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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Valve has sold multiple millions of steam decks. Fortnite is a popular game. What better way to grow a platform than to develop a popular game for it? Am I not wrong in thinking you'd increase profits having invested in another area? Especially if it would only take "a few more programmers"? I know Tim Sweeney doesn't want to provide profit to Valve and I know he's also a fucking idiot, but more money is more money...
Tim Sweeney has a personal grudge against Linux.
I don't think it's Linux.
I think Tim Sweeney is just like all of the big publicly traded companies where they do not want the best thing for their customers and only want to control them.
Valve, and thus Gabe Newell, is actually making pro-consumer choices, which is success that Tim Sweeney wants.
I think the grudge is against Gabe Newell and Valve.
There is a chance that Tim Sweeney would actively shit on Linux anyway, since that would reduce control over consumers (and yes with all of the deceptive practices Epic does and how they fight lawsuits in court, they definitely are not trying to give control to the users).
I'm sure Gabe has a lot of wonderful traits, but pro-consumer ain't one of them.
Valve is not perfect but they're the closest thing to a not-evil corporation that I've ever seen. Just look at the Steam Deck.
I mean the list goes on.
Didn’t they also release schematics for 3D printing parts?
Eh... Valve isn't a publicly traded company. I'm not sure I'm aware of anything Gabe has said or done to imply he's anti-consumer.
And he is the one who said that piracy is a service issue, and if you give people convenient access and fair prices, they'll pay. And he was right.
And Steam is proof of that. Their refund policy is also far more generous than, at the very least, Sony and Nintendo.
Any sources to show I'm wrong?
Killed physical ownership of PC games. (Half Life 2 required Steam to work, locking your key to a single account)
Pioneered lootboxes. (Team Fortress 2)
Has price parity rules. (Prevent keys being sold cheaper elsewhere so gamers can't avoid giving 30% of their money to Valve)
Those aren't particularly pro-consumer.
Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn't play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I'm aware.
Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.
TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.
MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam's rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn't need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve's servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn't be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it's not like Steam doesn't add value).
On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve's decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren't, I can cite:
It's really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.
They also had to get sued by multiple states before they started offering refunds in the US. Valve doesn't do anything that doesn't make them money. They just have a longer term view towards profit than a publicly traded company. That's what lemmy/reddit doesn't understand.
Yup, Valve isn't my friend, but there's a lot of overlap in my and their interests. So I support them, because they support me. They make a product I like, and actively work to make my platform of choice better.
They're as good as a friend, but unlike a friend, I'll drop them as soon as they stop providing value.
Their refund policy is great but it was also the result of a massive lawsuit that they lost because previously refunds were basically not a thing.
There's a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).
I can't really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no "trying to create a competitor to Steam" isn't pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it's not like Epic couldn't have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.
And even Unreal is annoying since, at least when I last tried it, they don't provide binaries. I understand why, but the support is just good enough, not ideal.
And that's Epic's MO, everything is just good enough to make them money. They're not suing Google and Apple to take down a big evil corp, they're suing to not share their profits. That's it.
And EGS doesn't exist to make money from game sales, it exists to funnel people into their live service games. But they need people to come to their platform, so they also offer game sales, free games, etc.
He hates penguins?
"club all those fucking penguins to death" - Tim Sweeney probably
Tim Sweeney might be the reason club penguins shut down
Tim Sweeney has the emotional development of an 8 year old
Maybe the nerdy Linux guy stole his gf in high school?
I can tell you one thing and it's that this is not about his feelings. It is about it not being worth the effort of porting the game to Linux. If there was as many steam decks as there are switches, you can bet it would be on steam deck. He doesn't not care about Linux, he cares about placing his effort in the right place to make profit.
They Do Not have to port the game, only tick a checkbox to enable Proton support in the EAC SDK and maybe contact BattlEye to enable Proton support in BattlEye.
Stop spreading this bs. If it was this simple, no game would not be Linux-compatible. If they enable it, it is a huge responsability for them to make sure there are no experience breaking bugs, just like any other platform. It is a money thing, not an emotional "Tim does not like Linux" thing. Epic preferred being removed from the App store and they basically killed their Android version because they tought it was worth it during their lawsuits. And let me tell you, there are a LOT more iPhones than there are Steam Decks and desktop Linux computers out in the wild. If Epic is willing to give up on mobile platforms with millions and millions of potential players because they feel it costs them more to keep the game up rather than just shut it down, it means they don't give a shit about the maybe 20 something thousand potential players on Linux.
Look, I would love for them to enable the anti-cheat on Linux and I would love to be able to play any game without booting my Windows partition, but I can't. Such is life when you decide to use something that barely has 2.5-3% of market share as a desktop OS. To add to my previous points, the variance between setups is so great on Linux that is makes it basically impossible to fully support. We would need for immutable distros to be the main thing and we are not there yet. So many people have missing drivers, incompatible hardware, iffy setups that are unstable. That would be great for the Steam Deck, but if they make it for the Steam Deck, I doubt they could make it Steam Deck Linux exclusive
Take a look at AreWeAntiCheatYet EAC Breakdown, as you can see, exactly half of the one's that ticked the box in EAC SDK work. And guess what, that's a slightly outdated list for a few games. For example : Warhammer : Vermintide 2; which should be categorized as "Running" not broken.
If you notice, Fortnite isn't broken; it's straight up denied, they haven't even given it a chance at all.
Also, don't you find it funny how Apex Legends; a direct competitor of Fortnite; can do it, but Epic somehow magically can't despite having way more resources and literally owning EAC.
Actually, Valve & the community will do most of the work if Epic does the bare minimum on their end.
Yeah, Epic totally killed the pre-existing, and flawlessly working Linux version of Rocket League when they acquired the studio and then refused to refund because "it's a money thing" (ಠ_ಠ)>⌐■-■
That 2.5-3%(Global OS web usage) is still several million users, about 33 Million total give or take and growing. (Especially once ChromeOS joins our numbers after it's Linux-ified).
It's actually way less on steam, but that's because Linux gaming is a barley tapped market thanks to dumb fucks like Tim who refuse to even try tapping into it.
If Linux gaming was more expansive you could very much potentially see massive spikes as 33Million is dead ass almost half of the total traffic steam got in 2022(69 Million). Ofc they'll never be able to tap into it completely but that's still a shit load of money left on the table.
Tapping into just 4% of the global total would be 1,320,000 users or +2100 from what steam already has(1,317,900) according to their survey. The average player spends ~$84.67 USD in fortnite.
Doing the math, that comes out to a potential 111.7644 million USD market cap just sitting there.
You're definitely pointing real things, but it may not be as simple as you think making a game as large and as complete as Fortnite. Also, the point of 33M users is kind of moot imo, because the vast majority of those people won't even install steam on their computer, just like there may be a billion Microsoft computers and only a fraction has steam installed. It is also pretty clear that valve will not help Epic make fornite more compatible on their platform, as they are a direct competitor. I am not saying fortnite wouldn't work, I am saying they do not want to assume the maintenance burden of making such a large game run on an compatibility layer, because when shit doesn't work, the blame goes to them and not the layer. And that's bad PR
Wrong, Proton is open source and Valve would still benefit if Fortnite succeeded on Linux as it'd grow the ecosystem they're investenting in. Valve has said themselves they're open to supporting any game that takes advantage of Proton, including competitors. Unlike Epic, they're not trying to monopolize the entire market. If they were, they'd be trying to make deals with Microsoft to come pre-installed or some other invasive shit like that.
Hell, Valve already dead ass worked directly with Epic Games to add Proton support to EAC & EAC support in Proton(proton_eac_runtime) in the first place. Why the hell wouldn't Valve be obligated to support them?
All they have to do is say "running under Valve Proton report bugs here↗" similar to what Steam does, problem solved.
Not to mention, Linux users are 1000× better at making actually useful bug reports.
I'm thinking maybe you're not aware of the extent at which Proton works these days. It's come a long way, and fewer and fewer games are incompatible every day. Even games that Steam marks "unsupported" often work (for example, Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition with DSFix).
Games often play better with Proton than using their own native Linux runtime. On Steam Deck, and on my shitty Linux laptop.
My understanding about Fortnite, is that it's literally just a switch they'd have to flip to allow EAC.
I am fully aware of the state of Linux gaming, and I do play game with Proton, but the experience is far from perfect with many games having visual glitches and unexpected crashes. Epic likely do not want to deal with this and Valve will certainly not help a competitor get on their platform . It may be true that for the EAC, it is a switch to be toggled, but this does not show the entire story which is also the game experience.
Which games have you had visual glitches and crashes?
The last two games I've played: Lethal Company and BeamNG.Drive, both games that should be basically perfect. They both ran fine enough for me to play for an extended period, but there were some visual glitches like flickering or stuttering.
Edit: the person talking about echo chambers was so right... I'm getting downvoted for sharing my experience that happens to go slightly (!) contradict the "Linux is the best gaming platform" narrative
Sounds like you're the only one.. I've played several hours of Lethal Company, and it's ran perfectly.
Well that must be why on my 2 computers I've had some minor issues like the game crashing for having the misfortune of changing my workspace or having flickering on the top of my screen for 3 hours that persists after restarts and reboots.
Just because your experience has been perfect does not mean mine and other people's been. This community needs to stop taking criticism of real issues as an insult to their mother.
That's why I linked to ProtonDB, where the vast majority of people have a perfect experience out of the box.
If you have bugs that the vast majority don't have, then why don't you... let's say... go report them instead of complaining on some random forum so they can can actually get patched...
The devs can't patch a bug only a handful of people experience if those said people don't submit proper bug reports.
Because I have not been able to isolate and reproduce it yet. I also did no troubleshooting to see if it was present on other proton versions yet. And also the game crashing on workspace switching has been reported in the past, it is a known issue.
The effort from the dev side would be negligible as all they need to do is allow people to play it through Proton. Nobody needs to engineer a Linux runtime. Most games that work on Steam Deck don't have Linux support.