alt Hacker NewsAnd I forgot to mention in-game currency.
I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.
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> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.
Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.
Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.
Totally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place.
The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier.
Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts.
To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one.
Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels.
There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.
Which game of theirs has paid-for currency? I don't think you get more points with Dota Plus.
I had a rough time with Proton a few years ago and ended up setting up my most recent gaming rig as a Windows 11 machine. In retrospect it was probably unfair to judge it on dime-a-dozen Humble Bundle leftovers from a decade ago when most of the effort is spent on supporting new releases.
But yeah... just this week I was traveling for work and my kid reached out wanting to play a little Deep Rock Galactic with me. I couldn't believe how easy everything was from my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. Steam, proton, Discord, all of it just worked and I wouldn't even have realised it wasn't running natively if I hadn't noticed the extra proton download in the Steam client.
Very nice work.