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.
Even then. If steam actually locks out out of your games, then I bet hacked will quickly put more effort to sidestep the drm and make that more easily accessible.
A lot of games don’t require Steam’s DRM, you quit Steam and launch through the Steam directory and it still works. I haven’t tried it, but I’m pretty sure I can copy that game to a computer with no internet access and no Steam client and it’ll work. I haven’t done that though, I’ve only done it when I forgot my kids were playing on my account on another computer and wanted to play a game.
A lot of games don’t work this way, but a lot do. Try it for yourself.
I believe it holds true for some single player games as well. I seem to remember Half-Life 2 not wanting to launch without Steam present, same for some other Source games. That really might not be the case though, I’m curious to do more testing… Either way, I watch enough Linux gaming on ARM SBCs (check out MicroLinux and LeePSPComputer on YouTube), can I see them using Goldberg from time to time to get games running with no Steam
I used to tell myself this and gog even used this as marketing with the “French Monk” incident.
But over the years? I don’t see the point. If I am going to replay Stranglehold again but don’t want to wait for a re-release/re-buy it, it is just as easy to pirate it. Since I am going to need the crack to get past the lack of steam (which is totally not drm…) and probably a few patches anyway.
People have been trained to say that because that is how people decided to accept it when other DRM models were horrifically invasive (and didn’t look dissimilar on paper…)
Steam IS digital rights management. You authenticate with Valve, they confirm your account has access to the digitam media (the game), and provide a download if you do. After that, you can do whatever you want with it. That is almost exactly the Stardock “goo” model.
Steam ALSO has an extra layer of drm on top that developers can optionally use that will prevent you from launching the game outside of steam.
You can treat it like buying a CD (the first download) and being able to get another CD anytime for free from the store by verifying your identity and the extra DRM being the online check for the authenticity of the CD?
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.
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.
Oh hey, it actually was my cousin. Cory is always claiming he coined every cool word or phrase so haha, funny he actually did for a change. He actually claimed he popularized “epic” and “uber” in the 2000s. I mean, I know people pay attention to him but in all honesty he’s always kind of tooted his own horn wherever possible.
I’m sorry. I made all of that up. I guess my actual cousin and I aren’t that different, only he’d never say he made it up. He’d say it was a fact until he takes his last breath haha.
A stock market can still work. The ultra high speed market we have now is a problem. Ultra fast trading encourages fast, short term thinking.
A stock market with an update once per day could work better. It would take all the fast impulse trading out of the market, while still allowing price adaptation. When runs and crashes take weeks to play out, it’s a lot easier for cooler heads and logic to prevail. This, in turn would favour the sort of traders favouring long term stable investments.
The price updates whenever someone buys or sells, so doing that once a day may be a bit difficult to implement. Forbidding day-trading / imposing a minimum holding time on the other hand may be easier.
A queue type setup could likely work fine. Buyers and sellers could list their offers/requirements as a range. A round robin double blind auction matches buyers and sellers. The new price is calculated, based on this, and a new queue is opened.
Forbidding the various high profit rent seeking would be a little like trying to block a sieve. There are so many variants and workarounds, that closing them all would be difficult. It would also be a lot more vulnerable to being watered down, or declawed completely.
If once per day is too coarse, it could even work at once per hour. The key is it leaves time for people to think rather than reacting from gut instinct and high speed computer programs.
Sounds nice, but I guess the first step is to take control away from the likes of Citadel / Kenneth Griffin since they take advantage of all that information and they already get to bid against every order placed in real time.
I think our government should definitely get on that. In the meantime forbidding this kind of play aka taxing the living shit out of day-trading (like the current short-term/long-term gain system but actually painful in the very short term) should be pretty simple to implement.
I definitely agree with the need for short term fixes. Unfortunately, I suspect the core issues are inherent to the current system. Then again that applies to a lot of things at that level, and perfect is the greatest enemy of good.
Just run the company in a way where you don’t really care about maximizing profit. As long as you’re not at a loss and are liked, you will be successful.
Valve could probably be much more profitable at the expense of being a bigger dick, but Gabe is chill.
Also because valve is private, they don’t have any legal obligations to return maximise profit. They can purposefully lose money if they want and it’s not illegal. (At least to my knowledge)
Thats actually what valve does. Valve mandates all games on platforms must be the same retail price (e.g a game on Steam cannot be sold for 60$ retail, but be sold for 50$ on epic), not including deals and sales.
Its standard with how physical stores demand that digital copies of games must retail at the same price as physical else stores would see that as an attack on the business by the company.
There is essentially some level of price normalization.
Private companies can have shareholders(all nfl teams but the Packers), its just a game of finding shareholders who doesnt care about constant short term profit.
Since it’s a private company he can just appoint anyone he wants to be the ceo. Maybe his son will take it or maybe he will maintain ownership of it until I’m too old to care.
Its unknown exactly how much money Valve makes but it is a safe bet they are probably one of the most profitable companies on the planet considering they get a cut of more or less every single PC game sale. Others have larger revenues but, relative to expenditures, they are likely a top 100 if not top 50.
But yeah. Everyone just needs to figure out a billion dollar idea, luck out that people liked them enough to ignore the negatives while everyone else (Stardock, Atari, Gamespy, etc) were getting torn apart, and then maintain an effective monopoly for two decades. Easy.
But they do run it to maximize profit. There’s just allowed to do it creatively instead of obsessing over short term gains.
I mean the company essentially gave up on AAA games for well over a decade because they were making more money from steam, and Gabe famously only approves projects that have a plan to turn a profit or expand Valve’s market.
They didn’t spread into Linux out of sheer principle. It gives them more control and influence over the market to separate themselves from Windows. And they’ve done tons of shady stuff with steam like refusing to give refunds until they were sued by state governments.
I don’t read it so cynically, yes it’s in their best interest and a very smart play, but I don’t read malice into it though. Good business move, but also good for the communities and projects they’re contributing to.
Valve is the prime example of rent seeking behavior. It's a private company that collects economic rents on a market thanks to that market being the biggest. They're a private company and their only goal is to preserve those rents. They do that by fostering goodwill. They're everything I hate about capitalism, but I don't hate them for doing it.
They are also a good example of positive middleman behaviour. While they take their cut, the value they provide to both sides is huge.
They are also in a position where they are still easily replaceable. Their dominance is from doing it well, not because they have an absolute lock in.
Part of why this works is because they don’t have to prioritise short term profit over long term. Most companies like this get brought up and pumped dry. Valve seems to be the exception.
I don’t think you can do that on EGS or GOG. So they ask 30%, but only if they actually helped make the sale. If you drove the revenue yourself, they’re happy to distribute the game for free on their platform.
That’s about the least scumbag model I can think of.
Ultimately the 30% is as high as Steam estimates they can charge before they have to fear companies leaving their platform and bypassing steam altogether. Honestly I’m surprised it has not happened yet. 30% is super high, and users are not at all locked down like they are in the console market.
Epics is much lower because theyre trying to entice devs, but they are the anomally in the sea of pricing.
Epics trying to win market by enticing devs instead of working on features for the consumer, thats their market plan. Epic wasnt the only platform to have lower than 30% cut. Discord sold games at 10% cut, itchio is similar. Devs essentially debate of the baked in features of the platform and its audience is worth the 30% cut(the existing community, game review system, steams controller api, steam workshop, steamvr). Even just the client. ESPECIALLY to Linux users, on a consumer POV, ask yourself about ease getting to use the native client. Valve offers steam natively, and does a lot of work making the consumer end (and developer end too) easier on linux. EGS for example doesnt even run natively on linux, and requires a 3rd party launcher to run. People tend to take for granted all the things Valve has done for both the consumer and Developer.
Discord massively failed to get users, and devs saw little market in it. Epic takes advatage of their position using unreal engine, and offers some devs money upfront for exclusivity, something certain audiences on PC absolutely hate.
Users use steam because it simply offers them the best user experience. There are a ton of people who just buys their games directly from valve and not a 3rd party site. To a consumer, money’s not necessarily the problem on their end, and they dont see the 30% hit that developers take. Something good for the developer is not necessarily good for the consumer and vice versa, and many people make that mistake and conflate that to be the same thing when it isnt.
no cost for keys if you sell stuff outside the Steam store
no cost for downloads
no cost for improvements to games
Valve’s customers are publishers and devs, and they’re charging a finder’s fee for connecting customers to the games. To me, that’s not rent seeking, that’s a direct exchange of money for a service. If you don’t think the service is valuable or think you can do better, then generate keys and sell them elsewhere and you won’t need to pay Valve a cut.
Valve is capitalism done right imo. You only pay when you receive a service, and only when you profit from the service. Steam also has a fantastic refund policy as well, which is surprisingly rare in the digital goods market.
they have created a service that didn’t exist that’s beneficial to both the consumer and the seller, they don’t do any anti-competitive shit with it as far as I am aware.
in what world is what they do rent-seeking?
are you an edgy 15 year old that just learned a new word and didn’t understand it?
Well, Valve is privately-owned company and it’s investing a lot of money into the free software ecosystem right now. Yes it’s capitalism but very different in principles to the rest of the market.
Valve is far from a typical company. While technically not, they operate pretty much like a worker owned cooperative. Have a look at their employee handbook: www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
(and Igalia, the company presenting in OP is really a worker owned cooperative).
This PC uses a last-gen CPU which was a value buy before AMD moved to a new platform. It’s basically a budget build at a non-budget price with an overpriced GPU in it. For AMD CPUs, you should look for the 7000 series, and for Intel you’d want the 13000 series.
If you’re up for it, I strongly recommend building your own PC, perhaps getting help from someone if you need it. If not, look for something current-gen so that at the very least there’s an easy upgrade path.
If you’re going Linux, try to find a computer that doesn’t include Windows, since you’re paying extra for the license. For the GPU, AMD is usually the preferred choice for Linux builds since the drivers are open source and built into the kernel. I’d also recommend more RAM, but that’s something that can be upgraded later if it doesn’t fit into your current budget.
I have built my own PC in the past. That may be the best option again, though I was hoping to avoid it. It’s quite a lot of work. Given my priorities though, it may be the best option.
I concur with most of this, with one caveat. If you’re going with a Zen4 platform, make absolutely sure you choose a distro that lets you run kernel 6.5+, or else you’ll be having some issues. The main thing in the newer kernels for AMD and Zen4 is the amd-pstate management driver, and a number efficiency and compatibility drivers for things like caching and memory bus. The machine will run okay-ish without, but you’ll get some performance issues, and needless power ramping that just wastes power.
I can only get so excited about this, but it is upsetting that this project and KDE 6 with full Wayland support will only drop on 2024, probably middle year
Plasma 6 comes out February 2024, so you don’t have to wait until the middle of the year at least. Beta should still be this year if you’re in a hurry.
I recently bought an nvidia gpu and I won’t do it again. Forget nvidia and linux. They work together at this moment but very much meh. Proprietary driver and lots of little issues with games. Maybe those also surface with amd but I doubt it.
I would rather use an AMD graphics card over Nvidia on Linux, because of Nvidia’s attitude towards Linux. Other than that there’s not much to say I think, it’s usually the tiny details that are missing from product pages that can make an impact. There’s no mention of which wireless networking chip it uses for example.
That being said. Chances are really low you’ll run into any hardware that doesn’t work immediately without any drivers and if you do manage to run into issues, there are often workarounds. I’ve installed Linux on many devices, mostly laptops, and I’ve never had real problems.
Thanks for the really detailed explanation! This is a really nice overview for me.
I’ll try again to run the game on Steam on a few versions of Proton. If that doesn’t work, I might try relinking my accounts as another commenter suggested.
I’ve been trying to stick with Steam because Steam has been such a pleasant experience for me (besides some issues with NVIDIA but that’s not Steam’s fault) but I might have to take a look at Lutris if none of the other fixes work. Thanks for the recommendation, though!
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