, or is it a game of chance?
5 replies →
Wow are things that good now? It's been about a decade since I've played PC games. Linux support was not great back then. There were a few titles that worked well.
7 replies →
Yeah, I should make a list of our dependencies and petition the bosses to give a shout-out in public to open source software and the debt we owe them, then get a budget for timed donations to all of those projects.
I mean for example, the back-end systems gave way after a doubling of requests (energy company). As a result, they spun up projects to improve performance, on the one side by enhancing the existing (commercial, expensive) systems, on the other to replace these existing systems with newer ones.
One thing they already achieved is to run API endpoints on lambdas, doubling performance (at least, I'm sure more can be achieved yet) and slashing costs by a factor of 60. While the lambdas are AWS proprietary, those too I'm sure use tons of open source software.
That is exactly the right thing to do.
Github (aka Microsoft) should take notice -- Valve could be a big software player in the next decade.
"OSS dev payment pipelines / mentoring" is passé. Putting all their code into a LLM (of sorts) is not the way forward either. There's still a LOT of OS issues, and Valve seems to have surmounted a very large one, WITHOUT angering anyone.
That last bit is interesting to me. If I was a previously-mostly-closed-source company trying to wade into open source, I'd be at least wary about being perceived as stomping in and dictating my will. Especially knowing how easy it is to overrun the (original) volunteer contributors that doubtlessly they're interacting with as well, when bringing in full-time paid developers.
Yet, it sounds like they've managed? Possibly because there's a clear road forward that people generally align on, though even then, disputes about things like code architecture can easily arise.
Valve has built up trust over a long long period of time and they can get away with things other businesses cannot.
4 replies →
Valve has earned my money this way. I wasn't on Steam for the longest time (among other reasons because I didn't own HW/OS combinations that could actually run things), but now I am. I'm playing even fairly recent games (Everspace, 2017) on my Dragonfly Chromebook (https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos).
discussed at length 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028682
Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
What is Proton exactly? I thought it was an enhanced WINE.
It is a patched wine + DXVK + steam integration.
This open source work also allowed Tesla to run games on their cars running Linux. Really cool stuff!
Taking a page out of Microsoft's book: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Um, what? Is paying OSS devs something bad nowadays?
Do you think they created proton to Extend and then "extinguish" Steam (which they can't because it is proprietary) or what?
clearly valve is trying to extinguish the massive tux racer linux gaming community