zlacker

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+(OP)
I'm sure those developers hate getting a larger install base for free.

>>charci+(OP)
> 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?

>>charci+(OP)
Why the vitriol? This is one of the rare cases where a company actually puts money in open source development. Of course they ultimately do it for business reasons but everyone benefits from it as a whole, so I fail to understand the issue here.

>>Throwa+v
It's not just a larger install base. Those users may require extra support, those users may tank your reviews, those users may have a worse looking game or one that crashes a lot that can result in reputational damage.

>>marcel+A
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+G6
> Practically every other company with an application platform, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, Android, etc have programs to fund bringing content to their platform.

the only platforms I've ever heard of this for were Windows Phone and the Epic Store

both of which were runaway commercial successes

>>dev0p+t4
Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.

>>blibbl+07
Have you ever heard of terms like "Playstation exclusive" before? Companies benefit from having good content on their platform and they typically are willing to pay for it.

>>charci+G6
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.

>>charci+a8
Not since Bloodborne, I haven't. And I've heard people can play that game on Steam Deck now, too: https://youtu.be/eDHiVsr-jfM

These days the only context I hear "Playstation exclusive" in comes from people trying to analyze how much money Sony lost developing Concord.

>>charci+15
Then developers should fix their games and make sure the software they are selling actually works as advertised. End of discussion.

I don’t quite understand the logic behind your argument. Are you advocating pro-monopoly? Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up? That’s ridiculous, utterly consumer-hostile.

>>charci+O7
Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.

>>ohdear+Oc
They are advertising that it works on Windows. Developers in an ideal world shouldn't have to worry about unsupported configurations. I'm advocating that developers should only have their games judged by supported configurations.

>Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?

Other platforms could be profitable enough that developers could target and support them on their own volition.

>>ninth_+th
It's not a fool's errand. You are underestimating how few games most of Steam user's playtime is in. Getting proper support for ARM to make out the most performance on the most popular titles is a reasonable thing to fund. Valve can still use FEX for addressing the long tail of games, but it will have disadvantages to a proper ARM port.

>>ohdear+fc
I never said they were forced to support, but that they are forced to fund such a thing for their game as opposed to their being an option for Valve to fund it.

>>charci+Ux
They aren't forced to fund anything. They have the option for an additional value add, that's all.

>>charci+kx
But is the disadvantage worth the relatively high overhead of specifically adding arm support? I doubt that. It is better game devs focus on what they're better at - x86 - while valve and open source devs focus on what they're better at, than trying to split funds across competing solutions to the problem.

>>charci+G6
It is typically neither free nor open to develop on consoles. As in, you pay to access developer tools.

iOS and Android less so (even if there is a one time charge for Android and a yearly charge on Apple). OTOH I have not heard of them usually reaching out to more than a handful of devs for promotion purposes.

>>ohdear+fc
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.

>>charci+(OP)
The last studio I worked at where the Steam Deck came up, the rendering lead muttered “ew, no! we don’t have time to figure that out!” and that was the end of the conversation.

A week after launch, the Proton devs pushed a hotfix and the binary’s been compatible with Linux ever since.

>>sophro+AZ
The solutions have distant tradeoffs. When you want to run the latest PC games on mobile hardware using a battery, every cycle matters. Using translation layers for x86 will never be as good as as a native port.

>>sophro+fZ
Valve is known for never funding games which is why my original comment expressed surprise. Of course they aren't forced to fund content on their platform, but I had thought they had changed their strategy.

>>diath+X41
What has that got to do with Valve providing a compatibility layer so devs can broadly ignore all that nonsense and just target Proton?

>>charci+kx
But why would Valve do that, Steam is a game market place, that happens to provide a really powerful comparability layer to allow you to run many windows games on not windows. It’s not a platform in any meaningful sense. The Steam deck is a platform, and the Steam frame, and if they can get existing games running on them, without involving the original devs what’s the problem? Dev get a new market to sell their games into, Stream gets a new market to extend their store front onto, how is that not a clear win-win?

Also Valve does fund plenty of games, such as all of the first party games you might have heard of, like Half Life, and its long tail of sequels and spin offs.

>>charci+dv
I don’t think anyone can seriously hold up the PC gaming platform as a paragon of “supported configurations”. The stupid number of tiny things that can cause a PC game to fail on a supposedly “supported configuration” is beyond ludicrous. To the point where I’ve personally given up running Windows completely because it’s less reliable at actual running the game I care about than Proton is.

>>mhast+GZ
You pay, but you get actual support from console makers. They kind of need to given how closed off it is otherwise. The competition also means larger profile studios (indie and AAA) will usually get some good deals to work with.

The one time model from Apple/Android really is just a tax that gets you nothing but access in comparison. It's a full advert model where the biggest players throw millions at Apple/Android for visibility.

Valve's somewhere in the middle of the two. No "p2w" adverts but it's not doing too much to draw devs (except reducing the tax for AAA devs). It doesn't need to. A lot of its community models are "we're having a party, you bring the food and drinks".

>>bigyab+kc
Real shame, you should try Ghosts of Yotei. It's good.

Astro Bot is a personal favorite too. That one would be tricky to get the true experience on in terms of PC platform.

>>charci+hg1
The clsoest thing to funding we ever got was Activision getting Valve to lower the cut for big publishers so they could get onto Steam.

Otherwise, I can't remember the last time they funded a game they didn't make themselves. Maybe in the very early Steam days, but that's long past.

>>ohdear+Oc
>End of discussion.

And that's why Linux market share is a tiny drop in the pool. Devs have enough on their plates and being forced to do support for an attitude like this isn't in their budget.

>Are you advocating pro-monopoly?

Quite the contrary, I'd love for Valve to be taken down a notch.

> Should developers only release games on Windows by default unless other platforms decide to pay up?

If they want to be profitable, yes. If gamers really cared, they had 20, 30 years to put their money where their mouths were. Reality is often disappointing, though.

My future endeavors actually want to have a Linux-first development stack. To make a properly Native linux game, not this sham of compatibility not-emulation layers. But I know that will take some adjustment and me not using the two most popular game engines to help. I'm definitely not doing this because I hope to maximize revenue. I simply am tired of being trapped in the confines of billionaires who have actively made my society worse. But that stand has an opportunity cost, one a business like Valve won't truly make.

>>charci+Qf1
Yeah. Also, software written for a wide gamut of hardware configs, even those under the same CPU ISA, will always be slower than software written for a unique hardware stack and only shipped for that hardware. Does it follow that all software should be written for specific hardware? I think not, because the performance overhead you take on allows saving on massive economic costs. It just isn't realistic to use development resources in that way. Even if devs are better at making ports for their games than fex, that takes precious time and money away from making the game, adding features, polishing, etc. It is much more realistic and sensible to focus on the comparative advantage than the absolute advantage [1].

[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativead...

>>johnny+pl1
I probably will play them, once they're ported to PC and sold for $10 like TLoU and Death Stranding were. I haven't even played Tsushima yet.

Neither one of them is a system-seller though. I don't think anyone feels FOMO because they missed the Day 1 release of Gran Turismo, or didn't play Astro Bot with 7.1 Surround and HD haptics. Bloodborne was a magnum opus, Persona 5 had people lining up outside Best Buy to reserve a copy. The PS5 exclusive library is down right impoverished by comparison, to say nothing of the PC exclusives it lacks.

>>bigyab+Ay1
I don't really know if the concept of "system seller" is a thing anymore. Or at least, all those titles belong to Nintendo now. Sony's only had Gran Turismo and then made up for it with a consistent stream of first party titles. Not Nintendo level, but competitive. Xbox has 2 series and utterly bungled one of them. If you're not a racing sim fan, you're looking at the forest instead of the trees.

All those true "seller" series were always 3rd party and they've all pretty much abandoned console deals mid Gen 8. Bloodborne was truly the lasst of its kind.

The real "system seller" for the ps5 is a bunch of Japanese games that will never really be on Xbox and can't run on switch. So that depends on your taste. Japan's mostly come around on PC though, so it's not truly "exclusive" outside of the shaky optimization.

>>ohdear+Oc
I don't think that's the end of the discussion. Let's try to talk separately about developers and publishers. I'm sure game developers would love to spend time making the game run on everything. But publishers work with a budget and schedule and have to consider the returns. If the potential new customers bring more support load and bad reviews, it's not worth it. That, I think, is the end of the discussion for the publisher.