Comment by adverbly

The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar).

Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...

[1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review

Let's be honest about this current situation.

Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not charity.

Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)

Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary

They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS

Don't forget GoG which is an alternative game store with a strong anti-DRM stance (all the games there are DRM free).

They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious

When you're skimming 30 % off worldwide PC game purchases you can afford to do that.

Even there, didn't they recently make some changes to the CS go skins ecosystem to devalue much of the aftermarket sales.

I still put them in the same box as Apple until they fix the price parity and/or adjust their cut. Even Apple is finally having their hand forced there.

They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.

> gambling/loot box [...] legit ethical concerns

I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?

Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.

The difference between Valve and the other app stores with an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.

To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.

With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.

So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.

People are mostly perfectly happy with authoritarianism as long as their lives are improving.

If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even police this.

The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.

> shows pop up ads on startup

Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.

Ads can be disabled in the settings.

> The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games

Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by Valve?

> pretty poorly optimized website

What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.

I don’t mind the ads. They are actually about games and I may like some of them. If they start selling ad space for others that would be terrible.

This really makes me wonder if publicly traded companies are just a bad idea.

It's kind of scary that in a way future of gaming is in the hands of one man (who is getting old btw).

When Gabe is gone I cringe thinking MS will do everything in their power to buy Valve and turn it to complete shit couple years later.

Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing almost all the effort on the project.

If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).

Let them have their rootkits, good riddens

Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely had more issues with games with native Linux builds than Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to use Proton over native to get better performance.

Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never.

Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.

It would be better for Linux to gain native support for some of the Windows and DirectX 12 APIs.

Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows devs more than halfway.

Has that been confirmed? Got a link?

> like Apple: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model.

Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an exploitive company

Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad.

That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.

You complelty ignore the foxcon problem?

Google makes money with ads and at least takes this serious.

Apple just exploits.

Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...

Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)

Sure, none of that is untrue, but they could still engage in rent seeking behavior. They could start requiring subscription fees for stuff that previously didn't require it (like start capping download speeds unless you're part of "Steam+" or something), or blacklist any distro that isn't SteamOS, or make it difficult or impossible to install games from third-party stores (like GOG) on Steam Decks or their upcoming Steam Boxes.

I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.

I didn’t say you would oppose all organized endeavors. I said we shouldn’t worship companies.

I just wonder if it's an inherent symptom of massive success. I'm not talking Valve level of success, but more like Google and Apple and Microsoft levels. Eventually every company has downturns in the market, and whether or not it's fair the investors/board of directors will think it's because of the current strategy, and they'll engage in terrible rent-seeking behavior.

I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.

To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.

From interviews with the Alyx devs, it really sounded like the only reason they didn't call it HL3 was fear of not living up to the name.

Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."

That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).

Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in development.

https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...

I believe for the next Half-Life, latest rumors indicate it is actually back to 2D. During the press event last month, they were also pretty clear that no VR game is currently in development at Valve.

A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a theater sized screen is nice enough.

Leaks disproved this in 2023. HLX is a single player non-vr PC game.

Seems unlikely with the steam machine coming? I haven't heard any sign of it specifically being frame only

Orange Box 2. Then in another few decades we'd get Orange Box: Alyx.

A killer app is a great way to sell a "console". Windows port can come later.

this would be basically what they did with steam

Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).

Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? As far as I can tell, even indie games require steam to run.

DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?

They claim they will only release when the game has something innovative to offer.

But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve releasing virtual card games today?

Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now, they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.

They could publish Episode 3 and then publish Half-Life 3 afterwards. I never understood why people keep insisting they can release only one game. It's not like they don't have average or mediocre titles in the series anyway (Blue Shift and Episode 1 are examples of this).

I think as long as Valve remains a private company, they can continue Gabe's way of doing things. It's when it's a public company will the leader have the pressure of satisfying shareholder returns as opposed to doing what is right and what got them a loyal base of customers in the first place.

Maybe that's why he stays most of the time away from valve? It's his way of training the company into functioning without him, only intervening occasionally when necessary.

Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can.

I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.

Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers can do the job.

That doesn't mean he isn't still making the important decisions.

> So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive.

No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be.

> Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?

Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work".

The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be.

It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.