GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app!
Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers.
EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
I'm not sure about the internal governance structures at Valve but that's really what should be important when it comes to maintaining the corporate culture alive.
I think they've done a good job so far, and I'd be surprised if they didn't have plans in place to try keeping the company going in much the same way once Gabe is gone.
Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.
Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!
I also know that Steam DRM isn't that hard to bypass. Generally just some patched DLLs. But I've never had a real need to bypass it. Steam lets you play offline with no connection. My games are, to a first approximation, mine and Valve doesn't need to be informed every minute I'm playing if I so choose.
Gabe's premise is right on. We pirate from Netflix and Epic because it's orders of magnitude easier than playing by the rules. I buy from Steam because it's easier than piracy.
As a rule, I don't pirate steam games. If it's something I'm interested in, it's probably worth my money. I do pirate from EA and others because the Sims 4 is not worth $500 in any universe. I pirate shows and movies because it's too much time and money to even figure out who has what I want this week.
You beat pirates by making your service more attractive than piracy. Steam is a better experience than free, and a better experience than all the other paid options. This is how you win.
Story time: I was pretty upset when my original copy of GTA: Vice City was intentionally broken, then the "Definitive Edition" was released a short time later. Especially in the case of GTAIII, they removed the top-down camera so it's not a 1:1 flat upgrade. I find it quaint and fun to try and beat that game using the top-down camera of GTA1 and 2, so was rather disappointed.
That's more a critiques to how software development happens today. Its a consequence of decoupling the product ownership from the developer, who only implements what's required according to the ticket/feature requested by the PO.
To be clear, I'm not saying that passing full ownership of the software to the developers they've hired to be effectively code monkeys would work. And neither do I think that the approach of having the developers be the owners of the software "scales" (teams like that will always be small and have very little space for Jr. positions).
It's very illuminating if you look at the average developer salary at valve, they're just approaching software development differently then Amazon and Epic (and rest of the industry for that matter)
I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
Epic is so terrible, I'll pay them twice for the same game!
And we wonder why the game industry is in such a shit shape...
Economic semantics aside, yes. I hate Epic so much I'll pay them again not to have to use it any longer.
My friend had to go through huge gyrations to offer a discount for upgrades on a productivity app. Your choices seem to mostly be either never get paid again by old customers or over/undercharge people.
On Steam you can sort it out with a bundle discount.
They do regional pricing, including systems which make it difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in physical stores, and pay for them with cash.
Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially Apple's.
Valve also has unleashed the scum that is lootboxes, paid battle passes, paid leveling, nft store (technically not nft, but 90% of one).
The absolute trash that especially ubisoft tries to push on its users made me hold off on buying some of their games. It's just that bad.
For fucks sake, what decade is it?
I especially hate games that work 99% on Steam, but have a 1% issue with them requiring cookie banner dismissal (fuck you Rockstar) even after dealing with the logins.
Steam is just so much better than everyone else that they can have a cut of Rockstar and Electronic Arts money.
Eh.. It seems very common for Steam users to have libraries of thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep discounts during sales. The way Steam operates does a great job of instilling Fear Of Missing Out, and getting people to buy things they never end up using.
At leastrented digital games on Steam account dont contribute to global warming, waste problems and dont use tons of electicity to mint some tokens.
I guess only major issue Steam really have to solve is ability to inherit these digital purchases if owner has died. Their license agreement dont have proper procedure for that.
Also today, with gaming consoles, Nintendo's platforms, and similar, I don't think the pattern of buying lots of games and then never playing most of them happens very often.
What I'm saying is this pattern has something to do with the way Steam is structured, it's not an intrinsic property of game consumers which occurs with any kind of games store.
Also games on Steam not tied to specific hardware generation, OS or account country. You can still play majority of games from 2010 and earlier even if they wasn't updated.
They have the (much improved) Family Sharing now, which does combat that somewhat. Still not a proper solution.
Within 14 days.
If you havent played game at all most likely Steam will just accept return in much wider return window especially if there some new sale has started making game much cheaper or something.
Also if for some reason game was compatible with your platform (Linux, Mac) there are cases where Valve refunded money years after due to developers breaking compatibility.
PS: Yeah in the beginning Valve was certainly forced into implementing return policy by authorities, but today their return policy is one of the best of all software distribution platforms.
I believe late refund requests are forwarded to the publisher for them to judge.
This is more of a Humble Bundle thing than a Steam issue.
And Fanatical, and (many) other Steam-friendly game bundlers, but Steam themselves also contributed to my massive game library on Steam, due to those seasonal sales bein' just too good to pass up. :)
source?
Anecdotally, myself and most of my friends are in this boat, with very large "piles of shame." Humble Bundles tend to contribute greatly to this.
https://i.imgflip.com/7uzmif.jpg
https://memes.ucoz.com/_nw/86/80233222.png
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5...
https://i.imgflip.com/2fcexh.jpg
Search for "steam library memes" and you'll find lots of these. Very scientific, I know.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/is-the-total-value-of...
Steam is more convenient, reliable, and affordable, so no wonder they can compete with piracy
It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.
I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Or they’d realize that the Deck is successful because it’s open and bring Steam to the Xbox.
[1] Personally I remember how bundling ruined the brands of Cable TV which makes GAME PASS seem like a disaster to me, but objectively, the Cable TV ecosystem resisted change for 30 years and only really broke when Tubi came along, so maybe they'd be happy to be the new cable.
There are also apps that let you do it.
Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".
Linux doesn't have user experience rules, which is why Steam OS works.
As someone that was part of game development community (Flipcode, Gamedev portals, IGDA), demoscene, before FOSS became mainstream, my point of view is that both communities don't really overlap on point of views towards software and consumer experience.
But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd rather there be a greater number of companies all independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for us".
I think perhaps that's the goal is that there's any number of companies that we feel are pretty great that are phenomenal at serving a specific vision of gaming and computing that's oriented around Linux and that are quite happy to talk to each other in effective ways and so I wouldn't necessarily say that the culmination of that should be a merger between those companies but an ecosystem that thrives with deeply compatible hardware and software.
I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.
I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a business at the end of the day.
But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to the ground.
>a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't know what happened to Microsoft in that time.
You can have disappointments and even failures while Also admitting they lead to successes by not giving up. That was all I was saying.
As a business, it's clear what kind of success valve prioritizes.
Further, I wouldn’t call the Steam Deck itself a financial priority. Hardware is famously risky. Obviously, they want to continue their financial success, but they don’t seem to pursue that at all costs like other companies that run their IP into the ground to make more money. Having their financial success allows them to keep their integrity and continue pursuing artistic and engineering successes to diversify their income stream and build goodwill. Their work on Proton is a crowning achievement for their pursuit of engineering successes.
I also don't think it makes sense to suggest that the Fromsoft timeline starts at Dark Souls. My understanding is their first game was Kings Field, which had modest commercial aspirations compared to the Dark Souls franchise.
My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space.
Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.
I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will.
It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
Same here, I already had a keyboard and mouse plugged into it and it served excellently until the replacement part for my daily driver arrived.
I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.
They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
For example, I still don't use Epic. And I've probably even paid on Steam for games that Epic gave away for free.
What's worrying is Steam has enough mass to preclude me from buying games on GoG to a point. Linux support, for one. Frictionless playing on a Deck if i choose to get one in the future, for two. Steam built in streaming, for three.
I bought GoG first for a couple years, but now I'm agnostic again. Esp with games that have Linux versions.
------------
Still, the only games you really own are those you've downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM free.
And only if you have a good backup strategy :)
Helps that they don't have to be very very good to shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
(Quoted text is from https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
It's also possible that some gamers did actually get money from Valve via arbitration, so they could've been found to have acted in an anticompetitive way, separately from the lawsuit. I've not been able to find anyone specifically saying that they did the arbitration, though.
>If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
For UDK: they did get a lot better with that for UE4/5. These days, the first million dollars in that project's revenue has no cut, and after that it's a 5% royalties (there's also mandatory $1850 subscription seats per year if you have over a million gross revenue a year).
It's about as indie friendly as you can be for such an everpresent tool.
What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.
My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not because they hinder the competition, but because the competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
Both Steam and Band-Aid are brand names.
I'm a happy Valve customer, and I'd still likely buy with them even if other platform's offered lower prices, but that doesn't change that they've leveraged their market domination to force concessions from publishers that benefit their business at the cost of competitors and customers.
Yet Valve did nothing to stiffle competition. Their only major requirement for games published on Steam was that games suppose to get same efficient discounts as they get on other storefronts. E.g you cannot constantly sell your game on Epic Games store for $10 while Steam version cost never drops below $12.
Also game developers are allowed to request sane amount of Steam keys for free and sell them elsewhere while pocketing all the profit while Valve covers all the distribution costs.
Epic Games stiffled itself. Their store is shitty and dont even have player reviews. No surprise they have no customers except those who come to play Fortnite or get free games.
For example a publisher could price a new title at $69.99 on Steam or $59.99 on Epic and make the same gross margin, given the platform fees.
That Epic is a sub-par distribution platform does not change this, and Steam's agreement precludes the possibility that competitors can compete on price. Amazon was forced to remove price parity after regulatory pressure.
So like Microsoft of the 90's, Valve is using their market dominance to force publishers into agreements that limit competition. It's only different because we generally like Valve. Epic and GOG cannot compete on price and use that as a mechanism to grow their business because Steam could threaten to remove your product. It just so happens that Steam is so good that even with price discounts it's unlikely that competitors could use that as a major advantage.
There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
I have 3 different non-Steam game stores and another 3 or 4 non-Steam game-specific launchers on my PC.
If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
That's an exaggeration.
World of Warcraft, COD, League of Legends, all exist just fine. For brand new games, The Bazaar is doing very well and they're using their own launcher.
(Slightly off-topic, but The Bazaar is really good, for anyone who likes card-based auto-battler games! Highly recommend.)
Btw, based on my friend Bazaar still has its own balance issues arising every other patch.
It's proof that what the parent commenter said, the portion I explicitly quoted, is an exaggeration.
>Btw, based on my friend Bazaar still has its own balance issues arising every other patch.
I mean, sure. Can you name any competitive game that doesn't have balance issues? I can't. What matters to me is the iteration speed to address balance issues, which The Bazaar does at a really nice cadence.
>Can you name any competitive game that doesn't have balance issues?
Sure. But I'm not entirely sure Bazaar is stable enough yet to have the mood swings of Overwatch 2. That's the danger. Make too many fans angry in this beta stage and you lose all goodwill for the full launch.
I do empathize highly with the devs as someone who will try to do that song and dance themselves one day. But that's why I'm not only making my game with direct sales figures in mind.
Can we not say people aren't conversing in good faith solely as a method of shutting down further conversation?
They stated something as an absolute and I gave examples of why it isn't an absolute. That's a perfectly normal conversation. It's not even an argument.
As for Bazaar, it seems like you haven't played and aren't a fan, which is totally fine, but just a note that it is not in beta anymore. I'm not sure what your comments about "making my game with direct sales figures in mind" are referencing.
I will call a duck a duck as long as it quacks like one. I simply want to maintain the spirit of the guidelines
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
They made a hyperbolic statement and you are responding to the literal hyperbolic point and dismissing the main point in the same comment about the 90% monopoly. I don't see that as following the guidelines. There's no interesting conversation to have about "does your game not existing if it is not on Steam?", not even in a philosophical sense.
>it seems like you haven't played and aren't a fan, which is totally fine,
I'm just worried about its future. Especially in these turbulous times. You don't really get the luxury of rocking the boat that much. Maybe the founders will be fine, but the last thing I want is more layoffs over extemelty preventable issues.
> I'm not sure what your comments about "making my game with direct sales figures in mind" are referencing.
I wouldn't worry about it too mucn. Just personal ramblings. I'll just say "when I a good rush, sell shovels".
But nit: that's not what "exception that proves the rule" means. An example of that saying is a sign that says "no parking 2-4pm", which proves that there is a rule that you can park any other time. WoW, Fortnite, CoD, Minecraft, those are just "exceptions".
What stands out to me is that while most studios accept that they've got to pay their tithe to valve in order to succeed on PC, for many it seems to begrudgingly so and where they have the capability they investigate using their own or alternative channels to get a better rate. It's an interesting parallel to Valve's moan around 15 years or so that Microsoft could E.E.E. PC gaming and the linux direction was hedging against that.
CDPR also puts all of their games DRM free from release on GoG - including The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.
It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.
It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)
So, perhaps not all good.
This was in defiance of the fact that some lawyers were arranging a mass arbitration lawsuit over this stuff. So Valve is flipping the table hoping to evade that.
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price.
One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.
No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer.
> One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com
Just checked, $35 on both.
Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pleased and there would be consequences.
Same if you want a video on your site: if you don't YouTube embed and instead host yourself, you get less amplified by youtube even if people want to watch it just as much. YouTube ends up getting to plaster ads interrupting your website trailer as much as they do on YouTube.
If you spread your marketing to a steam competitor with better cut you get the same problem, less amplification on Steam. Steam is today stone soup, Valve used to put in more of the meat and veggies but now that's more and more up to the captive devs. For a time Valve was the most profitable major company per employee in the US from this stone soup arrangement, but they did eventually have to drop their rates on the biggest devs, announced either a few days before or after the Epic Games Store launched.
https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/the-judges-ruling-a-maj...
>Initially, it was believed that this policy applied only to Steam keys, but the emails indicate a broader application, raising serious concerns about Valve's business practices.
> Just checked, $35 on both.
This might be a regional thing then. When using a UK IP, it’s £30.00 on Steam, GOG and Humble. It’s £27.03 on factorio.com. I checked before posting.
That said: enforcement on such things is not going to be 100%. Larger companies will either be purposefully ignores or make their own internal deals and contracts to follow. Some smaller games will slip through like everything else in life (Valve can still let Malware slip in once in a blue moon. I'm not surprised you can find some niche Japanese game sold for cheaper on DLsite or wherever).
But the point is that they can push thst in devs because of the monopoly. And that's how you get stuff like the Wolfire lawsuit when a few people do push back.
They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their market share)
Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled gardens.
Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
Anecdotally I've heard it really does help to get on those Steam lists.
Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they target much younger children with less parental control.
They have no morals with how they make money. No morals in politics. They are running a monopoly with a 30% cut.
How is that a "do no evil" company? Because you can install an app from Epic? Give me a break...
Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
(Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported to it — and was duly impressed.)
Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid"
Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic.
Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392
Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2, mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering, which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.
My impression is that the general quality of games on the Switch (or Switch 2 or eShop) is sub par the quality of, e.g. Zelda. This is obviously because Zelda is a landmark title and it doesn't make sense to compare it with "the general quality" of games on Steam. It would make more sense to compare it with the quality of other landmark titles on Steam e.g. Baldur's Gate 3.
You can compare the general quality of games on Steam (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5") with the general quality of games on Switch (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5"), though I'm not sure it is that interesting of a comparison, since no one buys the "average" game but what they consider to be the best games on the platform.
I'd suspect that any attempt at an "objective" comparison (obviously, an impossible task) would land in favour of Steam simply because it has basically all of (core) gaming for most of history on it. Though obviously such an "objective" comparison would be meaningless for something like this where literally your subjective opinion should matter the most for your choice.
I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one. Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's literally everything else. In particular, the XBox exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam as a first-class citizen, for instance.
The Nintendo Switch lowered the bar substantially for what it takes to get on that platform, and broadly speaking, I support that, I'm not complaining about it.
No, I will never forgive the Chaos;Head NOAH . Especially since it only got through from blowback as being part of the famous Steins gate franchise and dozens of other games got quashed later.
An impossibly high bar given that the Zelda games are some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
You can absolutely make a game to the quality of Zelda as an indie developer.
Not as enoirmouus as paying a studio in California to make a failed GaaS shooter service. But still a large step past a AA budget.
I'd say at the bare minimum you need a very solid staff of 5 to pull it off though. Hollow knight did it with a rough core of 3 devs + composer (and other support, of course). The very ambitious Toweers of towers of aghasba was reportedly 6 devs IIRC, but that's TBD and might have scaled up.
Just because steam sells games that do in-game profiteering, doesn't mean you need to play them?
Tastes will be different and I can respect that. But I feel there's no worse kind of criticism than one that is berating a game for something it was never targeting to do in thr first place. Why lambast a Mario game for it's lack of deep characterization instead of saying "I prefer a story-heavy game" and picking up the Last of Us?
What? Given that 99.9% of all games are published on Steam, what you are comparing is Zelda against gaming as a whole, not “the quality of games on steam”
Zelda is good, but it’s not better than literally all of gaming. If you are not a die hard Nintendo fan, I’d rather use Steam and enjoy saner pricing. There is always emulation for Nintendo.
The Store UI is disgusting and intrusive compared to all other competitors who actually have a decent overview and design..
You can collect gems, cards and other misleading virtual currencies.. Tons of misleading business practises and time-consuming bloatware distractions hidden behind that terrible UI.
Steam is first and foremost DRM. A game-prison. You don't own a single thing. Gamers have totally drunk the kool aid.. They forgot back when Steam was bloatware forced on Half-Life and Valve games and it was despised for a decade before they became complacent little worshippers.
This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
It's surely healthy for Valve's bottom line, but it introduces an element of unpredictability into pricing, creating an inconsistent reinforcement regimen, which is the kind that most effectively reinforces a behavior (namely the purchase of games).
Discounting also debases the perceived value of something, which, in addition, I suspect, to reducing the joy of ownership and use, should further encourage consumption.
I find myself more and more bored of video games, and I wonder whether this is partly because Steam and Humble Bundle's discounting practices have ruined the experience of acquisition and ownership, reducing it to a kind of gluttony and buffer-style gorging.
I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
And when I say "sustain in western countries" I'm talking the bog bottom line of "us federal minimum wage", coming down to approx. $15k/year. That's 1000 copies of a $15 game that is probably upped to 1800 copies after valve and other's cuts. Even that paltry marker is hard just becsuse the market is so saturated (and not in a good way).
It's only gonna get worse as a generation that is raised on mobile games and game pass settle in. The idea of spending money upfront from a game may be lost entirely.
>I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
That was indeed an explicit strategy of Nintendo. Keep a premium brand and a price thst reflects that. Sales are rare to maintain this idea of an evergreen title that is always selling.
Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
I've used it for all sorts of stuff from gaming on flights, to local multiplayer, to controlling a robot car, to watching YouTube with adblocking, etc.
What about motion control games like Switch Sports?
I'm sure the emulators accept the Steam Deck's own accelerometer inputs for when you're in a non-detached mode, and tilting the screen to aim.
The super-mega-motion control games might not work, but part of what I mean by "works better" is that the Steam Deck can generally emulate with more power than the Switch itself, e.g., you can get a Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom setup with a better framerate than the switch itself, so, depends on what you want more. I don't have a lot of motion control games.
For ToTK in particular, this video suggests it'll barely hit ~30FPS on the Deck under Yuzu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afetsBdQFyc
Whereas on a modded Switch you can run it at ~60FPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Z6W_AUNY0
There are other more recent videos backing this up and showing that the game has far more frequent stutters than on the Switch.
Anyway, the point is, I wouldn't dismiss sticking a picofly into your Switch as pointless. Even if you have no desire to inflict some Meta-style "fair use" on videogame publishers, it's still worth doing for perks like sys-clk, RetroArch, sm64nx and 2s2h.
A software engineer can (temporarily) get it working after hours of diagnosis.
Compare that to the switch.
While I wouldn't pin this on Steam qua Steam as a program, it is a fair complaint about the ecosystem. I have some games that are as flexible as the Switch about being docked. I have some games that can be docked but can't handle any resolution changes. I have some games you just plain can't switch. I have some games that you can switch from using the physical Steam Deck controls to an Xbox controller seamlessly, complete with the in-game hint graphics changing to match the controller in use. I have some games that have to be restarted to pick up a new controller. At least a few months ago I had one particular combination of games that if I played them in sequence would somehow permanently render XBox controllers non-functional until I rebooted the Steam Deck, though that is certainly an exception.
The Switch does handle the Switch-ing in the Switch name better than the Steam Deck, and it is a structural advantage that Valve will have a hard time addressing in a practical way. That said, my family does use the Steam Deck as a de facto Switch 1.5, as a thing that is used fairly evenly between "docked" and "in hand", and it is functional enough to work, even if it is undeniably not as slick.
This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.
To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.
There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.
If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.
It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.
You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
It's a complicated topic, but no we have not always been doing merit based hiring. However, merit based hiring does result in imbalanced race and gender distributions due to long term societal issues and demographic distributions at earlier stages.
Basically, there is a skewed class distribution at the source. You have to fix it at the source via equality of opportunity and making our society more equal. I'm not a conservative, i'm very far left and strongly believe in making society more equal in general. However. Trying to fix it at the destination is called racial discrimination and is dehumanizing and evil and anyone who does it should suffer prosecution.
You don't get to dehumanize and discriminate against individual people for the greater good, i will personally go out of my way to see you receive consequences if you try this and you're doing it somewhere i can see. There's a lot of us with this opinion, hopefully your stance starts getting chilled from fear of blowback.
I have a question for you. Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
I look forward to you and your army of white men marching on me saying they're tired of racial discrimination in the workplace. I'll send you guys right over to HR, and tell them that you're tired of me hiring so many black people. I'm sure it'll go well.
> I look forward to you and your army of white men
We know, the secret is out, you and all the other racist lunatics never saw anything wrong with prejudice. It's the same type of thinking that fought against civil rights in the 70s that just moved straight over to the hot new forms of racism and discrimination just because you think it's socially acceptable.
> Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
You are saying this in order to defend racist hiring practices. Whether or not the base hiring process sucks is not part of the discussion on whether or not we should allow racial discrimination in said hiring process.
In the end it's always individual innocent people that get hurt, not broad identity groups that you think deserve it.
How would you go about these "consequences" as you put them? Do you actually think anyone will take you seriously when you complain about not enough white people being hired? Surrounded by too many women? Sounds like a personal issue to me.
It's natural for you to feel attacked, as you're used to living under a white-supremacist system. I guarantee you would have been one of the MLK haters back in the 60s.
Also, on the prejudice thing. You actively make the decision every day to have shitty, racist opinions. Black people do not have the choice to become white, but you can become a better person. You simply choose not to. There is a huge difference, and your lack of ability to see that is telling.
Discriminating against people on the basis of race or gender is unacceptable, that's the bottom line, going "do you think anyone will actually take you seriously" and accusing me of being an uber driver (?) is the theme type of language i'm talking about. Segregationists in the 60s and 70s constantly used this exact style of derision and appeal to marketability, spend some time just reading the writings of segregationists at the time and you will see yourself. Sorry but there's a simple objective truth here and you're on the wrong side of it, trying to call me racist while you're defending racist practices is just pointless, it looks like a fish floundering.
And it's actually really amazing how your post boils down to 'You're white so you deserve it, nobody will take whites seriously!' despite you not even knowing my race!
Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the same UI which the Deck uses.
But I think you're trying to make a point about Steam DRM.
Someone once said; there are two DRMs that everyone loves, Apple and Steam.
And I have to say it's true. I am normally not a proponent of DRM, I've been pirating since TURBO 250 tapes on c64, but I do love Steam. I love it for what Gabe has done for us gamers on Linux.
In my opinion he deserves 30%.
That's why I wanted to stick to consoles and a physical medium. But even those have devolved into what's basically a digital download, now with the disk (or cartridge now, with Switch 2) being the DRM. The Onion couldn't write a more ironic headline.
Now I'm wondering if all that "virtual sharing" stuff for switch 2 cartridges means difficulties with the used market.
>In my opinion he deserves 30%.
Even Gabe doesn't agree, given the cut he gives to AAA publishers. I'm not exactly onboard with the idea that the richest people get the best tax breaks, even in video game world.
A progressive platform cut would be much friendlier to smaller devs and put the biggest burdens on the ones likely using the most amount of bandwidth. That's how the game engines have started to leverage their tooling. And they put a lot more work in than a hosting platform
I am sure there are stories and certain situations where people have lost access to games, but I think they're fringe cases.
Yeah, it’s not a very big concern of mine either.
But people seem so Gung ho about DRM being bad. except for Steam.
Again none of this is inherently bad if your argument is "I like the convenience and don't care about the restrictions". But don't delude yourself into thinking this is "freedom".
Your entire comment is splitting some pretty fine hairs, but I just don't know how anyone can play the "muh firmware" card in 2025. I don't actually know a single Linux user or even hardware retailer that ships blobless hardware, if that means they aren't pro "software freedom" then I guess nobody is. But I think we can define "pro" to mean something other than "hardline absolutist" in this instance.
DRM is a thing we have to live with but valve does a decent job of making it invisible when it's theirs. The ones that suck the most are the aforementioned studios which roll their own on top.
I could perhaps live with subscription terms that are still variable amount / mount (currently 0) as servers do cost money. Even if their quasi-monopoly would allow them to extort us. But what needs to be more reliable, is that the ToS I applied to when I bought the game should not change afterwards in a one-sided proposal to keep access to my game licenses. Which is not allowed in our jurisdiction at least, so steam was found non-compliant in the EU.
(Back in 2021) https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/ip_21_...
What problems have you seen?
Some popular examples of this;
1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck.
2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.
Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings?
Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user.
I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved.
Developers are unable to opt out of the system and Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a developer.
Valve needs to set proper expectations of who to be mad at when a game breaks on the Steam Deck if the developer themselves never pledged support.
Most users don't understand what an OS really is or how a game works on the Steam Deck (SteamOS) instead of Windows.
This is a big claim, is there evidence for this? I'm an end-user, not a developer, but there are plenty of games in Unknown status. I would assume that should be the default, not Verified.
I can see an argument that Valve has incentive to have flagship games get that Verified badge, but there is also precedence for them downgrading popular games after launch. For example, Spider-Man 2 recently went from Verified to Playable (rightfully so, in my opinion).
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades.
Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.
Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.
My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
Native Linux ports matters!
You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance.
> Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm..
Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
> to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around the Steamdeck community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the performance deficit still persists: https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...
> You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork
Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or Proton users.
You just plain out refuse to see it, cuz you totally drank the kool aid.
Steamdeck have literally zero AAA-games compared to Nintendo, because thats the joy of owning a Steamdeck! Smearing diapers in Nintendos face and pirating their games like a true neckbeard, right?
Steam neckbeards are such manchilds. The "idea" of a Steamdeck sells more than the actual games and this is what this article proves. Sad, but true.
The catalog of games on Steam suck, objectively. Unpopular opinion maybe - to those that are addicted to browsing shitty new soulless games on Steam.
Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2).
I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS image and the default image ships with the Flatpak market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot of freedom, and the fences are just advisory.
I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.
But calling Windows more free than Linux because you can virtualize Linux is a noteworthy statement alright.
