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Steam keeps on winning
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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It's not Steam's fault if their competitors can't make a good product. Steam is still the only one with Linux support.
There is nothing exclusive to steam with respect to Linux support. All of the things required for games to run on Linux which valve support are fully open source and even existed before valve got involved. They just threw money at the efforts and turbo charged it (which is great).
Yes, which makes it even more puzzling that the competitors don't even try to capitalize on the success of Steam Deck and publish their own store on Flathub, utilizing the very same FOSS technologies to make the games run.
It is the simple fact that linux is too low a market share, even with steam deck, to bother throwing money at it.
Three million Steam Decks sold.
You act as if packaging existing open source software is such an insanely expensive task. It is not.
Which is why steam invested in said FOSS projects to begin with, they can now forego having to pay licensing costs to microsoft. It is not like steam did this out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather for their own bottom line.
Yes it absolutely is for a megacorp, for 0 return. Anybody who wants to run games on non-steam launchers can do so just fine, there is mostly only convenience to be gained. The megacorp needs to hire entire teams / departments that understand linux, that understand wine/proton and that can maintain and keep said packages up to date, it is realistically not simple or cheap in corporate hell.
The idea that there is money worthwhile for any store but steam in linux gaming is detached from reality. There is only money in it for steam only because of steam deck.
Steam is not a company, Valve is.
I don't care. My experience matters to me and Valve delivers on that experience, so I only buy games on Steam.
I pay for convenience. If I wanted to jump through burning hoops, I pirate the games.
No. Valve for the most part didn't (Pierre-Loup Griffais is a notable exception) but I wouldn't expect someone who can't get Valve's name right to know what outsourcing is.
Through Flathub Epic, CD Project, etc. could get on Steam Decks and completely circumvent any royalties to Valve. Epic also have an affiliation with One-Netbook, the makers of OneXPlayer, though Tencent. An Epic Deck is only one phone call away.
Steam Deck sells well because of superior usability to Windows handhelds.
All this pedantic smugness and yet you still can’t present a half decent argument for why linux support matters for other vendors besides steam.
And even with steam the only reason they matter for them is that it drives hardware profits. Extra game sales are a bonus.
Steam could have sold 30 million decks and it still would hardly matter. You know why? Most people who own a deck also own a PC, and chances are that PC is running windows, the deck is likely not their main gaming platform. Furthermore, many people would be happier if it ran windows, as sad as that may be. Just throw a google search for “SteamOS frustrating”.
At the end of the day, linux support doesn’t matter much for any other vendor. Linux marketshare is small and within that small share an even smaller share are linux exclusive gamers who take a hard line when it comes to linux support and do it how you will, linux support costs money, the ROI isn’t big enough to consider, it is pocket change.
I gave a reason why it barely requires any effort to bundle up existing FOSS solutions to make Windows games compatible, ie. expanding the potential user base by several millions. I know what I'm talking about because I package Linux software myself.
That's 5 million more than Xbox Series X|S and Windows games would run with hardly any extra work required. That's different from making native ports.
I don't care for annecdotal evidence. Sales numbers speak for themselves.
Learn the difference between Valve and Steam before trying to lecture anyone.
The fact that it can be done or even relatively easily means nothing. Whether teams are hired in-house or the task is outsourced does not matter, it still costs a decent sum of money and requires ongoing maintenance costs. You need additional devs, you need QA and customer support, you even need new features in your client. You can’t just wing it and bundle some packages, we are not talking hobby projects here.
Again steam did not do this to drive game sales, otherwise they'd have done this before they needed a deck solution. And this is because stand-alone the amount of game sales this would drive is nothing to major vendors because most linux gamers are willing to use heroic/lutris/bottles/wine whatever themselves or dualboot / vm passthrough to play what they want.
And you keep hinging on steams hardware sales figures but it is not like the praise or demand for steam deck comes from it running a linux base. It would be more accurate to say people love it despite that fact.
The praise steam is getting and what is driving steams device sales numbers comes almost in its entirety from the hardware platform being really good and the price being really low. And this comes back full circle - this is almost exclusively why steam invested in linux compatibility.
So no, steams hardware sales numbers don’t speak for themselves.
Proton exists far longer than Steam Deck. You don't know what you're talking about.
And steam has been trying to push linux based steam hardware before proton, so maybe you are out of your depth here?
No.
Lmao, you should go look into the origins of steams hardware line then and why steam invested in proton. Come back with something more than “ackchyually”
Maybe they're making more money behind the scenes from another corporation that perhaps pays for them not to do so? Exclusivity deals, etc. etc.?
Because there's no money in Linux. Valve can afford to target Linux for long term growth because they aren't a public company that has to answer to investors every quarter. People mistake that for valve being pro-consumer, which they're not.
You should have a chat with the CEOs of Red Hat, Canonical, etc. about that. They surely will value your opinion.
As a consumer, I don't care about their motivation, I care about the results. Steam Deck is more comfortable to use than Windows handhelds.
Companies focusing on long term growth is good for the consumers compared to the ones that only focuses on short term profits. Though why valve is able to do that and other companies like ea or abk can't is beyond me.
Lol it is literally steam's fault and they intended to be this way from the very beginning. They intentionally cornered the market with HL2. It's incredible how people act like this just accidentally happened because valve made a supposedly good product.
Epic is worth 5 times as much as Valve and EGS is still fucking garbage years after it launched. If anything, Valve is the underdog here, yet Steam is objectively better than every other store. It's not their fault if competing products are trash. Valve is not responsible for UbiSoft being incapable of making software that works as advertised, of for Epic refusing to support Linux.
You can't solve this problem with money. People don't want multiple game launchers. It's like asking why Apple hasn't cornered the desktop market when they're one of the largest companies in the world.
Valve 100% knew what they were doing with HL2.
You are sure an old head, you saw Half-Life 2 bound to Steam once and never forgave it. People don't care that much about Half-Life 2 today, it's not that which is keeping them there. Meanwhile today Epic not only makes their in-house games exclusive but games from other publishers as well.
The gaming market is much more fickle than general computing, one generation Sony might be on top, and the next one is Microsoft or Nintendo.
Sure people don't want multiple game launchers, but a launcher that has their favorite game and does all that they need would be enough to get people to switch over. Epic got Fortnite and loads of players because of it. If their launcher did all that players wanted it to, maybe more people would make it their main platform. But Epic doesn't care to add features to it. If I want to read guides, or listen to game soundtracks, or mod games, I can do that without leaving Steam. But other than exclusivity, you know, the thing that you denounce Valve for having done, there is nothing that Epic does better than Steam or any other store on the market.
Apple could easily eat into MS's pie by licensing macOS to OEMs.
Next CEO will literally just kill the program and pocket the money. Saying they need to focus on their core windows users, times are hard, “the economy”
"This product is worthless because it doesn't cater to... Let me check my notes... Under 2% of the market and even less if we don't count the Steam Deck!"
Ok buddy
I really don't understand this argument. Aren't you basically pointing out that Steam is better because they cater to a demographic that most companies won't consider because of the small market size?
No, I'm pointing out that it's perfectly normal that other companies don't see the point of spending money on it. Steam has 70% of the PC market which is 96% of the market and you think it's a good idea to put energy into trying to capture some shares of less than 2% of the market where they have basically a 100% hold.
Don't start a business.
I understand that it's normal, but the argument still doesn't make sense for the purposes of this discussion. For people who do use Linux, it is worthless since they can't use it. I also can't blame Linux users for not liking a company that has been hostile to them (i.e. removing Linux support from a game that had it.) You're just reinforcing that Steam is a better option for them.
The problem is that the complaints aren't "It might be a good product, I can't try it because they don't support my OS of choice and that's understandable considering the small user base" which is perfectly reasonable, the complaints are "Epic sucks because they don't support Linux and [insert a bunch of stuff that hasn't been true for years or that also applies to Valve as a company]" which isn't reasonable.
It's not just that though. A lot of people have already pointed out that Epic appears to be actively hostile towards Linux by removing compatibility for games that had it before. People have also pointed out that turning on Linux compatibility for EAC is fairly trivial, but they refuse to do it. For some games, Linux users have to go through extra loops just to make it work. So when it looks like a company is treating a certain demographic as something that's worth less than shit for no apparent reason, I'm not too surprised that they'll have a negative attitude towards that company.
And say what you want about Valve, but they have pushed Linux compatibility and it's not surprising why Linux users have a more positive view of them over Epic. As I've already said, your argument reinforces this point.
You have a comforting and appealing way of getting your point across that totally leaves the listener/reader readily open to considering your opinion. Keep doing that.
that the difference, instead of getting their ass fucked for what ever stupid decision microsoft do, they created their own market, that btw already run faster than the microsoft's one while windows is getting worse day by day, linux is getting better, an they are doing it in the most pro-user way
more than macOS lol
"Already runs faster than the Microsoft one"
Yeah so that article you're referencing doesn't have any credibility when you actually understand how sampling works.
One computer setup, ignoring the games that don't work at all, Windows offering marginally lower performance at peak but much higher fps stability... Let's present it as a major win for Linux!
Do you know what my stats teacher would have told me if I had presented a study based on a sample of one? They would have told me "See you in this same class next year, you clearly didn't understand anything I taught you so we'll try again."
Bruh, the Steam Deck is Linux.
Yes, but its only use (in the vast majority of cases) is playing games so it's not comparable to Windows PCs (a versatile tool) which are 96% of the market and are comparable to Linux PCs. The people who buy a Steam Deck intentionally buy it to play PC games with a portable device and couldn't care less what OS is on it, the people who run a Linux PC intentionally use Linux.
Although now that I say that, I wonder how many Deck owners are just Linux users who bought it out of OS loyalty and wouldn't have shown any interest in the equivalent product (ROG Ally, Legion GO)... When wouldn't make them much better than the Apple fanatics if we think about it...
I very specifically bought a steam deck because it can double as a Linux desktop. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Caution, though, this same principle applies to the disabled, and soldiers; both groups gaming companies have made many direct attempts to support even if it’s just for a positive public image.
The difference being that you choose the OS you're using.
Uhoh. I didn’t think this would be how I learned about the US draft being reinstated.
Find me one soldier/veteran that would choose to have PTSD or their limbs mangled.