Comment by marcellus23
2 days ago
> 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.
It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs. stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions, X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa, PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.
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I never said they were forced to support, but that they are forced to fund such a thing for their game as opposed to their being an option for Valve to fund it.
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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
Have you ever heard of terms like "Playstation exclusive" before? Companies benefit from having good content on their platform and they typically are willing to pay for it.
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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.
You pay, but you get actual support from console makers. They kind of need to given how closed off it is otherwise. The competition also means larger profile studios (indie and AAA) will usually get some good deals to work with.
The one time model from Apple/Android really is just a tax that gets you nothing but access in comparison. It's a full advert model where the biggest players throw millions at Apple/Android for visibility.
Valve's somewhere in the middle of the two. No "p2w" adverts but it's not doing too much to draw devs (except reducing the tax for AAA devs). It doesn't need to. A lot of its community models are "we're having a party, you bring the food and drinks".