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Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke f

by adverbly 11mo ago

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

drannex 11mo ago
To be fair, without the HL3 memes, would Valve ever become as massive as they are now without them constantly teasing and playing into it? (answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
  half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2 and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits. it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc. there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
- hamdingers 11mo ago
  Valve had near-total dominance over PC gaming distribution before HL3 even became a meme.
jonny_eh 11mo ago
There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.
- aloisdg 11mo ago
  Imagine HL3, Portal 3 et L4D3 but all linux only. oh my
  - pphysch 11mo ago
    A killer app is a great way to sell a "console". Windows port can come later.
    - seaal 11mo ago
      Doubt it, considering Deadlock still only has Windows builds a year into alpha. https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/depots/ https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/depots/
      - pphysch 10mo ago
        Deadlock is an F2P live service game with a (very) Early Access release & development model. Entirely different situation than bundling a finished HL3 + Steam Machine to achieve big sales.
  - Ylpertnodi 11mo ago
    Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
    - ZeWaka 11mo ago
      Why would you need a new PC to swap operating systems?
    - oarsinsync 11mo ago
      > Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc). Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?
      - bee_rider 11mo ago
        They are assuming you’d build a new machine for Linux, I think. OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.
- codeflo 11mo ago
  Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.
  - jsheard 11mo ago
    Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in development. https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-development-half-life/ https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...
    - llbbdd 11mo ago
      Maybe they finished it...
    - Krutonium 11mo ago
      They also said there was nothing coming for SteamDeck in terms of better hardware about a week before they launched the OLED.
      - jsheard 11mo ago
        Did they? AFAICT what they actually said was not to expect a faster Steam Deck any time soon, which was true, because the OLED version had basically the same performance as the original and in the two years since they still haven't released anything faster. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck-2-refresh-upgrade-cpu-2025 https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
      - WithinReason 11mo ago
        OLED has the same HW as the LCD, with only very minor differences
  - nemomarx 11mo ago
    Seems unlikely with the steam machine coming? I haven't heard any sign of it specifically being frame only
- andrepd 11mo ago
  Yes, I too have dabbled in that strongest of drugs called hopium.
- ManlyBread 10mo ago
  These rumors come from Tyler McVicker who regularly gets things wrong and makes stuff up in order to get clicks on youtube. I have no idea why anyone still takes him seriously in 2025.
thatguy0900 11mo ago
Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company
- erikerikson 11mo ago
  And Valve has been deeply rewarded as a result. The stance that you must abuse customers to maximize economic success will be looked back upon as the stupidity it is.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  When I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in positions of power today. I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
  - erikerikson 11mo ago
    Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers can do the job.
  - andrewstuart2 11mo ago
    Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can. I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
levocardia 11mo ago
Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
- TulliusCicero 11mo ago
  People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
  - asacrowflies 11mo ago
    They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious
    - avhception 11mo ago
      We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take Valve over any of the other players in their market all day every day without even thinking twice. EDIT: You're absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.
    - haunter 11mo ago
      >They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns ??? They didn't All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all
  - nialv7 11mo ago
    Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar). Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/ [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-makes-almost-usd50-million-per-employee-raking-in-more-cash-per-person-than-google-amazon-or-microsoft-gaming-giants-350-employees-on-track-to-generate-usd17-billion-this-year https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak... [1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review
sershe 11mo ago
They are merely trying to commoditize their complement https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.
- preisschild 11mo ago
  Steam Games can definitely be DRM free too. Its the developer/publishers choice.
  - sershe 11mo ago
    Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? As far as I can tell, even indie games require steam to run. DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?
    - blibble 11mo ago
      yes I copied FTL, and Into The Breach out of my steam directory to another machine and they work fine
    - preisschild 10mo ago
      > Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? To download and update Steam games you obviously need Steam, but once DRM free games are downloaded you can keep playing them without Steam. Heck, we even shared some drm-free games someone bought in my friends-group over a personal torrent among us, so we could play coop with each other to test the game out before we bought it ourselves.
craftkiller 11mo ago
That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q
- tencentshill 11mo ago
  They sold the Deck hardware at a loss, so I hope you've bought several full-price games to play on it since.
  - foresto 11mo ago
    Has that been confirmed? Got a link?
- tombert 11mo ago
  I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility. Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB. I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
  - d3Xt3r 11mo ago
    If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).
tombert 11mo ago
I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
- bee_rider 11mo ago
  Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
  - tombert 11mo ago
    Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad. That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked. You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
      - account42 10mo ago
Insanity 11mo ago
I always took the HL3 memes more as a good-faith joke. Like it's part of gaming culture more than a serious jab at them. I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
wengo314 10mo ago
maybe instead of HL3 they will deliver linux on the desktop for the masses. because that's the foreseeable trajectory at this point
vjk800 10mo ago
Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual business.
ManlyBread 10mo ago
>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to dethrone Duke Nukem Forever. There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up. I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from releasing an another new entry in the series that uses revolutionary new technology or whatever.
- uniq7 10mo ago
  I prefer not to have HL3 rather than a half-baked one, or a very short episode. They have only one chance of publishing HL3, and I hope put in it the same love and care they put in 1 and 2. I'd be very disappointed if they just released it just for the sake of releasing it.
  - ManlyBread 10mo ago
    They could publish Episode 3 and then publish Half-Life 3 afterwards. I never understood why people keep insisting they can release only one game. It's not like they don't have average or mediocre titles in the series anyway (Blue Shift and Episode 1 are examples of this).
  - paulryanrogers 10mo ago
    They claim they will only release when the game has something innovative to offer. But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve releasing virtual card games today? Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now, they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.
Gormo 10mo ago
> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.
- dmos62 10mo ago
  So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
  - Gormo 10mo ago
    > So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be. > Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on? Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work". The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be. It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.
    - 10mo ago
matheusmoreira 10mo ago
It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholder value to maximize.
ReptileMan 10mo ago
>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. And people have forgotten that they existed. I mean it is 18 years since the orange box.
john01dav 10mo ago
Their absurdly high 30% cut combined with having the only otherwise decent store with real network effect driven market share is a very real criticism
- mitkebes 10mo ago
  To be fair 30% is the standard. As far as I know, all of the following stores take a 30% cut: * Steam * GOG * Microsoft store * Xbox store * PlayStation store * Nintendo eShop * App store * Play store * Kindle store There's also stuff like Audible where Amazon takes a 75% cut unless you agree to exclusively sell your audiobook through them. And there was a lawsuit over that because it turned out Audible was actually only paying authors a 15% cut, while keeping 85% of sales for themselves.
  - john01dav 10mo ago
    The majority (Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintento, App Store, Play Store, and Kindle Store) have a captive market of developers (with varying degrees of enforcement, from end users demanding it (Steam) to it being impossible to use anything else (App Store and the consoles)). This will absolutely put upward pressure on the cut that the market will bear.

drannex 11mo ago

To be fair, without the HL3 memes, would Valve ever become as massive as they are now without them constantly teasing and playing into it? (answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).

red-iron-pine 11mo ago
half life releases were tied to new platforms, such as HL2 and its physics engine, or HL Alex and VR kits. it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc. there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
hamdingers 11mo ago
Valve had near-total dominance over PC gaming distribution before HL3 even became a meme.

jonny_eh 11mo ago

There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.

aloisdg 11mo ago
Imagine HL3, Portal 3 et L4D3 but all linux only. oh my
- pphysch 11mo ago
  A killer app is a great way to sell a "console". Windows port can come later.
  - seaal 11mo ago
    Doubt it, considering Deadlock still only has Windows builds a year into alpha. https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/depots/ https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/depots/
    - pphysch 10mo ago
      Deadlock is an F2P live service game with a (very) Early Access release & development model. Entirely different situation than bundling a finished HL3 + Steam Machine to achieve big sales.
- Ylpertnodi 11mo ago
  Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).
  - ZeWaka 11mo ago
    Why would you need a new PC to swap operating systems?
  - oarsinsync 11mo ago
    > Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc). Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?
    - bee_rider 11mo ago
      They are assuming you’d build a new machine for Linux, I think. OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.
codeflo 11mo ago
Are the rumors still hinting at a VR-only experience as they did a couple of years ago when Half-Life: Alyx released, or is that no longer the speculation? Because that would be unfortunate for me, I'd have to play with a bucket in hand.
- jsheard 11mo ago
  Valve recently said outright that they have no VR titles in development. https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-development-half-life/ https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...
  - llbbdd 11mo ago
    Maybe they finished it...
  - Krutonium 11mo ago
    They also said there was nothing coming for SteamDeck in terms of better hardware about a week before they launched the OLED.
    - jsheard 11mo ago
      Did they? AFAICT what they actually said was not to expect a faster Steam Deck any time soon, which was true, because the OLED version had basically the same performance as the original and in the two years since they still haven't released anything faster. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck-2-refresh-upgrade-cpu-2025 https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
    - WithinReason 11mo ago
      OLED has the same HW as the LCD, with only very minor differences
- nemomarx 11mo ago
  Seems unlikely with the steam machine coming? I haven't heard any sign of it specifically being frame only
andrepd 11mo ago
Yes, I too have dabbled in that strongest of drugs called hopium.
ManlyBread 10mo ago
These rumors come from Tyler McVicker who regularly gets things wrong and makes stuff up in order to get clicks on youtube. I have no idea why anyone still takes him seriously in 2025.

thatguy0900 11mo ago

Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company

erikerikson 11mo ago
And Valve has been deeply rewarded as a result. The stance that you must abuse customers to maximize economic success will be looked back upon as the stupidity it is.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
When I read what you wrote, I immediately asked myself "Doesn't Gabe have children who could have been raised with the same values? Maybe that..." and then I caught myself thinking exactly the same way as many others before me, and the reason why we have so many shitty politicians in positions of power today. I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
- erikerikson 11mo ago
  Corporate structure and tools to be used in combination with social controls (i.e. culture) by the true believers can do the job.
- andrewstuart2 11mo ago
  Just musing along with you here but I think it's really hard for anything like that to happen. What seems at least halfway likely is that Valve won't be the same post-Gabe. But there will be other companies that end up with a similar ethos, and we can support those companies as best we can. I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.

levocardia 11mo ago

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"

TulliusCicero 11mo ago
People complain about the gambling/loot box stuff, and yeah there's legit ethical concerns there. But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
- asacrowflies 11mo ago
  They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious
  - avhception 11mo ago
    We really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Of course they have their faults, but I'll take Valve over any of the other players in their market all day every day without even thinking twice. EDIT: You're absolutely right, is what I'm trying to say.
  - haunter 11mo ago
    >They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns ??? They didn't All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all
- nialv7 11mo ago
  Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar). Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/ [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-makes-almost-usd50-million-per-employee-raking-in-more-cash-per-person-than-google-amazon-or-microsoft-gaming-giants-350-employees-on-track-to-generate-usd17-billion-this-year https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak... [1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review

sershe 11mo ago

They are merely trying to commoditize their complement https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.

preisschild 11mo ago
Steam Games can definitely be DRM free too. Its the developer/publishers choice.
- sershe 11mo ago
  Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? As far as I can tell, even indie games require steam to run. DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?
  - blibble 11mo ago
    yes I copied FTL, and Into The Breach out of my steam directory to another machine and they work fine
  - preisschild 10mo ago
    > Can you actually download these games like one can with GOG? To download and update Steam games you obviously need Steam, but once DRM free games are downloaded you can keep playing them without Steam. Heck, we even shared some drm-free games someone bought in my friends-group over a personal torrent among us, so we could play coop with each other to test the game out before we bought it ourselves.

craftkiller 11mo ago

That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

tencentshill 11mo ago
They sold the Deck hardware at a loss, so I hope you've bought several full-price games to play on it since.
- foresto 11mo ago
  Has that been confirmed? Got a link?
tombert 11mo ago
I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility. Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB. I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
- d3Xt3r 11mo ago
  If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).

tombert 11mo ago

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

bee_rider 11mo ago
Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
- tombert 11mo ago
  Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad. That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked. You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
    - account42 10mo ago

Insanity 11mo ago

I always took the HL3 memes more as a good-faith joke. Like it's part of gaming culture more than a serious jab at them. I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)

deleted 10mo ago

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wengo314 10mo ago

maybe instead of HL3 they will deliver linux on the desktop for the masses. because that's the foreseeable trajectory at this point

vjk800 10mo ago

Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual business.

ManlyBread 10mo ago

>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to dethrone Duke Nukem Forever. There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up. I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from releasing an another new entry in the series that uses revolutionary new technology or whatever.

uniq7 10mo ago
I prefer not to have HL3 rather than a half-baked one, or a very short episode. They have only one chance of publishing HL3, and I hope put in it the same love and care they put in 1 and 2. I'd be very disappointed if they just released it just for the sake of releasing it.
- ManlyBread 10mo ago
  They could publish Episode 3 and then publish Half-Life 3 afterwards. I never understood why people keep insisting they can release only one game. It's not like they don't have average or mediocre titles in the series anyway (Blue Shift and Episode 1 are examples of this).
- paulryanrogers 10mo ago
  They claim they will only release when the game has something innovative to offer. But then why release Alyx as VR instead of HL3? What innovation did HL2 episodes 1 and 3 offer? Why are Valve releasing virtual card games today? Half Life as a franchise is great. Gabe was right to start nearly from scratch on HL1 back in the day. But now, they've got everything they want so the hunger is gone.

Gormo 10mo ago

> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.

dmos62 10mo ago
So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on?
- Gormo 10mo ago
  > So it became more straightforward to release games on Linux? Sounds like a positive. No, not really. Many of the common game engines already support Linux out of the box. Unity, for example, already makes building for Linux basically equivalent to building for Windows or Mac. Proton has disincentivized building for Linux even in cases where doing so is already as straightforward and low-effort as could be. > Or, is the gripe about distinction of released for vs playable on? Yes. Most of these games were already playable on Linux under Wine, even if it took a bit more effort on the part of the user to get things up and running. The rise in Linux usage started motivating native Linux ports for a few years, and there's a large library of native Linux games out there. But Proton has been removing the incentives to build native Linux ports by making that Windows compatibility "just work". The result is now that there are more games where Linux compatibility still running on top of an emulation layer -- but one that's a bit less straightforward for users to configure directly as they would with Wine -- and a bit less performant than they might otherwise be. It also means that Linux compatibility for these games is more closely coupled to the Steam ecosystem. Whereas a game with a native Linux build might distribute that build through Steam, GOG, Humble, itch.io, etc., now the non-Steam platforms have only Windows builds. Sure, these can usually still be played under Wine in the traditional fashion, but that represents a regression away from native Linux support.
  - 10mo ago

matheusmoreira 10mo ago

It's because Valve is privately owned. No shareholder value to maximize.

ReptileMan 10mo ago

>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. And people have forgotten that they existed. I mean it is 18 years since the orange box.

john01dav 10mo ago

Their absurdly high 30% cut combined with having the only otherwise decent store with real network effect driven market share is a very real criticism

mitkebes 10mo ago
To be fair 30% is the standard. As far as I know, all of the following stores take a 30% cut: * Steam * GOG * Microsoft store * Xbox store * PlayStation store * Nintendo eShop * App store * Play store * Kindle store There's also stuff like Audible where Amazon takes a 75% cut unless you agree to exclusively sell your audiobook through them. And there was a lawsuit over that because it turned out Audible was actually only paying authors a 15% cut, while keeping 85% of sales for themselves.
- john01dav 10mo ago
  The majority (Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintento, App Store, Play Store, and Kindle Store) have a captive market of developers (with varying degrees of enforcement, from end users demanding it (Steam) to it being impossible to use anything else (App Store and the consoles)). This will absolutely put upward pressure on the cut that the market will bear.