zlacker

>>evolve+(OP)
I thought for a moment from the title that Valve has finally started funding game developers to make content from SteamOS, but no, this is just another case where Valve pays some contractors for open source projects and force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility.

>>charci+IV2
> force developers to foot the bill for verifying compatibility

How are they forcing developers? If developers don't think it's worth it to make their game compatible with Steam Deck, can't they just avoid doing that?

>>marcel+iW2
They are forcing developers to be the one to pay for it if they do it because there is no other player in the space that would financially benefit from games having SteamOS support. Practically every other company with an game platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform. Also developers can't avoid supporting SteamOS because there is no way for them to 100% opt out of being on that platform.

>>charci+o23
Your argument is illogical. If devs don’t want to support it, they simply will not support it—as evidenced by the thousands of games that have yet to be SteamOS verified, but either run just fine, or don’t run at all with the devs not giving it a second thought.

Besides, if this does end up putting pressure on the developers to start supporting more platforms than just Microsoft’s data collector ahem I mean, Windows, then I’m all up for it. It’s a win for everyone.

>>ohdear+X73
It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs. stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions, X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa, PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.

>>diath+F04
What has that got to do with Valve providing a compatibility layer so devs can broadly ignore all that nonsense and just target Proton?