Oh my God this is so much nicer. I was getting so sick of trying to navigate the category and having the same live action free to play games appear every time. I have some games that I can remove from my ignore list now
This is literally an example of why Steam gets praised as the only good game store. They make a change, users complain that part of the change sucks, and they listen to the feedback
Steam does provide a good product, no critique there. My point is the fact that they too are employing anti competitive measures and serve a billionaire. I wont stop criticizing that.
I see your point. A reason why I brought this up is because valve does not see criticism for the things they also do wrong and especially on this platform, rarely does anyone look at them from a non favorable view. Thats not because they dont do wrong but because they are good at marketing and other gaming companies are a lot worse than them.
The underlying issue here is that we are in this mess because our parents and grandparents didnt do this (enough). So yes, going against corporations is kind of my hobby.
I don’t see how posting to lemmy in general is going to influence people that disagree with you both because I don’t think there are many people here that do and also I think that your comment in particular is so far removed from the topic of this article that it borders on being a non sequitur entirely, and I’m worried you may get the feeling that the people downvoting you are against your message and not the fact that your message isn’t relevant beyond being a knee-jerk reactionary cry against Valve, one of the only privately owned companies that seems to listen to user feedback as thoroughly as the article demonstrates.
I don’t believe Valve is a monopoly and I’ve directly been able to talk to Gabe Newell via email multiple times over multiple years. Maybe some of their inter-business dealings could be better for their business partners, but as a lifelong steam user that so far has felt comfortable buying almost every hardware product they’ve put out I continue to feel comfortable supporting them because they seem to actually care about their customers from what I have directly experienced.
I don’t mean any of this in a confrontational tone, and I apologize for the general shill vibes of that second paragraph. I’d be happy to continue the discussion, I think your message is correct and good and I think there are better more effective ways of acting on it.
I don’t know what a solution would look like here. In your opinion, what should be done to stop Valve from being anti-competitive? What specifics should I be raising awareness of and looking into? What should be done by/about Gabe Newell?
I would like to know more about what you believe the solution here is, because at its core I see Valve as the end result of very talented and self-driven people doing an amazing job at delivering a very good product. I would hope that would lead to success, and I am given to understand that Gabe (to focus back in) is not a disinterested corporate figurehead as the position is with other software companies.
There’s some amount of anti-competitive behavior that is just… Doing business in a space with competitors. I write private code that I use myself and within the company I work for that I choose not to share with my competitors, is that anti-competitive behavior? This is a dumb example, but also I haven’t seen a direct convincing argument as to what Valve is doing to deserve the label.
In many ways, to provide my viewpoint, they’ve directly supported both unofficial modifications to their storefront by users (Decky Loader, for loading steam deck mods), modifications to their hardware (OLED screen mods, replacement parts on iFixit for reasonable prices), and even support Windows on the deck and are beginning (through reading commit logs) to support competitors’ hardware in their custom OS. They’ve singlehandedly pushed gaming on Linux into the mainstream eye and are doing well with it.
All that to say that I don’t think the way that Gabe became a billionaire was bad, and while I would prefer he use his personal wealth to better society I both don’t know enough about what he does with his money to know whether or not he’s already doing that and also think that any solution here would genuinely go against fundamental liberties and personal freedoms that I personally agree with. I’m not an absolutist on this, but enough of what I do know about the history of Valve and Gabe in specific lead me to lend him some amount of goodwill, because he has through his works and actions earned it from me.
I don’t disagree that billionaires are bad. Personally, I strongly believe in a Star Trek post-monetary future.
I wouldn’t call Gabe Newell a friend, although I suspect I don’t disagree with many of his opinions.
You are able to email him at gaben@valvesoftware.com, as is anyone else. I’ve emailed twice. Once when I was 13 to inform him of a bug in portal 2, and once a few years ago to inquire about steam being ported to arm.
There was a lot to explain about my position there and it may be a bit disjointed. If there’s anything I can clarify on my thinking, I’d be happy to.
I was referring to the very vocal crowd that can not ever accept steam being criticized for dominating the market and serving its billionaire owner, however „less bad“ he is. There are no ethical billionaires.
It could be viewed as a measure to get free games away from the main focus so valve can make more money.
The only reason they are in their own tab now is because users complained about how they were on the main tab, that’s the whole point of this thread. Get your head out of your ass.
Because your criticism sucks. You want to take something good from people Because “rich man is rich”, who cares as long as product good and not overly taking my money.
The irony of someone who uses “AI” and spicy autocorrect to rank employees trying to complain about a company people love to work at, and provides a good product.
Let me see if I got your statement right: you took the comment I made on another post to spare people having to click a link as me talking about myself?
In any case, steam does provide a good product but it also uses anti competitive measures to stay on top of the market and is owned by a billionaire. There are no ethical billionaires, sorry.
Whatever you‘re doing, you might wanna do less of it. Valve has been doing these kinds of things for a long time and anyone who understands markets knows that there is no monopoly without taking out the competition.
In any case, I know you wouldnt admit it if I presented you with rockhard evidence that they did it and thats okay. I‘m not doing this for you.
I am back on Elite Dangerous after taking some time to focus on Deep Rock Galactic in the first half of the year. I now have a second flight stick and did a little community class on flight assist off flying. Plus there have been lots of updates coming out. Taking advantage of the new engineering changes to build a really good combat ship and then going to focus on getting to Elite in combat probably, which also helps me practice my faoff flying.
If you take a screenshot in horizons and then take the same screenshot in odyssey, you’ll see that blacks are crushed to absolute shit in odyssey. You can even raise gamma to max and you still will not recover that shadow detail. The devs clipped it. They tonemapped the game incorrectly. It becomes blatantly obvious when you play this game on an oled screen haha.
I.e., take screenshot in horizons where tjere is a large shadow or no light hitting a part of your ship. Replicate it in Odyssey. It’ll be obvious. Or try raising gamma to max and you’ll see that zero shadow detail is recovered.
Also idk if you’re familiar with reshade, but if you google and install Lilium’s HDR shaders, it makes it even easier to see how crushed shadows are. It shows you a waveform visual that maps brightness. (Graph works in sdr as well as hdr)
Interesting, I think I’ve probably never noticed because I use night vision pretty much all the time when I’m flying my ship. I’ll look into reshade but I’m playing on Linux via proton and I’m not sure I want to hack more on an already working setup lol
Fair enough. The real issue is when you play in HDR (via inverse tonemapping) on an OLED. It’s just missing sooooo much shadow detail. It’s a well known issue that they never fixed and probably will never fix unfortunately. I’ve been experimenting with ways to recover the shadow detail using reshade add-ons, but so far no luck :-(.
Got one over on the reddit thread. Still waiting for it to come through because apparently there’s a delay, but I’ll invite some folks once it comes in.
Very much appreciated! I’ll send it to the next person in the thread. Is the invite just an item in my Steam inventory? Or something within the game itself?
Haven’t tried all the ones mentioned here but I installed the modrinth app and can’t really complain about anything so I haven’t looked further. Easy to search mods and install them, it deals with all the dependencies, updates automatically, etc. It looks nice and doesn’t get in your way.
I like mulimc. super easy to manage mods (I use a performance boosting modpack that has like 25 mods in it) so it automatically keeps that up to date
also the official launcher had issues with my VPN where if it was connected it wouldn't load my skin and I couldn't even split tunnel it, multimc doesn't have that issue
Runs perfectly fine on Linux though, with DX11 or Vulkan. On Windows, Vulkan has some performance issues that make it quite unenjoyable, but in Linux for me it plays a lot better with Vulkan than Windows DX11.
The quality of Proton is not the point, the point is that they’re not dogfooding their own platform. They’ll likely follow the same course as CS2: Lengthy prerelease test exclusively on Windows, then a few days before actual release someone will port the game to Linux/SteamOS and release day is the first day of the Linux port’s alpha test.
How can anybody at Valve expect game publishers to take Steam Deck and SteamOS seriously if the developer of the actual platform is not dogfooding it with their own games?
Yeah I get what you mean, but with Linux gaming I think it's great enough that it runs with Proton and no one is blocking it. I also believe they'll port it to native Linux after the alpha stage is done, but remember that the game is in a closed alpha state, so at no point this should be taken as "Valve not dogfooding their platform". All we can do right now is wait and see.
with Linux gaming I think it’s great enough that it runs with Proton and no one is blocking it.
You clearly missed many news from the gaming sphere.
remember that the game is in a closed alpha state, so at no point this should be taken as “Valve not dogfooding their platform
Yes, it is. Sony is developing their games for PlayStation first and Windows as an afterthought. I’m not saying that Windows should be an afterthought but SteamOS should be a development target from day 1.
All we can do right now is wait and see.
Grab your Steam Deck, install Counter-Strike 2, and look at the state of Source2 games right now.
No. Development occurs on windows machines, so this is where they deploy. It’s essential for a studio to work on core mechanics, gameplay loop and feel. It’s obviously going to be steam deck day one.
Who the actual fuck do you think wants to play cs on a motherfucking steam deck? And again, you of course target your own machine first for a pc game. It’s how 99% of all editors work. Why would you try to argue something that you don’t know how it works?
Valve is probably perfectly happy with just making sure proton compatibility is good. They don’t expect developers to change their whole workflow to cater to the Deck, that’s why they’ve done so much work with proton.
Valve is probably perfectly happy with just making sure proton compatibility is good.
Valve is happy that games break all the time? Yeah, sure buddy. If anybody at Valve was happy with that, maybe that Microsoft agent should lose their job.
They don’t expect developers to change their whole workflow to cater to the Deck
The point of cross-platform middleware is specifically not to “change their whole workflow”. 🙄
that’s why they’ve done so much work with proton.
Valve is also doing much work with SDL and so on to target native development, that’s why it’s embarrassing that they don’t target their own platform. All successful platform holders treat their platform as 1st class citizens: Sony targets PlayStation from day 1 of game development, so does Nintendo with Switch. Apple is not prioritizing Windows either.
Failing platforms are those where the platform vendor doesn’t even believe enough in it to properly support it. Since over a decade Microsoft makes ARM-based Surface devices and to this day Microsoft has ported not a single game, not even casual stuff like Minesweeper, over to Windows ARM. “Microsoft is perfectly happy with just making sure Prism compatibility is good” and yet emulated applications crash, perform worse, and result in battery drain. Similar with Steam Deck: The only way to ensure games perform to their best and don’t unexpectedly break on an update is proper SteamOS native versions.
They are going to add Linux support the game is in alpha.
That’s not day 1. Why do I need to say it over and over again? It’s not like I spelled it out already: CS2 had a Windows-only pre-release and the Linux port was only added to the formal release, resulting in the Linux port being very buggy to this day! Their own platform needs to be the top tier development target from day 1. How is that difficult to understand?
It’s almost as if they are a for-profit company that doesn’t want to waste development time on an OS that have significantly fewer players to sell to and will choose to optimize for Linux as an afterthought.
I use Arch, btw and play only on Linux, so I’m not being biased, just speaking truths.
I wouldn't say that's the case because it's Valve, and they work on a very unique way. Besides, the work they did with Proton, SteamOS and Steam Deck shows that at no point they believe developing for Linux is waste of efforts or an afterthought. They go out of the usual way to make things better for Linux. I fully expect them to port Deadlock to Linux once it hits beta or release.
It’s almost as if they are a for-profit company that doesn’t want to waste development time on an OS that have significantly fewer players to sell to and will choose to optimize for Linux as an afterthought.
Yeah, why would Nintendo develop for Switch or Sony for PlayStation when it’s clearly a waste of development time and and money and Windows is clearly the superior development target?
I’m not being biased, just speaking truths.
No, you speak nothing of truth regarding game development has a platform holder.
Yeah but Valve, who is making this game, made SteamOS and the Steam Deck in house. It’s their own product. It would be a monumentally stupid move to release a first party game that doesn’t run on their own first party hardware.
It’s still niche. You’re living in your dream world, not reality. It’s the entire point of proton - not to have to create two versions of the game. As long as it’s compatible it’ll run nicely on their hardware.
I’m with you in principle, but I think it’s unlikely that Valve are building the game themselves, given that they haven’t done much of that in ages.
It’s reasonable to think their first priorities were finding a development studio [Edit: or even in-house developers] capable producing a good game, and helping them to do so. If the developers are most familiar with Windows tools and APIs, then the path to a successful game would be letting them use those, at least to begin with.
Let’s just hope that they’re being guided along to way toward design decisions that make a native port relatively easy if the game turns out to be good.
Edit:
The project is reportedly led by “IceFrog”, which looked like a studio name when I first read it, but it’s apparently a person. So maybe this is in-house development after all. Great! It would be nice to see Valve making significant games again.
Nevertheless, gathering a team with the talent and vision to make a good game is harder than finding people who can learn a certain API or platform, so if they have the former, it would make sense to let them target the platform they already know and get the game out the door. Doing it in-house just makes it even easier for Valve’s linux folks to guide them in design choices that would simplify multiplatform support later. (Cross-platform development isn’t all that hard if you plan for it from the start instead of painting yourself into a corner.) If the game is well received, it would then make sense to invest more time into training the devs on linux and doing a linux-native port.
Or to put it another way: Yes, Valve has an OS that keeps them independent from Windows, but that’s just one tool in their kit. Proton is another tool. That gives Valve flexibility in how they bring a game to market, and how they prioritize/schedule various phases of the project. This still-unannounced game might be Windows-only for now, but I would not assume that will be forever.
If that studio’s developers are most familiar with Windows tools and APIs, then the path to a successful game would be letting them use those, at least to begin with.
So you’re saying, if Sony or Nintendo made a new console and contracted an outside developer, that developer should develop for Windows instead of the new consoles because they are unfamiliar with the new tools and APIs? Why even develop using Source Engine (2)? Why not also give in to a total Unreal Engine monopoly because that’s what every game developer knows? CS2 on Steam Deck is bad right now.
No, that is not what I said at all. Either you’ve misunderstood, or you’re arguing in bad faith. Given that you’re now pushing an unrealistic all-or-nothing point of view and putting words in my mouth, I think it’s some of both.
Not sure what you mean here with your sarcasm. Proton means that developers can just write games for Windows and expect to make that version compatible with Linux with minimal changes as opposed to making a native Linux version.
As a developer myself, I know that it doesn’t make sense for a developer in most cases to write a Linux version and support it when the Linux user base is tiny by comparison. It happened with OS/2 and it can happen again. Not to mention Linux game developer tooling pales in comparison to Windows with DirectX.
Proton means that developers can just write games for Windows and expect to make that version compatible with Linux with minimal changes as opposed to making a native Linux version.
SteamOS is Valve’s own OS. Steam Linux Runtime is Valve’s own development target. Steam Deck is Valve’s on hardware. It’s a stable platform that doesn’t move constantly like chasing Windows compatibility through reverse engineering. Win32 is not Java, Proton is not OpenJDK. Windows games on Proton break constantly. The only way into the future is proper SteamOS versions, not buggy afterthoughts.
As a developer myself, I know that it doesn’t make sense for a developer in most cases to write a Linux version and support it when the Linux user base is tiny by comparison. It happened with OS/2 and it can happen again.
Steam Deck is not OS/2. Steam Deck is more like a video game console and needs to be treated like one with proper ports instead of broken shit like CS2, especially for Valve’s own games. Portal on Nintendo Switch works better than CS2 on Steam Deck because it’s a proper port, not an afterthought.
Stop repeating the same false arguments to me over and over again, as repeating those would make them right. If anyone of you would ever be put in charge of PlayStation, that entire business would collapse within months.
Not to mention Linux game developer tooling pales in comparison to Windows with DirectX.
Maybe Valve should improve that for their own platform then instead of relying of tools by a hostile competitor. It’s just dumb.
That’s because I don’t understand your point. You complain about it being only for windows yet push away their efforts of bringing windows games to linux (which is proton). So indeed, the quality of proton is very much the point as it dictates the quality of the game on linux to a general extent.
Not to mention that this IS an early development build, I would say that its perfectly reasonable for them to only make the early builds for windows since that is where a majority of the play testers are likely to be (not to mention that linux -> windows tools don’t exist unless you want to game on WSL2).
So what are you trying to complain about? The fact that they aren’t exclusively pandering for steam deck users? If that is the case, I must admit that it’s very childish to just expect that and I hate other companies for making this the norm.
This is going very well it seems! I see the next few countries close to passing the threshold are:
Denmark (88%)
Netherlands (87%)
Germany (75%)
Assuming we get those, we would need one more country. The highest remaining country is Ireland (55%). Getting all those still wouldn’t reach 1M signatures, but the rest could keep being distributed across the EU (even including countries which have already passed the threshold, I’m assuming).
This is all very exciting and gives me a lot of hope! Keep signing folks!
At this point I’d that say getting enough individual countries is almost inevitable in the process of getting 1M signatures. If the distribution between countries remains as it is, every country with more than 25% right now would reach the threshold by the end.
Seems to me like the individual country threshold is only added to prevent initiatives getting single-handedly pushed by a single big country and never be the blocker for regular initiatives.
So yeah, the best strategy would most likely be to keep pushing the big countries: Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Speaking of Italy, what’s up with them? Only 18%? Those are rookie numbers.
That’s one thing I checked first, but compared to Germany for example, the average age and percentage of people playing video-games is apparently just a few percentage points of difference. Though “people playing video-games” could of course mean anything and I’d wager that the average person playing casual games on their phone might not care as much.
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