Dear valve. Please never ever go public. We will happily keep giving you money while you keep yourself a private company
Better yet:
Dear Gabe Newell,
Please never die so you can continue running this company as you always have. You make my life as a Linux user much better, and I’ll keep paying you as long as that remains the case.
There may only be dozens of us, but we love your product. Never change.
My hope is that community-developed Proton forks reach a point where they can stand on their own without Steam and Valve, perhaps as a component of or a sibling to Lutris, to conveniently run games from other platforms too.
I’ll admit that I don’t have a clear idea of how that would look or come about. It’s hard to beat the convenience of having the compatibility tool built directly into the launcher like in Steam, with individual prefixes and settings for different games if they have different requirements.
Well, that exists and works well. Proton GE exists and works outside of Steam, and it’s quite easy to manage. A lot of these improvements make their way back to WINE as well, so that’s a thing.
But what really sets Steam apart, at least for me, is:
- selecting the right Proton version for a game
- Steam infrastructure like Steam Input, so games “Just Work” with controllers
Those are a bit harder to separate. That said, running EGS or GOG games through Heroic directly works fine most of the time, so we’re already there for desktop, kb+mouse use. So if Valve goes evil, we have options.
Would be good to see gog get more popular. Fuck drm
Yup, but they need to support Linux better. I’m glad that Heroic exists and apparently they’re now taking a cut of GOG purchases made through their launcher, but there’s still a lot missing from what Galaxy does.
You’d be surprised how many steam games have no DRM other than steam itself. And how easy it is to put in a replacement (open-source) dll that acts as a steam emulator and runs the games without steam. I’d say… pretty much every non-AAA game on steam can have DRM removed this way. It’s such barebones DRM that I can’t really find reason to be angry at it.
FYI games on Steam don’t actually have to use any DRM. e.g. Kerbal Space Program – you can download it, close the Steam client, copy it to another folder, unplug your network cable… then go launch the .EXE from its directory and play anyway.
I used GOG much more when they were the only ones in town releasing old games, especially DOS games, that actually ran on modern systems. Steam has a lot of what I wasn’t able to get anywhere but GOG now; many are even updated graphically or on new engines because certain old games are in vogue now. This isn’t Steam or GOG’s fault though… If anyone can be blamed, I’d blame Nightdive for making kick-ass source ports and not having them available on GOG.
I like gog the site not the gog galaxy app. I always have to look too hard to start a game up.
@JulesTheModest Er…How do you mean? The Galaxy app has its issues, but I’ve not run into this one.
Biggest issue I ran into was years back trying to point it to my existing directory of GOG games from before Galaxy to get it to recognize them without reinstalling them, but eventually I just decided to reinstall whenever I felt like playing them again (and uninstall from old location).
No need to use the app at all. The games on there are drm free. Run the game any way you want. That said, I like gog galaxy cos it keeps all the games I own on every platform together, and I use the search function to find the game I want and hit play. Or just hit view all and browse.
Not all games on GOG are DRM free.
We don’t believe in controlling you and your games. Here, you won’t be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming.
You’ll need to show some proof for that claim.
Do you have an example? Drm free is one of their selling points.
Some of things I hate like extra launchers and DRM are still kind of good that Valve even gives people who publish there to have the flexibility to do whatever they want. Same goes for publishing of “crap” games. With Valve being the dominant one in the PC space being super draconian would be a bad thing, since just as they could go the good route for consumers they could go the bad route too. So the kind of "hands off " approach is a good one even if it doesn’t always work out for us.
Nothing I appreciate more than checking out the reviews and seeing “don’t let it go unnoticed that this is an Ubisoft title, and therefore uses their launcher and drm” saved me regretful purchases (before the 2 week/2 hour return window) many times.
Yep and Valve themselves display clear warnings on the store page for 3rd party account requirements, DRM and additional launchers.
With Valve being the dominant one in the PC space
This is a common misconception. Revenue on Steam is around 8.6 Billion out of 45 Billion. The actual heavy hitters (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite) aren’t even on Steam.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/
Ah yes I often use the Minecraft launcher to buy the latest AAA titles
Apples and oranges
Nice graph tho.
it is a dominant one if it’s by number of game developers.
It’d be impossible to create a competitor in this day in age, because what made Steam win out is that it was the first and that it hasn’t acted like a greedy dick trying (too much) to monetize their platform dominance. Arguably, GOG is a better platform because it is much more against DRM, but when you get right down to it, gamers don’t really care enough about those issues to put a dent in it even if the loudest voices do, so I doubt Steam’s success has much to do with being a ‘democratic platform’.
You’re ignoring a ton of stuff Valve has done. Look at what they’ve done for Linux gaming at a bare minimum.
If all you’re doing is buying games for Windows, Steam doesn’t offer much more than GOG. But if you’re playing those games, well, that’s a different story.
Not to mention that Steam lets you use keys bought from other platforms.
Valve tried to Android their gaming platform under SteamOS, yes. They really didn’t do it for Linux. Rather, they know Linux distros can’t really complete with their specialized house advantage for gaming, in the general consumer sense.
Kind of ironic that they chose a thumbnail image of a character from a game suffering a slow decline and death due to being abandoned by the studio, with item server outtages and waves of bots and hackers that the community have created their own methods to deal with.
Other than that, I completely unironically agree!
