10 ms·

What I find most amazing about it is that this has been about a decade in the making - Valve started their Linux compatibility initiative back when Microsoft th

What I find most amazing about it is that this has been about a decade in the making - Valve started their Linux compatibility initiative back when Microsoft threatened to hurt Steam with Windows 8 and Microsoft Store requirements. How dedicated they are to this effort is impressive - they first failed big with the Steam Machines when support was very half baked, but now they'll try again with the Deck just as compatibility is coming along much better. I guess Linux gamers can largely thank Microsoft for this one! As a Mac user I'm a bit disappointed they stopped their efforts on that front, since the new processors are quite capable.

ekianjo 5y ago
mac left the ship once they refused to embrace standards like Vulkan and let OpenGL rot at the same time.
- indymike 5y ago
  I wonder how much gaming reduces consumption of music and long-form video.
  - taneq 5y ago
    Can't speak for everyone but I sure struggle to engage as much with long-form non-interactive media these days. If I'm not affecting a narrative in some meaningful way it's really hard to stay interested.
    - tra3 5y ago
      What do you like in terms of "interactive media"? Are you talking strictly games or something? When you said "interactive media", my mind immediately went to tell tale games, "Wolf Among Us" [0]. It's more of an animated story with limited interactivity, but I really enjoyed it. Would love more of this kinda low key gaming. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Among_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Among_Us
      - taneq 5y ago
        Hmm. It set in back when I was playing WoW and realised that the effort I was putting into gaming the auction house was exactly the same as the effort I'd need to make money flipping items on eBay or something. After a while I couldn't make myself care about the in-game goals because I could just be using the same effort IRL for far more significant reward. Then a few years later I spent a bunch of time playing Factorio, to similar effect. Downside: Suddenly flipped from "wow this is awesome" to "man this game feels like a job, it's no longer fun" to "uh, my job is basically this game so... yay?" Now between the two it's really hard to get excited about something that isn't managing a real life business and building useful IP. Am I old? :P
        tra3 5y ago
        Yeah, I could never get into those games 'cause they felt too much like work. Instead of factorio I'd rather write some fun code. Instead of WoW, I'd rather go exploring the woods. But you do need recreation. Games could be fun again, depending on the level of effort, etc
  - fiedzia 5y ago
    Games include music, so the answer for that part is "not at all". Many games offer music at additional cost, so there is a market for that. Also certainly some games made their music iconic in the same way movies used to do it.
- dijit 5y ago
  It's not really an accident, Apple strongly dislikes AAA games (note: not AA games like fortnite or .. "games" like candy crush). If they support any kind of game development it's purely indie or puzzle style in nature and not high fidelity. The reasons are.. well incalculable, there are so many: To be competitive you must work closely with driver manufacturers; you would likely need to segment your desktop class hardware platforms based on what games they can play, you might bef forced to update hardware on a significantly shorter cadence- probably support for third party upgrades (like graphics cards). Also, Apple strongly dislikes nvidia who have a stranglehold on AAA games. (ever since they sold them a bunch of cards that desoldered themselves) Apple wants to be a computing platform, and for "creatives". That's the image they're going for. They can't win on gaming, even if they wanted to, but it's against the brand image to go for that market anyway. You can't really do AAA gaming on a mac, and that's ok, not everything has to be about playing games.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Apple loves AAA games if they're on the iOS store and bringing in billions USD per year of microtransaction revenue from teens and compulsive gamblers. They can't get that by supporting native APIs for non-App-Store desktop games.
    - dijit 5y ago
      While I was mainly talking about MacOS (the desktop); Does iOS support AAA games? I haven't been promoted any AAA games on iOS- fortnite is not a AAA game. Edit: argue your point phantom downvoters. Fortnite is not AAA; God Of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tom Clancy's the Division are AAA. Find a source that calls fortnite AAA. Find any source of a AAA studio working collaboratively with Apple and I will retract everything I said.
      - mastax 5y ago
        Can you define AAA in a way that excludes Fortnite, and "AAA studio" in a way that excludes Epic Games?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Most AAA studios don't care about such standards, as proven by game consoles and Metal already being supported by Unreal, Unity, Ogre3D, Xenko/Stride, among others.
- tpush 5y ago
  Different graphics APIs aren't a reason not to develop for a platform. Game consoles have unique APIs, yet both AAAs and Indies happily develop for those platforms. What matters is whether the prospective income from those platforms outweigh the additional dev costs. Additionally, most Macs simply aren't gaming machines; they're mostly thin laptops or AIOs with very high resolution screens, meaning the GPU has less cooling headroom and has way more pixels to draw than pretty much all Windows machines that are used for gaming. That makes the potential pool of users even smaller than it already is, so most of the time it doesn't make sense to develop games for the Mac.
  - vimy 5y ago
    Apple silicon changes this. Macs have plenty of gpu power now for AAA games.
    - sliken 5y ago
      Indeed, and what will keep being even more true as apple silicon evolves and the PS5 and XSX stay the same for 5 years or so. Likely related to this, I've heard that both Sony and Microsoft have approached apple about getting more games on their platform.
    - imbnwa 5y ago
      And a much better temperature story
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    > Different graphics APIs aren't a reason not to develop for a platform. > What matters is whether the prospective income from those platforms outweigh the additional dev costs. Different APIs increase costs. If dev costs were lower for porting games, the platform would see more games.
    - tpush 5y ago
      1) Porting costs are not per game but per engine, which can be shared between multiple games. 2) The majority of costs is ongoing support, not writing to a different API.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  Not only that, but it has a lot of pain points, including ARM CPUs in a world where a lot of games used to target 32 bit windows. Proton supported macos at first[1]. I think support is still more or less there, though not integrated with "steam play". Proton "glue" scripts are also mostly python, and macos does not (did not?) support python3. I think the community could step in and help support it, but valve pretty much stopped efforts on that front (some rationale in [2]), although I think community efforts on wine would be welcomed. [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d8177fa40f3de729e55d238d3c24877 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817... [2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493#issuecomment-422022116 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493#issuecom...
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    Valve is funding a separate effort for an x86-on-ARM emulator: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
  - syspec 5y ago
    Python3 is natively installed on MacOS, and it has always "supported" Python3 meaning it could be installed and would work just fine
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  By far most games on Windows don't run on OpenGL or Vulkan but on Direct3D. Game consoles also don't use OpenGL or Vulkan but have their own APIs. Metal is "just another" platform-specific 3D-API, it's not an exception but the norm. In reality, "cross-platform" 3D APIs don't matter much (for games). What actually matters are distribution platforms (for instance: Steam), and if a distribution platform promises good business, games will be created for it.
lunfard000 5y ago
I dont think they will, nothing prevents Apple pulling the same b.s than ms.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  They'd see this as an alternate app store and that's a no-no for them. OTOH, there is no shortage of games in the Mac app store. It just may not be the same titles you have on Steam. Edit: I think I didn't understand the reason of the complaint.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    On macOS, Apple doesn't mind other app stores. Steam is available there right now.
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      Apple is not even against other operating systems on Macs. Bootcamp has been a thing for a long time (and apparently they're not against ARM Bootcamp were it possible [1]) and recently marcan mentioned how Apple added something that wouldn't be helpful for Apple, but is helpful to the Asahi Linux project. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-windows-for-m1-macs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind... [2] https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        An OS is different from an application for selling, installing and running other applications.
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        That's pretty much literally what an OS is! An application that lets you install and run other applications.
marcodiego 5y ago
Linux is Valve's lifeboat for the case Microsoft starts misbehaving.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Good luck with that, Steam Machine were selling like hot cakes.
  - meibo 5y ago
    The Deck certainly is, it's sold out into 2023. People want PC games on the go, Valve provides it in a now common form factor, at a reasonable price, with a trusted name.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      If I only make 5 units of something, I can state it is sold out as well, yet it won't take the market by storm. Lots of things sold out, what matters is sustainability.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Not really sure why you were downvoted here, production capacity is certainly an issue with Steam Decks.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        I will get downvoted for every remark made against Steam and the dream of Linux taking over the world of AAA games (originally written for DirectX/Windows anyway). God forbid to talk against the Valve mob.
        Zhyl 5y ago
        But the case being argued is demand for the Steam Deck which is demonstrably high. The counter point to that was that production was low, therefore selling out doesn't mean much. However, the Steam Machines didn't sell out at all so at the very least there is more interest in the Steam Deck than Steam Machines. Sure, it doesn't follow that the Steam Deck will necessarily be a success, but the GP's arguments seem lazy and bad faith, which is presumably why they are being downvoted.
ahartmetz 5y ago
With Valve being founded by a bunch of Microsoft employees, maybe they took a lesson from Microsoft: if you have enough money to keep trying, eventual success is likely. Microsoft did that with many products, most relevant in this context: the Xbox series.
- behnamoh 5y ago
  So many counter examples come to mind. Just look at recent Google projects.
  - Tyr42 5y ago
    Money and nerve to keep trying and not wander off.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Google doesn't "keep trying", it rewrites replacement products frequently. The nearest Microsoft equivalent to Google's (lack of) strategy was Skype being replaced(? Complimented by?) "Skype for Business"
    - fomine3 5y ago
      Various XAML UI Platform!
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  I highly recommend watching their recent docuseries on the history of Xbox. It really seems like the project nearly failed multiple times. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-NLoYNcQEHdBGO https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-N...
- marcodiego 5y ago
  As strategists use to say: "Wars are lost". If you can maintain yourself long enough, your enemy will eventually be out of resources to maintain themselves.
shmerl 5y ago
Dealing with Apple isn't something Valve would want. They focus on Vulkan, Mesa and Wine. And Apple are pretty negative about Vulkan for some unknown reason (which seems to be even more than their usual NIH mentality). I.e. like when they were resisting adopting SPIR-V for the Web. So Apple have no one to blame but themselves for it.
zelon88 5y ago
The Proton compatibility tool is fantastic. I game mostly on Linux and I remember just a few years ago having anxiety while purchasing a new Windows game because I wasn't sure that I would get it working. Since then the support has become so good I have practically no anxiety at all. If the game doesn't launch first try it's usually just a couple settings that need tweaking. Most things just work right out of the box.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Do you have any anxiety around how the games work after launch? I enjoy a lot of older games and sometimes they glitch in some cases. A VM of the original target platform seems the most reliable IME.
  - zelon88 5y ago
    Sometimes. In particular the game Uboat stopped working after an update and I was unable to get it going. To be expected however, as the game is still in Early Access. Another early access title that I ran into problems with after launch was Postal 4. I found a workaround is to replace the bundled direct X installer with some other silent installer that returns the expected return code. Other issues tend to crop up around custom launchers. Usually in this instance I will search online for the command line arguments to bypass the launcher or simply launch the game directly. The last subset of issues I seem to experience revolve around fullscreen/window mode. I find that some combination of ALT+Enter and F11 typically resolves this. If not I usually resort to running the game in a Window and undecorating it. However in some games this does not capture the mouse and can cause the window to lose focus if you click outside of the game window.
    - MayeulC 5y ago
      gamescope should help with that by running games in their own Xorg server as well as handling the scaling, and gaming on wayland/sway helped me a lot with getting games to behave consistently with other programs. It does have its own issues sometimes, certainly. I hope gamescope will help route around them.

ekianjo 5y ago

mac left the ship once they refused to embrace standards like Vulkan and let OpenGL rot at the same time.

indymike 5y ago
I wonder how much gaming reduces consumption of music and long-form video.
- taneq 5y ago
  Can't speak for everyone but I sure struggle to engage as much with long-form non-interactive media these days. If I'm not affecting a narrative in some meaningful way it's really hard to stay interested.
  - tra3 5y ago
    What do you like in terms of "interactive media"? Are you talking strictly games or something? When you said "interactive media", my mind immediately went to tell tale games, "Wolf Among Us" [0]. It's more of an animated story with limited interactivity, but I really enjoyed it. Would love more of this kinda low key gaming. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Among_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Among_Us
    - taneq 5y ago
      Hmm. It set in back when I was playing WoW and realised that the effort I was putting into gaming the auction house was exactly the same as the effort I'd need to make money flipping items on eBay or something. After a while I couldn't make myself care about the in-game goals because I could just be using the same effort IRL for far more significant reward. Then a few years later I spent a bunch of time playing Factorio, to similar effect. Downside: Suddenly flipped from "wow this is awesome" to "man this game feels like a job, it's no longer fun" to "uh, my job is basically this game so... yay?" Now between the two it's really hard to get excited about something that isn't managing a real life business and building useful IP. Am I old? :P
      - tra3 5y ago
        Yeah, I could never get into those games 'cause they felt too much like work. Instead of factorio I'd rather write some fun code. Instead of WoW, I'd rather go exploring the woods. But you do need recreation. Games could be fun again, depending on the level of effort, etc
- fiedzia 5y ago
  Games include music, so the answer for that part is "not at all". Many games offer music at additional cost, so there is a market for that. Also certainly some games made their music iconic in the same way movies used to do it.
dijit 5y ago
It's not really an accident, Apple strongly dislikes AAA games (note: not AA games like fortnite or .. "games" like candy crush). If they support any kind of game development it's purely indie or puzzle style in nature and not high fidelity. The reasons are.. well incalculable, there are so many: To be competitive you must work closely with driver manufacturers; you would likely need to segment your desktop class hardware platforms based on what games they can play, you might bef forced to update hardware on a significantly shorter cadence- probably support for third party upgrades (like graphics cards). Also, Apple strongly dislikes nvidia who have a stranglehold on AAA games. (ever since they sold them a bunch of cards that desoldered themselves) Apple wants to be a computing platform, and for "creatives". That's the image they're going for. They can't win on gaming, even if they wanted to, but it's against the brand image to go for that market anyway. You can't really do AAA gaming on a mac, and that's ok, not everything has to be about playing games.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Apple loves AAA games if they're on the iOS store and bringing in billions USD per year of microtransaction revenue from teens and compulsive gamblers. They can't get that by supporting native APIs for non-App-Store desktop games.
  - dijit 5y ago
    While I was mainly talking about MacOS (the desktop); Does iOS support AAA games? I haven't been promoted any AAA games on iOS- fortnite is not a AAA game. Edit: argue your point phantom downvoters. Fortnite is not AAA; God Of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tom Clancy's the Division are AAA. Find a source that calls fortnite AAA. Find any source of a AAA studio working collaboratively with Apple and I will retract everything I said.
    - mastax 5y ago
      Can you define AAA in a way that excludes Fortnite, and "AAA studio" in a way that excludes Epic Games?
pjmlp 5y ago
Most AAA studios don't care about such standards, as proven by game consoles and Metal already being supported by Unreal, Unity, Ogre3D, Xenko/Stride, among others.
tpush 5y ago
Different graphics APIs aren't a reason not to develop for a platform. Game consoles have unique APIs, yet both AAAs and Indies happily develop for those platforms. What matters is whether the prospective income from those platforms outweigh the additional dev costs. Additionally, most Macs simply aren't gaming machines; they're mostly thin laptops or AIOs with very high resolution screens, meaning the GPU has less cooling headroom and has way more pixels to draw than pretty much all Windows machines that are used for gaming. That makes the potential pool of users even smaller than it already is, so most of the time it doesn't make sense to develop games for the Mac.
- vimy 5y ago
  Apple silicon changes this. Macs have plenty of gpu power now for AAA games.
  - sliken 5y ago
    Indeed, and what will keep being even more true as apple silicon evolves and the PS5 and XSX stay the same for 5 years or so. Likely related to this, I've heard that both Sony and Microsoft have approached apple about getting more games on their platform.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    And a much better temperature story
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  > Different graphics APIs aren't a reason not to develop for a platform. > What matters is whether the prospective income from those platforms outweigh the additional dev costs. Different APIs increase costs. If dev costs were lower for porting games, the platform would see more games.
  - tpush 5y ago
    1) Porting costs are not per game but per engine, which can be shared between multiple games. 2) The majority of costs is ongoing support, not writing to a different API.
MayeulC 5y ago
Not only that, but it has a lot of pain points, including ARM CPUs in a world where a lot of games used to target 32 bit windows. Proton supported macos at first[1]. I think support is still more or less there, though not integrated with "steam play". Proton "glue" scripts are also mostly python, and macos does not (did not?) support python3. I think the community could step in and help support it, but valve pretty much stopped efforts on that front (some rationale in [2]), although I think community efforts on wine would be welcomed. [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d8177fa40f3de729e55d238d3c24877 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817... [2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493#issuecomment-422022116 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493#issuecom...
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  Valve is funding a separate effort for an x86-on-ARM emulator: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX
- syspec 5y ago
  Python3 is natively installed on MacOS, and it has always "supported" Python3 meaning it could be installed and would work just fine
flohofwoe 5y ago
By far most games on Windows don't run on OpenGL or Vulkan but on Direct3D. Game consoles also don't use OpenGL or Vulkan but have their own APIs. Metal is "just another" platform-specific 3D-API, it's not an exception but the norm. In reality, "cross-platform" 3D APIs don't matter much (for games). What actually matters are distribution platforms (for instance: Steam), and if a distribution platform promises good business, games will be created for it.

lunfard000 5y ago

I dont think they will, nothing prevents Apple pulling the same b.s than ms.

rbanffy 5y ago
They'd see this as an alternate app store and that's a no-no for them. OTOH, there is no shortage of games in the Mac app store. It just may not be the same titles you have on Steam. Edit: I think I didn't understand the reason of the complaint.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  On macOS, Apple doesn't mind other app stores. Steam is available there right now.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Apple is not even against other operating systems on Macs. Bootcamp has been a thing for a long time (and apparently they're not against ARM Bootcamp were it possible [1]) and recently marcan mentioned how Apple added something that wouldn't be helpful for Apple, but is helpful to the Asahi Linux project. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-windows-for-m1-macs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind... [2] https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994 https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      An OS is different from an application for selling, installing and running other applications.
      - gjsman-1000 5y ago
        That's pretty much literally what an OS is! An application that lets you install and run other applications.

marcodiego 5y ago

Linux is Valve's lifeboat for the case Microsoft starts misbehaving.

pjmlp 5y ago
Good luck with that, Steam Machine were selling like hot cakes.
- meibo 5y ago
  The Deck certainly is, it's sold out into 2023. People want PC games on the go, Valve provides it in a now common form factor, at a reasonable price, with a trusted name.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    If I only make 5 units of something, I can state it is sold out as well, yet it won't take the market by storm. Lots of things sold out, what matters is sustainability.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Not really sure why you were downvoted here, production capacity is certainly an issue with Steam Decks.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        I will get downvoted for every remark made against Steam and the dream of Linux taking over the world of AAA games (originally written for DirectX/Windows anyway). God forbid to talk against the Valve mob.
      - Zhyl 5y ago
        But the case being argued is demand for the Steam Deck which is demonstrably high. The counter point to that was that production was low, therefore selling out doesn't mean much. However, the Steam Machines didn't sell out at all so at the very least there is more interest in the Steam Deck than Steam Machines. Sure, it doesn't follow that the Steam Deck will necessarily be a success, but the GP's arguments seem lazy and bad faith, which is presumably why they are being downvoted.

ahartmetz 5y ago

With Valve being founded by a bunch of Microsoft employees, maybe they took a lesson from Microsoft: if you have enough money to keep trying, eventual success is likely. Microsoft did that with many products, most relevant in this context: the Xbox series.

behnamoh 5y ago
So many counter examples come to mind. Just look at recent Google projects.
- Tyr42 5y ago
  Money and nerve to keep trying and not wander off.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Google doesn't "keep trying", it rewrites replacement products frequently. The nearest Microsoft equivalent to Google's (lack of) strategy was Skype being replaced(? Complimented by?) "Skype for Business"
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Various XAML UI Platform!
jonny_eh 5y ago
I highly recommend watching their recent docuseries on the history of Xbox. It really seems like the project nearly failed multiple times. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-NLoYNcQEHdBGO https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-N...
marcodiego 5y ago
As strategists use to say: "Wars are lost". If you can maintain yourself long enough, your enemy will eventually be out of resources to maintain themselves.

shmerl 5y ago

Dealing with Apple isn't something Valve would want. They focus on Vulkan, Mesa and Wine. And Apple are pretty negative about Vulkan for some unknown reason (which seems to be even more than their usual NIH mentality). I.e. like when they were resisting adopting SPIR-V for the Web. So Apple have no one to blame but themselves for it.

zelon88 5y ago

The Proton compatibility tool is fantastic. I game mostly on Linux and I remember just a few years ago having anxiety while purchasing a new Windows game because I wasn't sure that I would get it working. Since then the support has become so good I have practically no anxiety at all. If the game doesn't launch first try it's usually just a couple settings that need tweaking. Most things just work right out of the box.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Do you have any anxiety around how the games work after launch? I enjoy a lot of older games and sometimes they glitch in some cases. A VM of the original target platform seems the most reliable IME.
- zelon88 5y ago
  Sometimes. In particular the game Uboat stopped working after an update and I was unable to get it going. To be expected however, as the game is still in Early Access. Another early access title that I ran into problems with after launch was Postal 4. I found a workaround is to replace the bundled direct X installer with some other silent installer that returns the expected return code. Other issues tend to crop up around custom launchers. Usually in this instance I will search online for the command line arguments to bypass the launcher or simply launch the game directly. The last subset of issues I seem to experience revolve around fullscreen/window mode. I find that some combination of ALT+Enter and F11 typically resolves this. If not I usually resort to running the game in a Window and undecorating it. However in some games this does not capture the mouse and can cause the window to lose focus if you click outside of the game window.
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    gamescope should help with that by running games in their own Xorg server as well as handling the scaling, and gaming on wayland/sway helped me a lot with getting games to behave consistently with other programs. It does have its own issues sometimes, certainly. I hope gamescope will help route around them.