Comment by charcircuit
2 days ago
I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility.
> force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility
How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't they just avoid doing that?
They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for them to 100% opt out of being on that platform.
Your argument is illogical. If devs don’t want to support it, they simply will not support it—as evidenced by the thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified, but either run just fine, or don’t run at all with the devs not giving it a second thought.
Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows, then I’m all up for it. It’s a win for everyone.
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> Practically every other company with an application platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform.
the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows Phone and the Epic Store
both of which were runaway commercial successes
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It is typically neither free nor open to develop on consoles. As in, you pay to access developer tools.
iOS and Android less so (even if there is a one time charge for Android and a yearly charge on Apple). OTOH I have not heard of them usually reaching out to more than a handful of devs for promotion purposes.
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The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.
A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.
Why the vitriol? This is one of the rare cases where a company actually puts money in open source development. Of course they ultimately do it for business reasons but everyone benefits from it as a whole, so I fail to understand the issue here.
Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.
Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.
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I'm sure those developers hate getting a larger install base for free.
It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that can result in reputational damage.
Then developers should fix their games and make sure the software they are selling actually works as advertised. End of discussion.
I don’t quite understand the logic behind your argument. Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up? That’s ridiculous, utterly consumer-hostile.
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