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 work. You can pop open multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend more time looking at things there than playing.
GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. 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. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app!
Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers.
EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
That's why lots of us are worried about when something happens to Gabe, and some black suited C level raven is promoted as CEO and starts asking questions like "why don't we push for the latest expansion packs? why don't we gate features behind subscriptions?" and all that anti-consumer shit that breaks with the original spirit of so many products.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine a person (that I don't personally know) who I more want to ensure a very, very long and productive life than GabeN. He has done more for us Linux/open source people than nearly anyone else I can think of besides maybe the Linux kernel team, Red Hat, and Arch, Debian and other bigtime contributors.
The sticky thing that keeps me in the steam platform is the software itself: notably, Steam Workshop. I normally source my games DRM free but after some experience trying to manage mods of heavily modded games like Rimworld I have come to discover that the value add of package management via Workshop for the exact same price is 100% worth it. Even though I trade DRM for it.
Yeah, GoG is my other go-to for games. I'm not a big fan of DRM, but I'm OK with DRM that respects me. Valve has never abused the DRM or let it get in my way. I can play offline, I can use multiple computers, I can share games with my family on their computers. All things considered it's pretty respectful of the reality of how people want to experience and share their content.
Interesting. I think the software is absolutely tasteless. For a long time it had to update "twice", asking you to restart steam 2 times in a row. It defaults to showing an "ad" on startup. Its chat had a bug that had hidden messages everytime someone wrote you, so you had to reopen the window several times to see it.
Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.
Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!
I just wish the platforms weren't beholden to the publishers. To a certain extent, pulling a game from Steam is like pulling it off the shelves at big box stores, but the difference is the games CAN'T find their way to resale shops; they're gone forever.
Story time: I was pretty upset when my original copy of GTA: Vice City was intentionally broken, then the "Definitive Edition" was released a short time later. Especially in the case of GTAIII, they removed the top-down camera so it's not a 1:1 flat upgrade. I find it quaint and fun to try and beat that game using the top-down camera of GTA1 and 2, so was rather disappointed.
> Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it.
That's more a critiques to how software development happens today. Its a consequence of decoupling the product ownership from the developer, who only implements what's required according to the ticket/feature requested by the PO.
To be clear, I'm not saying that passing full ownership of the software to the developers they've hired to be effectively code monkeys would work. And neither do I think that the approach of having the developers be the owners of the software "scales" (teams like that will always be small and have very little space for Jr. positions).
It's very illuminating if you look at the average developer salary at valve, they're just approaching software development differently then Amazon and Epic (and rest of the industry for that matter)
> 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
I know that some portion of profits from the game, even on Steam, will go to them because they funded and published it. But after the exclusivity expires I'd expect Remedy Entertainment will probably have the standard 70/30 split with valve and whatever Epic see from that sale will be a smaller percentage. I love Remedy and how they practice their craft and art.
Economic semantics aside, yes. I hate Epic so much I'll pay them again not to have to use it any longer.
If I could copy one feature from Steam to the Apple Store it would be seasonal sales. And bundle prices. If I could copy two features from Steam to the Apple Store...
My friend had to go through huge gyrations to offer a discount for upgrades on a productivity app. Your choices seem to mostly be either never get paid again by old customers or over/undercharge people.
On Steam you can sort it out with a bundle discount.
Steam also did the legwork to adapt to other countries' cultures, means and payment systems.
They do regional pricing, including systems which make it difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in physical stores, and pay for them with cash.
Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially Apple's.
While I know that Steam has DRM, it's never been as onerous as other types of DRM.
I also know that Steam DRM isn't that hard to bypass. Generally just some patched DLLs. But I've never had a real need to bypass it. Steam lets you play offline with no connection. My games are, to a first approximation, mine and Valve doesn't need to be informed every minute I'm playing if I so choose.
Gabe's premise is right on. We pirate from Netflix and Epic because it's orders of magnitude easier than playing by the rules. I buy from Steam because it's easier than piracy.
As a rule, I don't pirate steam games. If it's something I'm interested in, it's probably worth my money. I do pirate from EA and others because the Sims 4 is not worth $500 in any universe. I pirate shows and movies because it's too much time and money to even figure out who has what I want this week.
You beat pirates by making your service more attractive than piracy. Steam is a better experience than free, and a better experience than all the other paid options. This is how you win.
Crates were in TF2 (and in some MMOs before that), but I think you can more readily blame Overwatch for that one. And paid levelling was a KMMO staple long before. But I can't argue about the DotA2 battle passes, or the expensive hats/stat-track weapons.
> 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.
It's not like this is Steam fault. You can always return games you played under 2 hours no questions asked. Some people just like to buy stuff they dont need or hoard random things, but it's as old as humanity itself
At leastrented digital games on Steam account dont contribute to global warming, waste problems and dont use tons of electicity to mint some tokens.
I guess only major issue Steam really have to solve is ability to inherit these digital purchases if owner has died. Their license agreement dont have proper procedure for that.
yeah valve are scummy on loot boxes, but their steam service is top notch. And they're right, since not only they compete with publishers or f2p live service games, they also compete with pirated service, which can be highly reliable, and free.
Steam is more convenient, reliable, and affordable, so no wonder they can compete with piracy
It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS.
It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.
I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
And kill Steam Deck just like they did with Netbooks, why get Proton translation of the real XBox experience.
Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".
I'd much rather a partnership than an acquisition. Valve is great, but open, repairable hardware is not their core mission. I think Framework needs to stay independent to maintain that.
But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd rather there be a greater number of companies all independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for us".
I love the idea in one sense, which is that I think they're two great companies working in areas that could plausibly converge and be quite complementary. I do have to imagine there's something about their different respective business missions or business cultures, and the ethos and philosophies that inform them that might not make it work in practice. Although I definitely see a place for a framework laptop that's happy to run SteamOS.
I think perhaps that's the goal is that there's any number of companies that we feel are pretty great that are phenomenal at serving a specific vision of gaming and computing that's oriented around Linux and that are quite happy to talk to each other in effective ways and so I wouldn't necessarily say that the culmination of that should be a merger between those companies but an ecosystem that thrives with deeply compatible hardware and software.
The Framework Desktop is what you would want for a Steam Machine 2.0. But the price is around $1,186 and I think that price is too high for a game console. As a PlayStation 5 Pro is $700. Maybe they could reach that price with a second-gen chip? Or when they introduce a new chip and this machine gets discounted.
I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.
>So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a business at the end of the day.
But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to the ground.
>a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't know what happened to Microsoft in that time.
Breaking the seal and demonstrating the capabilities, and getting it into the hands of consumers set the conditions for the Steam Deck's success. The Steam Deck exists because the Steam Machine existed, and it's in this context that the Steam Machine succeeded. You don't need overnight instant success for the program itself to succeed.
I purchased a steam deck when they first came out specifically to financially support Valve's Linux efforts and I haven't regretted that purchase for a second. In the past year I had a couple of days where my laptop was not working. I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened (after installing some software of course, like emacs). I've re-purchased games that I own on consoles just to get the PC versions to de-couple my games from hardware, so now I'll be able to run Flower on powerful beasts, portable handhelds, and computers that haven't been invented yet whereas before it was stuck on a loud aging ps3.
My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space.
Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.
You know this already but the reason nintendo doesnt release their games on other systems is so you have to buy the system.
I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will.
It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
You also probably know this, but they don't really care about the console per se. What you buying the console means is that Nintendo gets to stand on the bridge between your console and game developers and demand 30% or whatever it is.
Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
> 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 that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
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.
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Still, the only games you really own are those you've downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM free.
> [...] by being very very good to their users [...]
Helps that they don't have to be very very good to shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
> If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are
They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
Yeah, when you wanna be evil, be evil to devs. They are stuck on two fronts and gamers are already pre-disposed to blame them for any problems anyway.
>If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
I find it funny that every time other publishers try to recreate Steam with their own catalogues, a good chunk of gamers (myself included) just refuse to buy "exclusives" on other platforms, to the point they eventually crawl back to Steam. EA held out for a LONG time. I broke my reluctance only once because I wanted to play the latest FarCry game, but otherwise, I've kept all my games on Steam. They eventually caved too.
What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.
My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
Deadlock is absolutely not a Team Fortress spiritual successor, it has much much more in common with Dota 2 than TF2, and is really full of interesting features and polish for where it's at in its development.
In some ways, it's because valve caved and did the equivalent of tax cuts for the rich. You have revenue more than like, 25 million/yr as a publisher and you reduce your infamous 30% cut to 20%.
Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
And there are tons. Epic, EA, Ubi Play - they are pretty shitty.
Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not because they hinder the competition, but because the competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
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 friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
Not only is Steam not a monopoly, TFA mentions how it’s possible to easily install alternative app stores on the Steam Deck.
It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.
I bought a Steam Deck OLED last year, and it's honestly astounding to me how well it both provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience for both the "gaming mode" Steam interface and the "desktop mode" with a regular Linux desktop without sacrificing basically any customization. It's a glorified tablet that in my baggiest pair of jeans I can just barely fit into my pocket, and somehow probably the most realistic attempt I've seen at making something suitable for the mythical "year of the Linux desktop", which wasn't even the goal!
It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
> given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices
Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)
They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive.
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of
They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their market share)
I believe saints would implement some sort of distributed platform that others could interoperate with, by sharing the launcher’s list of games (e.g. have Epic games automatically appear on the list), share the list of friends and achievements between platforms, and so on.
Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled gardens.
Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
While I don't disagree with you I also don't think Valve is particularly bad in this area. Valve's games are not made for younger kids and Steam's parental controls are excellent.
Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they target much younger children with less parental control.
They have done absolutely nothing to be a monopoly. The only reason they are at the top is that their competition consistently keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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.)
For me, the switch is the only console I trust to leave my kids alone with. Nintendo builds great games for kids, but you pay for them. I mean, launch games like Mario Odysee and Breath of the Wild are still sold at full price, years later.
I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters. My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back into the game (because they pressed the Home button)
Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid"
Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
> Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic.
Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
It's sticker price shock for sure. Historically speaking, this will just smooth over and people will set their sticks in the sand. If the 900 dollar PS5 pro can shrug it off, then I doubt there's much issue here.
> 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
A licensing deal between Nintendo and Valve. Once could dream. Get the entire Steam lib on your Switch, then Valve gets a "Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 - Only on Nintendo" store listing on Steam.
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 years, if not 1.
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.
My impression is that the general quality of games on the Switch (or Switch 2 or eShop) is sub par the quality of, e.g. Zelda. This is obviously because Zelda is a landmark title and it doesn't make sense to compare it with "the general quality" of games on Steam. It would make more sense to compare it with the quality of other landmark titles on Steam e.g. Baldur's Gate 3.
You can compare the general quality of games on Steam (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5") with the general quality of games on Switch (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5"), though I'm not sure it is that interesting of a comparison, since no one buys the "average" game but what they consider to be the best games on the platform.
I'd suspect that any attempt at an "objective" comparison (obviously, an impossible task) would land in favour of Steam simply because it has basically all of (core) gaming for most of history on it. Though obviously such an "objective" comparison would be meaningless for something like this where literally your subjective opinion should matter the most for your choice.
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.
On the other hand, I've heard it said that the Steam Deck's sticker price is almost wholly justified as a single-purpose Baldur's Gate 3 device. Let alone Skyrim, Civ, etc.
Just because steam sells games that do in-game profiteering, doesn't mean you need to play them?
Nintendo games have consistently disappointed me with their lack of depth in their stories. Breath of the Wild had an amazing open world, but the characters came off as two-dimensional and the final boss was completely disappointing. (there's something especially uncanny about having a protagonist who doesn't utter a word, even if it's meant to help players self-insert) Mario Odyssey was even more pitiful in how it retread the same surface level cartoonish villainy of Bowser kidnapping the princess. Nintendo certainly makes games that are fun to play, but as an adult, I've come to expect more from art, and plenty of the games on Steam actually respect the capability of their audience to not turn off their brains.
> 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.
Totally. Steam store looks like a god damn aliexpress marketplace and is tasteless design.
The Store UI is disgusting and intrusive compared to all other competitors who actually have a decent overview and design..
You can collect gems, cards and other misleading virtual currencies.. Tons of misleading business practises and time-consuming bloatware distractions hidden behind that terrible UI.
Steam is first and foremost DRM. A game-prison. You don't own a single thing. Gamers have totally drunk the kool aid.. They forgot back when Steam was bloatware forced on Half-Life and Valve games and it was despised for a decade before they became complacent little worshippers.
People buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, generally. It's actually baffling how other AAA game studios release games at full price in a buggy state, then are heavily discounted months later with enough patches for them to finally be playable. I don't like how Nintendo games rarely get decent discounts but I understand why they're preserving the image that their games are worth the price.
This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
Yeah; the Steam Deck still runs a Zen 2 chip, while handhelds like the Ally X are on Zen 4. We'll likely start seeing some handheld PCs begin upgrading to Zen 5/Strix Point this year, and IMO that may be the point where these devices start actually being able to replace desktop gaming PCs for some gamers.
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.
It's a trickle down effect for sure. Where indies suffer the most. You have games getting away with $70 price tags, but your indie game you spent 2+ years on better no cost more than 15-20 a pop and better have a 50% launch discount. You really can't sustain yourself even as a true solo dev in western countries (let alone if you need to commission/hire an artist/composer).
And when I say "sustain in western countries" I'm talking the bog bottom line of "us federal minimum wage", coming down to approx. $15k/year. That's 1000 copies of a $15 game that is probably upped to 1800 copies after valve and other's cuts. Even that paltry marker is hard just becsuse the market is so saturated (and not in a good way).
It's only gonna get worse as a generation that is raised on mobile games and game pass settle in. The idea of spending money upfront from a game may be lost entirely.
>I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
That was indeed an explicit strategy of Nintendo. Keep a premium brand and a price thst reflects that. Sales are rare to maintain this idea of an evergreen title that is always selling.
I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller). I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than bundle the crapware that is windows.
> According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way.
Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
I've used it for all sorts of stuff from gaming on flights, to local multiplayer, to controlling a robot car, to watching YouTube with adblocking, etc.
I have a first-gen Switch, still in active rotation. My kids are asking me why we don't hack it. My answer has been, what does a hacked Switch do that my Steam Deck doesn't already do, without hacking? I mean, if you're going to sail the seven seas and yo-ho-ho, not that I've been encouraging that, the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too! And at least we can't accidentally hook the Switch up to the network and get it banned if it isn't hacked.
I don't have any personal experience running Switch games on the Steam Deck, but I do have experience trying to use the Switch Pro controllers. I think they may work fine for some people now, but I have never been able to have them have a stable wireless connection. But when the connection was established, the accelerometers worked fine. (I gave up and just bought some XBox controllers.)
I'm sure the emulators accept the Steam Deck's own accelerometer inputs for when you're in a non-detached mode, and tilting the screen to aim.
The super-mega-motion control games might not work, but part of what I mean by "works better" is that the Steam Deck can generally emulate with more power than the Switch itself, e.g., you can get a Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom setup with a better framerate than the switch itself, so, depends on what you want more. I don't have a lot of motion control games.
"Local multiplayer on Steam" has no referent, because Steam does not do local multiplayer at all. It's all up to the game. I've played plenty of games that way, Steam and the Steam Deck add no particular problem with it.
While I wouldn't pin this on Steam qua Steam as a program, it is a fair complaint about the ecosystem. I have some games that are as flexible as the Switch about being docked. I have some games that can be docked but can't handle any resolution changes. I have some games you just plain can't switch. I have some games that you can switch from using the physical Steam Deck controls to an Xbox controller seamlessly, complete with the in-game hint graphics changing to match the controller in use. I have some games that have to be restarted to pick up a new controller. At least a few months ago I had one particular combination of games that if I played them in sequence would somehow permanently render XBox controllers non-functional until I rebooted the Steam Deck, though that is certainly an exception.
The Switch does handle the Switch-ing in the Switch name better than the Steam Deck, and it is a structural advantage that Valve will have a hard time addressing in a practical way. That said, my family does use the Steam Deck as a de facto Switch 1.5, as a thing that is used fairly evenly between "docked" and "in hand", and it is functional enough to work, even if it is undeniably not as slick.
That's an editorialized title ("The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly") and subtly different than what the article actually states. I don't think Steam Deck was made particularly software-freedom friendly. I do think that it managed to not be software-freedom unfriendly, and that's because unlike other vendors Valve did not care to make it so. It's a subtle, yet non-negligible difference that leads to different outcomes.
> Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux.
This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.
> 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.
I don't want to get into this on this discussion because...well. video games. But consider the following: The organization and customers benefits from meritocratic hiring of the best candidates. But individual hiring managers have biases either for specific people (nepotism) or against groups of people (bigotry). Those individuals would be acting against the best interests of the company and customers whether they act consciously or not. A responsible company would adapt hiring processes to remove that kind of bias otherwise everyone suffers. The company suffers due to lower efficiency and blind spots in their points of view. Customers suffer due to worse output by the company. Some individual candidates suffer by being denied opportunities based on attributes they have no control over (gender, race, physical appearance) instead of the merits of their education, experience, and talents.
There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
Meritocratic hiring of the best candidates is equality of opportunity, not equity/equality of outcome. Equity requires discrimination and dehumanization of individual people to achieve because racial distributions vary at an earlier stage than the hiring process. I agree that a responsible company tries to remove bias and doesn't discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics, however...
It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.
If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.
It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.
You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
The flat structure deadlocks projects and adds downward pressure to not take on ambitious ones (Half-Life 3?) as it requires massive-scale politicking.
Sounds like you're operating off of old knowledge from the Half-Life Alyx developer's commentary. They specifically changed their internal processes because of those issues.
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.
Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in exposing tech to potential other audiences.
But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
"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.
I don't think a product being freedom friendly is going to make it a success in and of itself, but seeing one always makes me smile and that's a win in my book.
How good is platform support - can I install e.g. Diablo 3 and have the thumbsticks control the character and not a virtual mouse? Or would I need to remap the input myself?
It varies by game - if the devs created a default control scheme, the Deck will load that by default and you're good to go. (The green check mark means that Valve verified this behavior, as well as other things.) And if not, the Deck UI makes it pretty easy to create your own mappings and share them, or download "community layouts".
You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the same UI which the Deck uses.
I was going to check that and I realized i can’t find diablo 3 on steam. I know I could install it myself through some other online store. Still, I wish there were cartridges that “just worked”; consoles (including today’s Nintendo) got that part right IMO.
Steam's Input system is great, and many people will launch non-Steam games through Steam specifically for the controller mapping. Any game with controller support (console) works flawlessly with the Deck, or any PC using a controller. I don't think I've come across a game that doesn't work out of the box.
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.
I still don't love it. DRM is DRM and I've watched enough heroes fall from grace to know it's onto a matter of when they yank your chain, not if. I will avoid to the best of my ability any attempts to retract back products I purchased myself.
That's why I wanted to stick to consoles and a physical medium. But even those have devolved into what's basically a digital download, now with the disk (or cartridge now, with Switch 2) being the DRM. The Onion couldn't write a more ironic headline.
Now I'm wondering if all that "virtual sharing" stuff for switch 2 cartridges means difficulties with the used market.
>In my opinion he deserves 30%.
Even Gabe doesn't agree, given the cut he gives to AAA publishers. I'm not exactly onboard with the idea that the richest people get the best tax breaks, even in video game world.
A progressive platform cut would be much friendlier to smaller devs and put the biggest burdens on the ones likely using the most amount of bandwidth. That's how the game engines have started to leverage their tooling. And they put a lot more work in than a hosting platform
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.
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.
It's perfectly fine to love Apple and Steam. They are both great companies and offer great products. The issue I have is in trying to extrapolate that love into labeling them pro-"software freedom", which is idiotic. Both these companies ship opaque binaries of their storefront and products. Their apps/games have restrictive DRM. You cannot install/register games without an account and internet access. They artifically limit resale/sharing/lending of digital goods. They are actively user hostile (such as not offering refunds until forced to by courts). Even the Steam Deck is full of proprietary blobs which would be illegal to revese engineer and reshare. Nothing about the experience is FOSS.
Again none of this is inherently bad if your argument is "I like the convenience and don't care about the restrictions". But don't delude yourself into thinking this is "freedom".
The Steam Deck does a good job of running games offline. The mix bag will be the online style cash grabs from Ubisoft and EA but most work too.
DRM is a thing we have to live with but valve does a decent job of making it invisible when it's theirs. The ones that suck the most are the aforementioned studios which roll their own on top.
And subscription service free is high on my wishlist, too.
I could perhaps live with subscription terms that are still variable amount / mount (currently 0) as servers do cost money. Even if their quasi-monopoly would allow them to extort us.
But what needs to be more reliable, is that the ToS I applied to when I bought the game should not change afterwards in a one-sided proposal to keep access to my game licenses. Which is not allowed in our jurisdiction at least, so steam was found non-compliant in the EU.
Steam Deck owner since launch here -- I wouldn't say the Verified status is a lie, but there have been instances where games have received Verified badge status at launch, but performed poorly on Deck.
Some popular examples of this;
1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck.
2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.
Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings?
Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user.
I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved.
For me it was the lack of portability (it's a chunky beast), I just wasn't taking it anywhere because it takes up so much space in your bag. By comparison the switch with it's disconnecting controllers fits in my electronics bag along with a bunch of plugs, chargers and cables and hardly takes up any room, and weighs a decent amount less. Looking forward to a slimmer and narrower V2 though, if it ever materialises.
this is what happens when you ship experimental software as "stable" on a handheld system. could have told you in advance. expect game-breaking crashes and bugs sooner or later the more you use it.
> Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a developer.
This is a big claim, is there evidence for this? I'm an end-user, not a developer, but there are plenty of games in Unknown status. I would assume that should be the default, not Verified.
I can see an argument that Valve has incentive to have flagship games get that Verified badge, but there is also precedence for them downgrading popular games after launch. For example, Spider-Man 2 recently went from Verified to Playable (rightfully so, in my opinion).
> You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking.
Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
The selling point of a Steam Deck is that it is a PC console. One of the problems with the PC gaming market is that even though in theory all PCs are "compatible", the reality for game developers is very different. Different PCs have subtly (or not so subtly) incompatible software and hardware, and it's up to OS developers to try to maintain some semblance of compatibility, and game developers to ensure that their product runs on as many configurations as possible.
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
> The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know.
First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, 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.
Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.
Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.
My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
> 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 not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
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.
> Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm..
Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
> to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
>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 the Steamdeck community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
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 measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
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 development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
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.
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 work. You can pop open multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend more time looking at things there than playing.
GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. 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. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app!
Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers.
EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
That's why lots of us are worried about when something happens to Gabe, and some black suited C level raven is promoted as CEO and starts asking questions like "why don't we push for the latest expansion packs? why don't we gate features behind subscriptions?" and all that anti-consumer shit that breaks with the original spirit of so many products.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine a person (that I don't personally know) who I more want to ensure a very, very long and productive life than GabeN. He has done more for us Linux/open source people than nearly anyone else I can think of besides maybe the Linux kernel team, Red Hat, and Arch, Debian and other bigtime contributors.
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That's unlikely to happen with Valve's ownership structure
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Lets enjoy the moment while it lasts…
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The sticky thing that keeps me in the steam platform is the software itself: notably, Steam Workshop. I normally source my games DRM free but after some experience trying to manage mods of heavily modded games like Rimworld I have come to discover that the value add of package management via Workshop for the exact same price is 100% worth it. Even though I trade DRM for it.
Yeah, GoG is my other go-to for games. I'm not a big fan of DRM, but I'm OK with DRM that respects me. Valve has never abused the DRM or let it get in my way. I can play offline, I can use multiple computers, I can share games with my family on their computers. All things considered it's pretty respectful of the reality of how people want to experience and share their content.
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FWIW RimWorld on steam is DRM free. You can copy it and launch it without steam.
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Interesting. I think the software is absolutely tasteless. For a long time it had to update "twice", asking you to restart steam 2 times in a row. It defaults to showing an "ad" on startup. Its chat had a bug that had hidden messages everytime someone wrote you, so you had to reopen the window several times to see it.
Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.
Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!
I just wish the platforms weren't beholden to the publishers. To a certain extent, pulling a game from Steam is like pulling it off the shelves at big box stores, but the difference is the games CAN'T find their way to resale shops; they're gone forever.
Story time: I was pretty upset when my original copy of GTA: Vice City was intentionally broken, then the "Definitive Edition" was released a short time later. Especially in the case of GTAIII, they removed the top-down camera so it's not a 1:1 flat upgrade. I find it quaint and fun to try and beat that game using the top-down camera of GTA1 and 2, so was rather disappointed.
> Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it.
That's more a critiques to how software development happens today. Its a consequence of decoupling the product ownership from the developer, who only implements what's required according to the ticket/feature requested by the PO.
To be clear, I'm not saying that passing full ownership of the software to the developers they've hired to be effectively code monkeys would work. And neither do I think that the approach of having the developers be the owners of the software "scales" (teams like that will always be small and have very little space for Jr. positions).
It's very illuminating if you look at the average developer salary at valve, they're just approaching software development differently then Amazon and Epic (and rest of the industry for that matter)
> 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.
> I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible.
Epic is so terrible, I'll pay them twice for the same game!
And we wonder why the game industry is in such a shit shape...
I know that some portion of profits from the game, even on Steam, will go to them because they funded and published it. But after the exclusivity expires I'd expect Remedy Entertainment will probably have the standard 70/30 split with valve and whatever Epic see from that sale will be a smaller percentage. I love Remedy and how they practice their craft and art.
Economic semantics aside, yes. I hate Epic so much I'll pay them again not to have to use it any longer.
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If I could copy one feature from Steam to the Apple Store it would be seasonal sales. And bundle prices. If I could copy two features from Steam to the Apple Store...
My friend had to go through huge gyrations to offer a discount for upgrades on a productivity app. Your choices seem to mostly be either never get paid again by old customers or over/undercharge people.
On Steam you can sort it out with a bundle discount.
Steam also did the legwork to adapt to other countries' cultures, means and payment systems.
They do regional pricing, including systems which make it difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in physical stores, and pay for them with cash.
Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially Apple's.
While I know that Steam has DRM, it's never been as onerous as other types of DRM.
I also know that Steam DRM isn't that hard to bypass. Generally just some patched DLLs. But I've never had a real need to bypass it. Steam lets you play offline with no connection. My games are, to a first approximation, mine and Valve doesn't need to be informed every minute I'm playing if I so choose.
Gabe's premise is right on. We pirate from Netflix and Epic because it's orders of magnitude easier than playing by the rules. I buy from Steam because it's easier than piracy.
As a rule, I don't pirate steam games. If it's something I'm interested in, it's probably worth my money. I do pirate from EA and others because the Sims 4 is not worth $500 in any universe. I pirate shows and movies because it's too much time and money to even figure out who has what I want this week.
You beat pirates by making your service more attractive than piracy. Steam is a better experience than free, and a better experience than all the other paid options. This is how you win.
For Epic, I am using Heroic Games Launcher, I believe it is much better than the official Epic app.
Many of the consumer friendly decisions were a direct result of lost lawsuits.
Valve also has unleashed the scum that is lootboxes, paid battle passes, paid leveling, nft store (technically not nft, but 90% of one).
Crates were in TF2 (and in some MMOs before that), but I think you can more readily blame Overwatch for that one. And paid levelling was a KMMO staple long before. But I can't argue about the DotA2 battle passes, or the expensive hats/stat-track weapons.
Steam really is a blessing for gaming. It just works.
The absolute trash that especially ubisoft tries to push on its users made me hold off on buying some of their games. It's just that bad.
> 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.
It's not like this is Steam fault. You can always return games you played under 2 hours no questions asked. Some people just like to buy stuff they dont need or hoard random things, but it's as old as humanity itself
At leastrented digital games on Steam account dont contribute to global warming, waste problems and dont use tons of electicity to mint some tokens.
I guess only major issue Steam really have to solve is ability to inherit these digital purchases if owner has died. Their license agreement dont have proper procedure for that.
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> thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep discounts during sales
This is more of a Humble Bundle thing than a Steam issue.
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> very common for Steam users to have libraries of thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed
source?
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yeah valve are scummy on loot boxes, but their steam service is top notch. And they're right, since not only they compete with publishers or f2p live service games, they also compete with pirated service, which can be highly reliable, and free.
Steam is more convenient, reliable, and affordable, so no wonder they can compete with piracy
It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS.
It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.
I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.
> The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.
Or they’d realize that the Deck is successful because it’s open and bring Steam to the Xbox.
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And kill Steam Deck just like they did with Netbooks, why get Proton translation of the real XBox experience.
Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".
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The next Xbox is a handheld.
There are rumors about an Xbox handheld https://www.pcworld.com/article/2656008/leak-more-evidence-o...
Valve should acquire Framework and have them do Steam Machine 2.0.
I'd much rather a partnership than an acquisition. Valve is great, but open, repairable hardware is not their core mission. I think Framework needs to stay independent to maintain that.
But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd rather there be a greater number of companies all independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for us".
Please no, all due props to Valve but they really can't count to 3.
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I love the idea in one sense, which is that I think they're two great companies working in areas that could plausibly converge and be quite complementary. I do have to imagine there's something about their different respective business missions or business cultures, and the ethos and philosophies that inform them that might not make it work in practice. Although I definitely see a place for a framework laptop that's happy to run SteamOS.
I think perhaps that's the goal is that there's any number of companies that we feel are pretty great that are phenomenal at serving a specific vision of gaming and computing that's oriented around Linux and that are quite happy to talk to each other in effective ways and so I wouldn't necessarily say that the culmination of that should be a merger between those companies but an ecosystem that thrives with deeply compatible hardware and software.
The Framework Desktop is what you would want for a Steam Machine 2.0. But the price is around $1,186 and I think that price is too high for a game console. As a PlayStation 5 Pro is $700. Maybe they could reach that price with a second-gen chip? Or when they introduce a new chip and this machine gets discounted.
I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.
>So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a business at the end of the day.
But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to the ground.
>a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't know what happened to Microsoft in that time.
Breaking the seal and demonstrating the capabilities, and getting it into the hands of consumers set the conditions for the Steam Deck's success. The Steam Deck exists because the Steam Machine existed, and it's in this context that the Steam Machine succeeded. You don't need overnight instant success for the program itself to succeed.
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I purchased a steam deck when they first came out specifically to financially support Valve's Linux efforts and I haven't regretted that purchase for a second. In the past year I had a couple of days where my laptop was not working. I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened (after installing some software of course, like emacs). I've re-purchased games that I own on consoles just to get the PC versions to de-couple my games from hardware, so now I'll be able to run Flower on powerful beasts, portable handhelds, and computers that haven't been invented yet whereas before it was stuck on a loud aging ps3.
My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space.
Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.
You know this already but the reason nintendo doesnt release their games on other systems is so you have to buy the system.
I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will.
It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
You also probably know this, but they don't really care about the console per se. What you buying the console means is that Nintendo gets to stand on the bridge between your console and game developers and demand 30% or whatever it is.
Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
> I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened
Same here, I already had a keyboard and mouse plugged into it and it served excellently until the replacement part for my daily driver arrived.
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 that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
> 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.
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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 :)
> [...] by being very very good to their users [...]
Helps that they don't have to be very very good to shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
> If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are
They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
(Quoted text is from https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
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Yeah, when you wanna be evil, be evil to devs. They are stuck on two fronts and gamers are already pre-disposed to blame them for any problems anyway.
>If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
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I find it funny that every time other publishers try to recreate Steam with their own catalogues, a good chunk of gamers (myself included) just refuse to buy "exclusives" on other platforms, to the point they eventually crawl back to Steam. EA held out for a LONG time. I broke my reluctance only once because I wanted to play the latest FarCry game, but otherwise, I've kept all my games on Steam. They eventually caved too.
What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.
My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
Deadlock is absolutely not a Team Fortress spiritual successor, it has much much more in common with Dota 2 than TF2, and is really full of interesting features and polish for where it's at in its development.
In some ways, it's because valve caved and did the equivalent of tax cuts for the rich. You have revenue more than like, 25 million/yr as a publisher and you reduce your infamous 30% cut to 20%.
Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
Steam isn't really a monopoly though, everyone is free to use whatever marketplace they choose on PC. Steam's just the best one.
And there are tons. Epic, EA, Ubi Play - they are pretty shitty.
Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not because they hinder the competition, but because the competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
It's economies of scale. I strongly feel "just grab it on steam," which my friends say, is colloquially equivalent to "grab a band-aid".
Both Steam and Band-Aid are brand names.
Same with Microsoft in 90's
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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 friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
The library one amasses is a huge lock-in though, you’re downplaying it
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How do you qualify them as a monopoly?
I have 3 different non-Steam game stores and another 3 or 4 non-Steam game-specific launchers on my PC.
>How do you qualify them as a monopoly?
If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
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Not only is Steam not a monopoly, TFA mentions how it’s possible to easily install alternative app stores on the Steam Deck.
It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.
I bought a Steam Deck OLED last year, and it's honestly astounding to me how well it both provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience for both the "gaming mode" Steam interface and the "desktop mode" with a regular Linux desktop without sacrificing basically any customization. It's a glorified tablet that in my baggiest pair of jeans I can just barely fit into my pocket, and somehow probably the most realistic attempt I've seen at making something suitable for the mythical "year of the Linux desktop", which wasn't even the goal!
It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
> given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices
Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)
So, perhaps not all good.
(From https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
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They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive.
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
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I hope Gabe Newell outlives me, because I don't want to see Valve go down the road of other game studios...
My main long term worry with Steam is that Gaben will die and then Valve will IPO.
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My bigger problem with Valve is their unregulated underage gambling platform that they could shutdown in a second but they don't because $ $ $
> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of
They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their market share)
I believe saints would implement some sort of distributed platform that others could interoperate with, by sharing the launcher’s list of games (e.g. have Epic games automatically appear on the list), share the list of friends and achievements between platforms, and so on.
Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled gardens.
Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
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Isn't it kind of a bloodsport to get into the midweek madness or seasonal sales? It's like curated playlists in the music apps but for games.
Anecdotally I've heard it really does help to get on those Steam lists.
They profit off getting kids addicted to gambling. Is that not evil?
While I don't disagree with you I also don't think Valve is particularly bad in this area. Valve's games are not made for younger kids and Steam's parental controls are excellent.
Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they target much younger children with less parental control.
Right. There is 1 good thing about Steam (it can be summarized to the point of openness), and the rest is evil. I don't get the article.
They have no morals with how they make money. No morals in politics. They are running a monopoly with a 30% cut.
How is that a "do no evil" company? Because you can install an app from Epic? Give me a break...
By the low standards set by other companies in similar positions I think they're doing quite well.
Gabe Newell became a Microsoft millionaire decided to have a company who did things his way. Turns out he’s quite an ethical guy.
They have done absolutely nothing to be a monopoly. The only reason they are at the top is that their competition consistently keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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.)
For me, the switch is the only console I trust to leave my kids alone with. Nintendo builds great games for kids, but you pay for them. I mean, launch games like Mario Odysee and Breath of the Wild are still sold at full price, years later.
I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters. My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back into the game (because they pressed the Home button)
Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid"
Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
> Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic.
Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
It's sticker price shock for sure. Historically speaking, this will just smooth over and people will set their sticks in the sand. If the 900 dollar PS5 pro can shrug it off, then I doubt there's much issue here.
> 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
A licensing deal between Nintendo and Valve. Once could dream. Get the entire Steam lib on your Switch, then Valve gets a "Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 - Only on Nintendo" store listing on Steam.
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 years, if not 1.
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.
My impression is that the general quality of games on the Switch (or Switch 2 or eShop) is sub par the quality of, e.g. Zelda. This is obviously because Zelda is a landmark title and it doesn't make sense to compare it with "the general quality" of games on Steam. It would make more sense to compare it with the quality of other landmark titles on Steam e.g. Baldur's Gate 3.
You can compare the general quality of games on Steam (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5") with the general quality of games on Switch (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5"), though I'm not sure it is that interesting of a comparison, since no one buys the "average" game but what they consider to be the best games on the platform.
I'd suspect that any attempt at an "objective" comparison (obviously, an impossible task) would land in favour of Steam simply because it has basically all of (core) gaming for most of history on it. Though obviously such an "objective" comparison would be meaningless for something like this where literally your subjective opinion should matter the most for your choice.
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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.
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On the other hand, I've heard it said that the Steam Deck's sticker price is almost wholly justified as a single-purpose Baldur's Gate 3 device. Let alone Skyrim, Civ, etc.
Just because steam sells games that do in-game profiteering, doesn't mean you need to play them?
> 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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A lot of games need ui redesign for hand held controllers. That’s often the biggest issue.
Nintendo games have consistently disappointed me with their lack of depth in their stories. Breath of the Wild had an amazing open world, but the characters came off as two-dimensional and the final boss was completely disappointing. (there's something especially uncanny about having a protagonist who doesn't utter a word, even if it's meant to help players self-insert) Mario Odyssey was even more pitiful in how it retread the same surface level cartoonish villainy of Bowser kidnapping the princess. Nintendo certainly makes games that are fun to play, but as an adult, I've come to expect more from art, and plenty of the games on Steam actually respect the capability of their audience to not turn off their brains.
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> 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.
Totally. Steam store looks like a god damn aliexpress marketplace and is tasteless design.
The Store UI is disgusting and intrusive compared to all other competitors who actually have a decent overview and design..
You can collect gems, cards and other misleading virtual currencies.. Tons of misleading business practises and time-consuming bloatware distractions hidden behind that terrible UI.
Steam is first and foremost DRM. A game-prison. You don't own a single thing. Gamers have totally drunk the kool aid.. They forgot back when Steam was bloatware forced on Half-Life and Valve games and it was despised for a decade before they became complacent little worshippers.
People buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, generally. It's actually baffling how other AAA game studios release games at full price in a buggy state, then are heavily discounted months later with enough patches for them to finally be playable. I don't like how Nintendo games rarely get decent discounts but I understand why they're preserving the image that their games are worth the price.
This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
Yeah; the Steam Deck still runs a Zen 2 chip, while handhelds like the Ally X are on Zen 4. We'll likely start seeing some handheld PCs begin upgrading to Zen 5/Strix Point this year, and IMO that may be the point where these devices start actually being able to replace desktop gaming PCs for some gamers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAu7L1hezJA
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.
It's a trickle down effect for sure. Where indies suffer the most. You have games getting away with $70 price tags, but your indie game you spent 2+ years on better no cost more than 15-20 a pop and better have a 50% launch discount. You really can't sustain yourself even as a true solo dev in western countries (let alone if you need to commission/hire an artist/composer).
And when I say "sustain in western countries" I'm talking the bog bottom line of "us federal minimum wage", coming down to approx. $15k/year. That's 1000 copies of a $15 game that is probably upped to 1800 copies after valve and other's cuts. Even that paltry marker is hard just becsuse the market is so saturated (and not in a good way).
It's only gonna get worse as a generation that is raised on mobile games and game pass settle in. The idea of spending money upfront from a game may be lost entirely.
>I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
That was indeed an explicit strategy of Nintendo. Keep a premium brand and a price thst reflects that. Sales are rare to maintain this idea of an evergreen title that is always selling.
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I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller). I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than bundle the crapware that is windows.
> According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way.
Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
It's one of the best devices I've ever bought.
I've used it for all sorts of stuff from gaming on flights, to local multiplayer, to controlling a robot car, to watching YouTube with adblocking, etc.
I have a first-gen Switch, still in active rotation. My kids are asking me why we don't hack it. My answer has been, what does a hacked Switch do that my Steam Deck doesn't already do, without hacking? I mean, if you're going to sail the seven seas and yo-ho-ho, not that I've been encouraging that, the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too! And at least we can't accidentally hook the Switch up to the network and get it banned if it isn't hacked.
>the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too
What about motion control games like Switch Sports?
I don't have any personal experience running Switch games on the Steam Deck, but I do have experience trying to use the Switch Pro controllers. I think they may work fine for some people now, but I have never been able to have them have a stable wireless connection. But when the connection was established, the accelerometers worked fine. (I gave up and just bought some XBox controllers.)
I'm sure the emulators accept the Steam Deck's own accelerometer inputs for when you're in a non-detached mode, and tilting the screen to aim.
The super-mega-motion control games might not work, but part of what I mean by "works better" is that the Steam Deck can generally emulate with more power than the Switch itself, e.g., you can get a Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom setup with a better framerate than the switch itself, so, depends on what you want more. I don't have a lot of motion control games.
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While not a Switch, I use Wiimotes with motion accelerometer + gyro (MotionPlus) with my Steam Deck & Dolphin just fine.
Local multiplayer on steam is borderline unusable.
A software engineer can (temporarily) get it working after hours of diagnosis.
Compare that to the switch.
"Local multiplayer on Steam" has no referent, because Steam does not do local multiplayer at all. It's all up to the game. I've played plenty of games that way, Steam and the Steam Deck add no particular problem with it.
While I wouldn't pin this on Steam qua Steam as a program, it is a fair complaint about the ecosystem. I have some games that are as flexible as the Switch about being docked. I have some games that can be docked but can't handle any resolution changes. I have some games you just plain can't switch. I have some games that you can switch from using the physical Steam Deck controls to an Xbox controller seamlessly, complete with the in-game hint graphics changing to match the controller in use. I have some games that have to be restarted to pick up a new controller. At least a few months ago I had one particular combination of games that if I played them in sequence would somehow permanently render XBox controllers non-functional until I rebooted the Steam Deck, though that is certainly an exception.
The Switch does handle the Switch-ing in the Switch name better than the Steam Deck, and it is a structural advantage that Valve will have a hard time addressing in a practical way. That said, my family does use the Steam Deck as a de facto Switch 1.5, as a thing that is used fairly evenly between "docked" and "in hand", and it is functional enough to work, even if it is undeniably not as slick.
Could be a fun family project to hack the Switch
That's an editorialized title ("The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly") and subtly different than what the article actually states. I don't think Steam Deck was made particularly software-freedom friendly. I do think that it managed to not be software-freedom unfriendly, and that's because unlike other vendors Valve did not care to make it so. It's a subtle, yet non-negligible difference that leads to different outcomes.
If only gaben could live forever... It'll be a dark day for gaming when he's gone and valve gets bought out by MS or goes public.
It will be. The best case might be valve turns into some form of co-op, it might keep some of that culture going.
> Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux.
This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.
> 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.
I don't want to get into this on this discussion because...well. video games. But consider the following: The organization and customers benefits from meritocratic hiring of the best candidates. But individual hiring managers have biases either for specific people (nepotism) or against groups of people (bigotry). Those individuals would be acting against the best interests of the company and customers whether they act consciously or not. A responsible company would adapt hiring processes to remove that kind of bias otherwise everyone suffers. The company suffers due to lower efficiency and blind spots in their points of view. Customers suffer due to worse output by the company. Some individual candidates suffer by being denied opportunities based on attributes they have no control over (gender, race, physical appearance) instead of the merits of their education, experience, and talents.
There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
Meritocratic hiring of the best candidates is equality of opportunity, not equity/equality of outcome. Equity requires discrimination and dehumanization of individual people to achieve because racial distributions vary at an earlier stage than the hiring process. I agree that a responsible company tries to remove bias and doesn't discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics, however...
It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.
If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.
It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.
You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
The flat structure deadlocks projects and adds downward pressure to not take on ambitious ones (Half-Life 3?) as it requires massive-scale politicking.
Sounds like you're operating off of old knowledge from the Half-Life Alyx developer's commentary. They specifically changed their internal processes because of those issues.
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.
Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in exposing tech to potential other audiences.
But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
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do you find it fishy 88% of the nursing workforce is female?
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"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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The steam deck is so cool, I can't wait for the steam box revolution to begin
I don't think a product being freedom friendly is going to make it a success in and of itself, but seeing one always makes me smile and that's a win in my book.
How good is platform support - can I install e.g. Diablo 3 and have the thumbsticks control the character and not a virtual mouse? Or would I need to remap the input myself?
It varies by game - if the devs created a default control scheme, the Deck will load that by default and you're good to go. (The green check mark means that Valve verified this behavior, as well as other things.) And if not, the Deck UI makes it pretty easy to create your own mappings and share them, or download "community layouts".
You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the same UI which the Deck uses.
I was going to check that and I realized i can’t find diablo 3 on steam. I know I could install it myself through some other online store. Still, I wish there were cartridges that “just worked”; consoles (including today’s Nintendo) got that part right IMO.
Steam's Input system is great, and many people will launch non-Steam games through Steam specifically for the controller mapping. Any game with controller support (console) works flawlessly with the Deck, or any PC using a controller. I don't think I've come across a game that doesn't work out of the box.
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%.
I still don't love it. DRM is DRM and I've watched enough heroes fall from grace to know it's onto a matter of when they yank your chain, not if. I will avoid to the best of my ability any attempts to retract back products I purchased myself.
That's why I wanted to stick to consoles and a physical medium. But even those have devolved into what's basically a digital download, now with the disk (or cartridge now, with Switch 2) being the DRM. The Onion couldn't write a more ironic headline.
Now I'm wondering if all that "virtual sharing" stuff for switch 2 cartridges means difficulties with the used market.
>In my opinion he deserves 30%.
Even Gabe doesn't agree, given the cut he gives to AAA publishers. I'm not exactly onboard with the idea that the richest people get the best tax breaks, even in video game world.
A progressive platform cut would be much friendlier to smaller devs and put the biggest burdens on the ones likely using the most amount of bandwidth. That's how the game engines have started to leverage their tooling. And they put a lot more work in than a hosting platform
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.
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.
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It's perfectly fine to love Apple and Steam. They are both great companies and offer great products. The issue I have is in trying to extrapolate that love into labeling them pro-"software freedom", which is idiotic. Both these companies ship opaque binaries of their storefront and products. Their apps/games have restrictive DRM. You cannot install/register games without an account and internet access. They artifically limit resale/sharing/lending of digital goods. They are actively user hostile (such as not offering refunds until forced to by courts). Even the Steam Deck is full of proprietary blobs which would be illegal to revese engineer and reshare. Nothing about the experience is FOSS.
Again none of this is inherently bad if your argument is "I like the convenience and don't care about the restrictions". But don't delude yourself into thinking this is "freedom".
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You can run your GOG library on Steam Deck even without having to change the OS
The Steam Deck does a good job of running games offline. The mix bag will be the online style cash grabs from Ubisoft and EA but most work too.
DRM is a thing we have to live with but valve does a decent job of making it invisible when it's theirs. The ones that suck the most are the aforementioned studios which roll their own on top.
And subscription service free is high on my wishlist, too.
I could perhaps live with subscription terms that are still variable amount / mount (currently 0) as servers do cost money. Even if their quasi-monopoly would allow them to extort us. But what needs to be more reliable, is that the ToS I applied to when I bought the game should not change afterwards in a one-sided proposal to keep access to my game licenses. Which is not allowed in our jurisdiction at least, so steam was found non-compliant in the EU.
(Back in 2021) https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/ip_21_...
It does mean that you can install games any way you want, and even do things like emulate Switch games.
You can run games offline and DRM free.
Yes.
If only there was a powerful linux phone with convergence. The steam deck is not far from that.
Hmm, the headline here is quite different to the post.
> I had no issues installing Epic Games
Except Fortnite =(
steamdeck verified is a lie, I bought a steamdeck and tested 20 games. Lots of problems.
I have a pretty big Steam library and have had no issues with any “verified” game and very few issues even with those that are just marked “playable”.
What problems have you seen?
I don't own one, so mostly just curious, what are some more prominent examples of this?
Steam Deck owner since launch here -- I wouldn't say the Verified status is a lie, but there have been instances where games have received Verified badge status at launch, but performed poorly on Deck.
Some popular examples of this;
1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck.
2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.
Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings?
Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user.
I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved.
1: https://www.steamdeck.com/verified
What kills Deck for me are the game launchers.
For me it was the lack of portability (it's a chunky beast), I just wasn't taking it anywhere because it takes up so much space in your bag. By comparison the switch with it's disconnecting controllers fits in my electronics bag along with a bunch of plugs, chargers and cables and hardly takes up any room, and weighs a decent amount less. Looking forward to a slimmer and narrower V2 though, if it ever materialises.
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this is what happens when you ship experimental software as "stable" on a handheld system. could have told you in advance. expect game-breaking crashes and bugs sooner or later the more you use it.
They really need to do much better about how they communicate this to users.
Developers are unable to opt out of the system and Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a developer.
Valve needs to set proper expectations of who to be mad at when a game breaks on the Steam Deck if the developer themselves never pledged support.
Most users don't understand what an OS really is or how a game works on the Steam Deck (SteamOS) instead of Windows.
> Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a developer.
This is a big claim, is there evidence for this? I'm an end-user, not a developer, but there are plenty of games in Unknown status. I would assume that should be the default, not Verified.
I can see an argument that Valve has incentive to have flagship games get that Verified badge, but there is also precedence for them downgrading popular games after launch. For example, Spider-Man 2 recently went from Verified to Playable (rightfully so, in my opinion).
> You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking.
Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
The selling point of a Steam Deck is that it is a PC console. One of the problems with the PC gaming market is that even though in theory all PCs are "compatible", the reality for game developers is very different. Different PCs have subtly (or not so subtly) incompatible software and hardware, and it's up to OS developers to try to maintain some semblance of compatibility, and game developers to ensure that their product runs on as many configurations as possible.
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
> The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know.
First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, 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.
Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.
Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.
My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
Native Linux ports matters!
> 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 not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
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.
> Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm..
Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
> to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
>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 the Steamdeck community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
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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 measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
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 development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
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.
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You can install Windows on the Steam Deck if you want.
But calling Windows more free than Linux because you can virtualize Linux is a noteworthy statement alright.
That's the exact argument people make on the Steam deck vs Nintendo. "but you can emulate switch games!"
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It always briefly crosses my mind for a second when I install older games that package some ancient C++ redistributable with the installer.