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>What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their

>What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, but Proton and the Steam Deck are their future insurance policy against Microsoft coming after their profits in the future. The writing was on the wall, they saw how much money Epic was giving to Apple, and how many studios Microsoft owns, and with the direction Windows is going, in 10 years when Windows 12 drops, Microsoft could also push for a 30% cut on all Steam sales on Windows for example, and Valve is preparing themselves for such a scenario by pushing Steam to Linux full throttle. They want to make sure they reap all the profits from the Steam store and not have to share they pie with a middle man like the Epic vs Apple kerfuffle. That's the end-game here. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very grateful for what Valve is doing for Linux, but it's important to be aware of the motivation behind the actions, consider their potential end-game, and not get romantically attached to companies as there is no free lunch and companies are not your friends.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" Well yeah. That's what a company is. Companies are also people, and people make decisions, and those decisions are sometimes influenced by more than the mere bottom line. You can't read their minds, and it's the opposite of charitable to assume the worst. Fully agree about the rest though. It certainly makes business sense. But it took around a decade to maneuver themselves into this position, and it's pretty hard to believe they did it all solely for the green. I used to exchange MSN messenger messages with Zoid, one of their most productive Dota 2 programmers. (Boy that sounds like ancient history.) He didn't strike me as a person who was particularly ruthless and mercantile. Just a driven programmer trying to do good.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I mean, Valve is still privately owned as far as I know, so wherever it’s going is entirely up to the mind of it’s founders. Edit: Tring to do good, and they made Dota 2?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    1v1 sf mid scrub The history of dota is pretty fascinating. As someone who worked on Heroes of Newerth, I can vouch that https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is pretty accurate, based on the reactions of all of my coworkers when it came out. So there's some juicy drama for you. It's true that Valve makes decisions based on money. But it's also true that they execute on them fantastically well. Far better than S2 could ever dream to achieve. It was wonderful to have a front row seat to the steamroller. In hindsight I wish I'd relaxed and enjoyed it more.
    - oblio 5y ago
      I can believe almost everything else, and I imagine War3 mod making wasn't the "cleanest" thing ever, but this: > your first realization was that Abdul was a poor designer from here: https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is almost categorically false. I've been playing Dota since... 2004, I was there almost immediately after the Eul/Guinsoo/Neichus stuff. I did research the previous versions a ton, out of curiosity. There's almost no comparison between Icefrog's additions to Dota and what came before. The other versions were brilliant in their concept but generally very poor in their execution. Icefrog added more brilliant concepts but primarily greatly cleaned up Dota mechanics and execution. He took an amateurish mod and made it have professional level execution. Maybe he sucks to work with in a team (really hard to believe, to be honest, considering the development and testing team he built around Dota and the changelogs, OMG, the changelogs; I'd rather think he might suck to work in a on-site team, because his online team management was pretty solid), but criticizing his management/design of Dota for so many years is really silly.
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        100% agreed, and I’ve said as much in the past. I winced to forget to qualify my statement with “but this part is nuts.” Thanks for calling that out.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Privately owned and operated means that squeezing out a little more profit hasn't much influence on the owner's wealth. Which happens to be the decisionmaker's wealth. And there's a real possibility that they will care how their money gets to them. But being publicly traded changes everything, suddenly a crowdsourced projection of profits into the future enters the picture, leveraged to the nth degree. This even affects companies still held by a strong founder majority. And when decisions are delegated to the salaried class, incentivized by options and bonus mechanisms, the payoff magnification effect gets even stronger. Suddenly a percentage point change in profits can cause a tenfold change in personal wealth. Or more. When there are tradeoffs to be made between decency and greed, always bet on the public company outdoing the private. It's not a guaranteed win, there are some truly nasty examples of privates, but they are outliers. Publicly traded means nasty by design.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" I didn't say that I'm not happy for what Valve is doing, but I don't trust any billion dollar tech megacorp like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, Valve, etc. to have the best interest of the consumer in mind, regardless of how fun their IP is for my entertainment. Pro-consumer actions on their end are always motivated by their internal Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy against their competitors, but ultimately they're not your friends, they're just fighting for your money and marketshare. In the end, you're still just a dollar sign that pads their stocks or bottom line, regardless of some of how pro-consumer some of their actions seem. Yes, everyone here knows a company does things for money, and I'm not knocking Valve for wanting to make money, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and try to think of what their end-game is, as that might turn out to be not be very consumer-friendly in the long run if they become a monopoly.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Yes, and we're not their friends. We'll go elsewhere as soon as we see a better deal. So what?
    - danuker 5y ago
      There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects. The largest platform has the most to gain, when it makes use of social interaction.
      - schmorptron 5y ago
        Most of the social interaction in the games space happens on discord these days though, and has since about 2016. The only social network effect steam currently has is with game invites, since it's slightly more annoying to join a party of friends via the xbox version of sea of thieves than the steam version, for example.
        5y ago
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Agreed. Profit is fine, monopolies are not. It's not a hard line to draw.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    Well seeing as there is little to no consensus on whether certain tech companies have a monopoly or not... I'd say it's a hard line to draw.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I think this is just because we misuse the word monopoly. Monopolies in tech are pretty rare I think, especially things like online services -- it is pretty hard to completely dominate a market when there are other big tech companies out there and they all dabble in everything. However, tech companies engage in anti-competitive behavior all the time. Unfortunately people want to say "monopoly" when they see anti-competitive behavior, because it sounds cooler. This is quite unfortunate because it leads to the whole "technically not a monopoly" debate, which really misses the point.
      - account42 5y ago
        There is never any 100% monopoly in other sectors either unless it's something government enforced where only one company is allowed to do something. What matters is that a significant amount of consumers do not have a choice of dealing with with the company in question if they want certain types of things. That is true in tech if you define the "type of thing" narrowly enough and is true nowhere if you define it broadly enough. The debate of where you draw the line is independt of the terms used.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    OK, but Steam has a near-monopoly on games, Spotify has a near-monopoly on music, and both of these are working great for me as a consumer. Netflix had a monopoly, but now not, and it's shit. I have to work out what platform a show is currently streaming on, and decide whether it's worth paying for that to see the show, and the lineups are constantly changing. Honestly, going back to piracy for video is looking good right now. The GP's statement "piracy is a service problem" is so true. And, unfortunately, to provide the kind of service we want, that means a single platform. I'm utterly uninterested in a world where I have to remember which platform that game was on. I refuse to buy games if they require Origin (or an Xbox account, or in fact creation of an account anywhere). I realise that at some point Steam is probably going to become evil and take advantage of its monopoly position. I hope we can persuade it to stay honest when that time draws near. I don't see any other option - I wouldn't want the government (which government? I live in Germany) controlling the platform either.
- spaceisballer 5y ago
  Yeah I think the main takeaway for me is that the work they are doing for Linux isn’t being kept only to themselves. Betting on Linux is giving people options. I would love to drop windows all together, and they are making this more of a reality (because the only key thing keeping me on windows is gaming, I can get all my other regular computing just fine on Linux).
thomaslangston 5y ago
And by extension our future insurance as consumers against Microsoft and X-Box as well.
Xelbair 5y ago
I don't care for underlying motives as long as the results are aligned with mine. The end result is that landscape is better for the customer. I seriously do not get why people think that companies do 'good' for any other reason than money.
- noirbot 5y ago
  I don't think anyone is implying they did it for any other reason. Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. Yes, they're clearly doing this to help the Steam Deck and other projects. I'm sure that will make them money and I'm sure someone at the company will do something with that money that people object to. That's just the nature of living in anything beyond a barter economy with humans. I think most people (especially on HN) get that. We don't need 5 people to pop out and remind us of it every time a company does something. Unless it's obvious that there's a clear malicious intent hidden in what the company did, a lot of times it just feels like "How dare these people feel some joy. Capitalism must make everyone feel bad all the time."
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. That's 100% the reaction here every time Microsoft launches something benefiting devs and consumers. Everything is scrutinized with skepticism. Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards? How do you think Valve would be towards consumers if they were to become a monopoly in the PC gaming sales space? Not knocking them, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and not get romantically attached to these corporations.
    - noirbot 5y ago
      I'm not saying that Valve should be above complaint. I'm also annoyed when people show up in threads about WSL or VS Code or whatever else that Microsoft does just to be like "Stop liking this, Microsoft is evil". I'm just saying that "But they're a company so nothing they do can be good" is a generic response without anything interesting behind it. You can post it on every thread about every action done by every company and it will be true. I'm not saying not to be paranoid, but unless the point is just "people can't enjoy things made by companies" maybe save the actual paranoia for cases where it's clear that the action is going to be a big downside. There's no call to action except "don't talk about this" or "why are you buying things from a corporation?" So much of it just feels mean-spirited to me. That there's literally no possible thing any company could do that wouldn't be spun as "well this is just good PR to cover up X evil thing they're doing." And that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage them to do good things and recognize them when they do them. It feels like a perverse joy in stomping on other people's happiness, even if it's justified. It's like showing up at someone's birthday and reminding them they're a year closer to death and debilitating old age diseases. It's true, but what does anyone gain by doing that. Are people on this forum A. unaware of corporate malfeasance or B. able to be persuaded from their current position on its dangers? I'd say that's almost never the case here.
mastax 5y ago
> Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, GOOD! That means our incentives are aligned, and the arrangement is much more likely to survive long-term.
yucky 5y ago
>Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts Something tells me Kroger doesn't sell me food out of the goodness of their hearts either, and I'm ok with that too.
mrkramer 5y ago
Valve depends on indie devs and atm Valve's Steam is by far the best platform to release, distribute and manage your indie game.
ranguna 5y ago
They could've choose to go proprietary with all their software, locked down proton, locked down their OS, locked down their hardware, locked down everything. But instead, proton is open source, their OS is based on one of the most open distros out there and they published a tear down guide (not the best guide, mind you, but it's trillions of year ahead any competition on their space). So yeah, they are doing it for the money, but they are one of the very few companies that understands that money come from users, and they seem to be doing very good for users. So don't kid yourself, it's not only for the money.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" Well yeah. That's what a company is. Companies are also people, and people make decisions, and those decisions are sometimes influenced by more than the mere bottom line. You can't read their minds, and it's the opposite of charitable to assume the worst. Fully agree about the rest though. It certainly makes business sense. But it took around a decade to maneuver themselves into this position, and it's pretty hard to believe they did it all solely for the green. I used to exchange MSN messenger messages with Zoid, one of their most productive Dota 2 programmers. (Boy that sounds like ancient history.) He didn't strike me as a person who was particularly ruthless and mercantile. Just a driven programmer trying to do good.

Aeolun 5y ago
I mean, Valve is still privately owned as far as I know, so wherever it’s going is entirely up to the mind of it’s founders. Edit: Tring to do good, and they made Dota 2?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  1v1 sf mid scrub The history of dota is pretty fascinating. As someone who worked on Heroes of Newerth, I can vouch that https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is pretty accurate, based on the reactions of all of my coworkers when it came out. So there's some juicy drama for you. It's true that Valve makes decisions based on money. But it's also true that they execute on them fantastically well. Far better than S2 could ever dream to achieve. It was wonderful to have a front row seat to the steamroller. In hindsight I wish I'd relaxed and enjoyed it more.
  - oblio 5y ago
    I can believe almost everything else, and I imagine War3 mod making wasn't the "cleanest" thing ever, but this: > your first realization was that Abdul was a poor designer from here: https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is almost categorically false. I've been playing Dota since... 2004, I was there almost immediately after the Eul/Guinsoo/Neichus stuff. I did research the previous versions a ton, out of curiosity. There's almost no comparison between Icefrog's additions to Dota and what came before. The other versions were brilliant in their concept but generally very poor in their execution. Icefrog added more brilliant concepts but primarily greatly cleaned up Dota mechanics and execution. He took an amateurish mod and made it have professional level execution. Maybe he sucks to work with in a team (really hard to believe, to be honest, considering the development and testing team he built around Dota and the changelogs, OMG, the changelogs; I'd rather think he might suck to work in a on-site team, because his online team management was pretty solid), but criticizing his management/design of Dota for so many years is really silly.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      100% agreed, and I’ve said as much in the past. I winced to forget to qualify my statement with “but this part is nuts.” Thanks for calling that out.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Privately owned and operated means that squeezing out a little more profit hasn't much influence on the owner's wealth. Which happens to be the decisionmaker's wealth. And there's a real possibility that they will care how their money gets to them. But being publicly traded changes everything, suddenly a crowdsourced projection of profits into the future enters the picture, leveraged to the nth degree. This even affects companies still held by a strong founder majority. And when decisions are delegated to the salaried class, incentivized by options and bonus mechanisms, the payoff magnification effect gets even stronger. Suddenly a percentage point change in profits can cause a tenfold change in personal wealth. Or more. When there are tradeoffs to be made between decency and greed, always bet on the public company outdoing the private. It's not a guaranteed win, there are some truly nasty examples of privates, but they are outliers. Publicly traded means nasty by design.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!" I didn't say that I'm not happy for what Valve is doing, but I don't trust any billion dollar tech megacorp like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, Valve, etc. to have the best interest of the consumer in mind, regardless of how fun their IP is for my entertainment. Pro-consumer actions on their end are always motivated by their internal Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy against their competitors, but ultimately they're not your friends, they're just fighting for your money and marketshare. In the end, you're still just a dollar sign that pads their stocks or bottom line, regardless of some of how pro-consumer some of their actions seem. Yes, everyone here knows a company does things for money, and I'm not knocking Valve for wanting to make money, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and try to think of what their end-game is, as that might turn out to be not be very consumer-friendly in the long run if they become a monopoly.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Yes, and we're not their friends. We'll go elsewhere as soon as we see a better deal. So what?
  - danuker 5y ago
    There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects. The largest platform has the most to gain, when it makes use of social interaction.
    - schmorptron 5y ago
      Most of the social interaction in the games space happens on discord these days though, and has since about 2016. The only social network effect steam currently has is with game invites, since it's slightly more annoying to join a party of friends via the xbox version of sea of thieves than the steam version, for example.
      - 5y ago
unityByFreedom 5y ago
Agreed. Profit is fine, monopolies are not. It's not a hard line to draw.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Well seeing as there is little to no consensus on whether certain tech companies have a monopoly or not... I'd say it's a hard line to draw.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I think this is just because we misuse the word monopoly. Monopolies in tech are pretty rare I think, especially things like online services -- it is pretty hard to completely dominate a market when there are other big tech companies out there and they all dabble in everything. However, tech companies engage in anti-competitive behavior all the time. Unfortunately people want to say "monopoly" when they see anti-competitive behavior, because it sounds cooler. This is quite unfortunate because it leads to the whole "technically not a monopoly" debate, which really misses the point.
    - account42 5y ago
      There is never any 100% monopoly in other sectors either unless it's something government enforced where only one company is allowed to do something. What matters is that a significant amount of consumers do not have a choice of dealing with with the company in question if they want certain types of things. That is true in tech if you define the "type of thing" narrowly enough and is true nowhere if you define it broadly enough. The debate of where you draw the line is independt of the terms used.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  OK, but Steam has a near-monopoly on games, Spotify has a near-monopoly on music, and both of these are working great for me as a consumer. Netflix had a monopoly, but now not, and it's shit. I have to work out what platform a show is currently streaming on, and decide whether it's worth paying for that to see the show, and the lineups are constantly changing. Honestly, going back to piracy for video is looking good right now. The GP's statement "piracy is a service problem" is so true. And, unfortunately, to provide the kind of service we want, that means a single platform. I'm utterly uninterested in a world where I have to remember which platform that game was on. I refuse to buy games if they require Origin (or an Xbox account, or in fact creation of an account anywhere). I realise that at some point Steam is probably going to become evil and take advantage of its monopoly position. I hope we can persuade it to stay honest when that time draws near. I don't see any other option - I wouldn't want the government (which government? I live in Germany) controlling the platform either.
spaceisballer 5y ago
Yeah I think the main takeaway for me is that the work they are doing for Linux isn’t being kept only to themselves. Betting on Linux is giving people options. I would love to drop windows all together, and they are making this more of a reality (because the only key thing keeping me on windows is gaming, I can get all my other regular computing just fine on Linux).

thomaslangston 5y ago

And by extension our future insurance as consumers against Microsoft and X-Box as well.

Xelbair 5y ago

I don't care for underlying motives as long as the results are aligned with mine. The end result is that landscape is better for the customer. I seriously do not get why people think that companies do 'good' for any other reason than money.

noirbot 5y ago
I don't think anyone is implying they did it for any other reason. Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. Yes, they're clearly doing this to help the Steam Deck and other projects. I'm sure that will make them money and I'm sure someone at the company will do something with that money that people object to. That's just the nature of living in anything beyond a barter economy with humans. I think most people (especially on HN) get that. We don't need 5 people to pop out and remind us of it every time a company does something. Unless it's obvious that there's a clear malicious intent hidden in what the company did, a lot of times it just feels like "How dare these people feel some joy. Capitalism must make everyone feel bad all the time."
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it. That's 100% the reaction here every time Microsoft launches something benefiting devs and consumers. Everything is scrutinized with skepticism. Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards? How do you think Valve would be towards consumers if they were to become a monopoly in the PC gaming sales space? Not knocking them, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and not get romantically attached to these corporations.
  - noirbot 5y ago
    I'm not saying that Valve should be above complaint. I'm also annoyed when people show up in threads about WSL or VS Code or whatever else that Microsoft does just to be like "Stop liking this, Microsoft is evil". I'm just saying that "But they're a company so nothing they do can be good" is a generic response without anything interesting behind it. You can post it on every thread about every action done by every company and it will be true. I'm not saying not to be paranoid, but unless the point is just "people can't enjoy things made by companies" maybe save the actual paranoia for cases where it's clear that the action is going to be a big downside. There's no call to action except "don't talk about this" or "why are you buying things from a corporation?" So much of it just feels mean-spirited to me. That there's literally no possible thing any company could do that wouldn't be spun as "well this is just good PR to cover up X evil thing they're doing." And that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage them to do good things and recognize them when they do them. It feels like a perverse joy in stomping on other people's happiness, even if it's justified. It's like showing up at someone's birthday and reminding them they're a year closer to death and debilitating old age diseases. It's true, but what does anyone gain by doing that. Are people on this forum A. unaware of corporate malfeasance or B. able to be persuaded from their current position on its dangers? I'd say that's almost never the case here.

mastax 5y ago

> Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, GOOD! That means our incentives are aligned, and the arrangement is much more likely to survive long-term.

yucky 5y ago

>Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts Something tells me Kroger doesn't sell me food out of the goodness of their hearts either, and I'm ok with that too.

mrkramer 5y ago

Valve depends on indie devs and atm Valve's Steam is by far the best platform to release, distribute and manage your indie game.

ranguna 5y ago

They could've choose to go proprietary with all their software, locked down proton, locked down their OS, locked down their hardware, locked down everything. But instead, proton is open source, their OS is based on one of the most open distros out there and they published a tear down guide (not the best guide, mind you, but it's trillions of year ahead any competition on their space). So yeah, they are doing it for the money, but they are one of the very few companies that understands that money come from users, and they seem to be doing very good for users. So don't kid yourself, it's not only for the money.