This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn’t even built a linux client after all these years.
I mean, I’m not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation. That doesn’t mean I (and the overall linux community as a whole) don’t greatly benefit from it. I want to incentivize their actions which benefit me. I love that I have been able to not boot into Windows for close to a decade because of proton, so I buy from them. I hate that GOG for all their drm free policy don’t support linux, and that I have to jump through hoops to get their games working on linux (which is again made easier because of valve’s proton), so I don’t buy from them.
I agree GOG and Valve have different objectives. GOG’s objective is to provide drm free games, where as Valve’s objective is to make linux a viable gaming platform so they can stay independent of Microsoft. My objective aligns with Valve, so they get my money.
I’m not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation.
I’m really not one for optimism but Valve really does seem to do things that are not entirely to their benefit. Compare the stark contrast to publicly-traded greedy companies like Apple, for instance.
When it comes to hardware, Apple goes out of their way and invests their vast resources into ensuring you have to trash your devices prematurely while Valve goes out of their way to make their components modular, attach with screws, and make first-party parts available through third party storefronts.
Apple maintains complete control over every piece of software you can install on your device, and even the operating system itself. Valve builds onto an open source OS, adds a “return to desktop” button, and while they don’t help you install 3rd party stores, they don’t put up any artificial barriers to doing so yourself.
Valve could absolutely do all the scummy shit that Apple does and get away with it because they have a similar amount of influence over their industry, and they would probably make buckets of money doing it, but they choose not to.
You could say similarly scummy things about EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc. etc., but not Valve (not to say that they’ve never done anything ethically questionable).
It really seems like they just don’t want to be scumbags, which is incredibly refreshing in these times.
There’s a key point in the article that emphasizes that valve are indeed “being nice”: their policy is " upstream everything".
Yes the motives are still keeping a foot out in case Microsoft decides to screw them over in some way, but they could (as many companies do) keep the improvements all for themselves, buy developers and make a closed source version of any of the tech they have been funding, locking down steamOS to only allow steam games and so on.
And I don’t buy games out of the bottom of my heart to give those companies more money. So why should I care about their reasoning, as long as they aren’t inherently unethical? In the end it’s a win / win situation that we can both benefit from. I personally cannot compare Valve & Microsoft here, because Microsoft acts in a way that is ultimately not a win situation for me as a customer anymore. Google started similarly, but then went to shit in how they behaved, hence why I degoogled myself for at least the majority of their services, especially their search engine. If Valve continues to benefit me as a customer, then I as a customer will continue to benefit Valve. That’s our contract, or mutual agreement.
That’s not fallacious at all. I imagine the guy above knows valve aren’t a selfless charity.
There’s a guy in my area that goes around with his pressure washer and cleans grimy road signs, park benches, etc (because the council doesn’t seem to give enough of a shit to do it themselves!)
He does it because the goodwill and publicity he gets from it benefits his business (he cleans everything from walls and houses, to wheelie bins and industrial/farming equipment).
He is not acting out of pure altruism, but does it really matter? His/Valve’s actions are still benefiting people regardless.
I only made this comment because for some reason GOG seems to be more preferred by linux users than Steam, where as Steam has done a lot more for linux, and it not just works for Steam. GOG is now easily usable on linux mainly thanks to Valve’s proton. I don’t mind if game devs don’t make as many games for linux. There is a huge chicken and egg problem with game development and userbase. Before proton they had all the reason to make games for linux but most didn’t because it didn’t make much financial sense to them. Now they don’t have to worry about it. Plus, linux is much more than gaming. Because there is more people using linux now because of gaming, software other than games would be interested in building for linux, because the userbase is getting there.
Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.
I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it’s become so widely unsupported that I can’t really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there’s a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there’s just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.
Win ≥8 is awful; I’ve helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I’ve ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don’t see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.
So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?
