To a certain degree sure, I’m still miffed at what they did for the steamdeck. Having custom drivers and configurations they never open sourced and have not declared any intention to open source. See https://gitlab.com/open-sd/acp5x-ucm-files#notice .
Valve is still a good advocate for open source, the support they’ve given to dxvk alone is worth praise. But they ain’t no angels.
Is what they’re doing causing issues to users of their devices? If not, then no one should care. It’s the same for nvidia, if no one is affected, then whatever. But nvidia does cause measurable harm to the FOSS ecosystem and makes adoption worse, so they deservingly get shit from the FOSS community. But don’t just criticize companies purely for closing their sources.
Define users of their devices? As a steamdeck owner my experience for installing an alternative os was terrible because theirs specific hardware configurations that valve made for the device and never bothered to upstream it so they were applicable outside of their environment. I’m not criticising valve for closing their resources, I’m criticising them for exploiting open source software to get a usable os up quickly and then not contributing to the same ecosystem that let them do that… not even assuring anyone they would eventually do that. Valve is a for profit company like any other, if you wanna waste time defending their less savory actions than go ahead but don’t pretend they aren’t what they are.
Doesn’t this article explicitly state that they are contributing to drivers and other projects that they use? It just sucks that you overlooked all of what they did and just focused on them not opening up their hardware configurations.
Also, what hardware configurations did they close? I couldn’t find any problems when looking this up. It seems like you can just install another OS while having some hiccups. Which is understandable since most desktop OSes are geared toward a mouse and keyboard control.
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.
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!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t game regularly, and Steamdeck is probably not something I’m going to be purchasing anytime soon. However, I was hopeful that Valve’s investment into Linux would be beneficial and to the larger Linux landscape.
I’m hopeful that more companies will look at Valve’s success and start building more on Linux in a way that will benefit the upstream community.
I bet Linus still thinks their code is shit tho
One of the few companies I’ve purchased digital good from - and they haven’t enshittified themselves yet
It’s because they’re a privately owned company.
The pressure for enshitification mostly comes from shareholders. Without them, the company can actually think about their long term future and decide exactly when and when not to increase profit.
I tend to avoid proprietary things whenever possible these days, but I found most things by small, privately owned companies are pretty good towards their users.
I would be so proud to be the dude who first said “enshitification” right now.
It’s probably my favorite new word I’ve ever heard in my life and seeing it widely used brings a smile to my face.
I’ve got a cousin who is probably claiming he invented it at this very moment.
It has been used so much recently that there is even a wikitionar entry for it - with a link to its original creation!
Well they did try to sell paid mods and push pay-to-play in the steam marketplace with Artifact, but luckily they ran it back. Steam is super good now but don’t get too comfortable.
I mean, I don’t have a problem with mod authors earning money for what they do instead of having to offer it for free. Especially the mods that bring the base game to a whole new level.
What’s the argument that paid mods shouldn’t be a thing?
It was pretty disastrous. As soon as money was at play tons of people re-uploaded other’s free mods and tried to sell them. They even tried copying their steam profiles to seem legit. There was another can of worms where paid mods would use assets from other games or made by other people. Aside from all the attempted theft, there was also tons of spam and fake/unconfirmed mods lying about what they are or trying to upload the same thing multiple times under different names to appear more in search… Etc…
Moderation didn’t keep up and the whole thing collapsed on itself. Mods shouldn’t be paid IMO, it just encourages terrible things rather than people making content for fun.
Using someone else’s IP for making money is generally a little questionable.
If anything ever happens to Gabe such that he can’t run the company, that’s the day I’m immediately downloading and backing up my entire steam library to a hard drive.
AFAIK steam has optional drm. If the devs dont use it you can play the games without steam. I think it says on the store page if it’s drm-free
Some games from Steam can still be used without Steam’s DRM. It’s a little difficult to pull it off, but it can be done
