Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.

So it is a bad thing now that Steam makes new releases more discoverable than the other storefronts that have a larger installed base than Steam?

Microsoft’s store has a close to 100% penetration of home installation of Windows 10 and newer.

Opening Microsoft Store: Boom, top spots for Microsofts properties (Activision Blizzard sale, Minecraft, Candy Crush).

Switching to the Games tab: PC Game Pass, more Activision Blizzard sale, COD Black Ops 6 with a dedicated banner, more Minecraft, more Candy Crush.

Visiting one of Microsoft’s other game stores, Battle.net: 100% Microsoft exclusive. Not just Blizzard games but Doom, Avowed, Sea of Thieves, PC GamePass. That’s unregulated Microsoft on full display. Not a single 3rd party game even available but the rest of the Microsoft catalogue integrated after the takeover of Activision Blizzard.

Compare that to Steam: Huge banner advertising the sale promotion of EA.

Scrolling a bit further down, Microsoft games advertised, some convention for narrative games.

Nobody but Microsoft and Epic are to blame for their huge installed bases not converting to sales of 3rd party games. Mostly advertising their own properties and paid exclusives.

All your emotional outbursts do not change facts.

It’s not about how easy it is to compile

But it is. It is what defines the cost of supporting a platform.

The install base is too low right now.

The installed base of Switch2 is 0% right now.

I always want symmetric licensing for community contributions. I have the same stance for Canonical and their Contribution License Agreement that also gives Canonical the exclusive rights to sell proprietary licenses.

This is a general stance I have, no matter who it is.

Valve does symmetric licensing for their SteamOS components, so there is precedent.

Also, I think you read way more into my comment than I actually meant, as if “sour taste” is the same as making demands.

10 Bn for Steam revenue this year, by the way.

So still far off anything resembling >50% market share on PC. Good to know they’re still not a monopoly.

The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else.

So Valve is not engaging in any anti-competitive behaviour as well as pumping resources into Linux support to break the Windows hegemony? Great!

Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.

Yeah, these people are very strange. I mean, it’s a fact that Microsoft is the convicted monopolist because of the grip Windows has on the industry, the same Microsoft that bought Minecraft, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King to become the world’s single biggest games publisher and their Windows-exclusive PC GamePass is also growing (surely at least partially thanks to Microsoft “continuing to misuse its Windows operating system monopoly” to promote their other services).

And yet, there are people who put the sole Linux supporter in the same corner, as if that company had anything approaching Microsoft’s market power. Not even the EU thought Valve was important enough. Microsoft, Apple, Google, ByteDance, and Meta are Digital Market Gatekeepers, not Valve.

There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway

Except for the fact that their entire technology stack already supports it and making Linux versions of their games is a compilation step away. Their Tencent buddies at One-Notebook would surely make a OneXPlayer with EpicOS. “Comes with Fortnite and get free games each week”.

They’ll never grow to the size of Steam, and that’s okay.

EGS has a massive installed base because of Fortnite.

Do they officially support Linux yet?

Unreal Engine has official Linux support since ages. Unreal Engine running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what movie CGI creators often use these days. It’s a highly lucrative market they’re not going to give up.

Epic Online Services supports Linux as well: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/eos-get-started/platform-support (which includes Easy Anti Cheat)

So when Fortnite and Rocket League have no Linux versions, it’s just because of lack of will, not anything technological.

TF2 is free and has been for a while now. I don’t see valve turning that around this late in the lifespan of the game.

Isn’t TF2 the last game in active development that’s still using Source 1? Dota was the first to switch to Source 2, CS switched a couple of years ago, and Deadlock is using it as well. Valve may touch up the older single player games like they did with HL1. L4D2 gets the occasional crash fix but nothing that constitutes actual development.

TF2 is geriatric

Actual open source might revitalize it.

What is it, like an SDK?

Yes, Valve released TF2’s game logic as part of the Source 1 SDK.

They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming and that means they should lose some market share, though.

So CD Project could take a tiny fraction of their massive Cyberpunk earnings and make GOG Galaxy with Proton integration available on Linux.

You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.

No, it has nothing to do with sports. Picking the vendor that invests into making an open source alternative to Windows viable is pure egoism. Their contributions will have a positive effect long into the future of PC gaming.

There are also distros without the corporate ties that Fedora has. For example, Mint and Mint Debian Edition

Both are literally corporate products by Linux Mint Ltd., registered in tax haven Ireland. They make money by setting their own affiliate IDs for web search etc. (money that would have gone to the upstream projects by default). At least Fedora has people working on the distribution that are actual contributors to the Linux stack.

Also, regular Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS. For gaming more recent versions of gaming-related components, mostly Mesa, are preferable to long term support. That’s also the reason stated by Valve why they switched to Arch as upstream for SteamOS after using Ubuntu and Debian before.

I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime.

And that unofficial support is brought to you by Valve’s contributions to Wine, DXVK, RADV, LibSDL,…

There’s no workaround for monpolistic positions

Considering that the only monopolist in PC gaming is Microsoft, the workaround for that Windows monopoly is to spend money on products that make non-Windows PC gaming better and currently that’s almost exclusively Valve.

Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.

They don’t have to. OK, maybe Microsoft has to because they are the actual monopolist and making the Activision Blizzard franchises available on storefronts other than Microsoft’s own is to keep the watchdogs away.

Also, none of the franchises are exclusive to Steam, so Steam has no monopoly.

It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC.

That sentence makes no sense. Fortnite is exclusive to EGS, therefore it cannot be “significantly bigger than the entire Epic store”.

Steam has no policies that forbid offering games on other stores, Epic has policies that makes certain games timed exclusives to EGS.

What makes EGS unattractive compared to Steam is the simple fact that Epic chooses to most prominently display their own games on EGS. Valve does front page banners, fests, that window that opens with every Steam launch, etc. and goes out of their way to make everything from big launches as well as solo dev indie games discoverable.

Epic has it in their own hands to make EGS more than the Fortnite launcher. They could promote other EGS games inside Fortnite but they don’t. They host concerts inside Fortnite but nothing to promote 3rd party EGS games, for examle.

That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.

USD 45 billion overall PC gaming revenue and all of Steam combined is 8.6bn. “And the cash flows to Valve”? Sure…

de-Googled android sounds even better.

They are already degoogled for the Chinese market. What the Chinese Android variants to not have is a shared replacement for Play Services and a shared app store because everyone is doing their own thing for maps API, payment, …

To what?

Read the article and find out.

Harmony Os will probably end up taking over realistically just due to everything going on in the world.

For Huawei but their competitors have no interest in that. Just look at the degoogled Android phones for the domestic Chinese market: Everyone ships their own app store and replacement APIs for PlayServices (not compatible to Google’s). So app developers need to target each vendor’s flavor of Android individually. It’s insane.

The logical way would be to create a joint venture for a common app store and PlayStore replacements but they don’t. Maybe this story is about exactly that but it should tell you that Xiaomi and the others have no interest in being controlled by a 3rd party.

Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.

EGS, GOG,… all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn’t even available on Linux, despite the fact that it’s built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.

Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.

For generic SteamWorks integration, there already exists a open source DLL called Goldberg Emulator. If publishers opt for real DRM, the games are not available on GOG anyway.

Also, downloading and backing up the games have to be done by yourself before the storefront goes bust. Distributing GOG games outside of GOG is a copyright violation, unless the copyright holders explicitly allow it.

So, to sum up: You can backup DRM-free Steam games and make them work with little effort.

Reminder that the world’s biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam.

Minecraft isn’t (it’s on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn’t (it’s EGS exclusive), Roblox isn’t (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren’t (Riot Launcher and EGS),…

Despite such stories are a regular occurrence, there’s still a loud part of the user base proclaiming that Proton is better than native Steam Linux Runtime V3 game ports.

This leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Because the source code is not real open source, the contributors of those fixes have fewer rights to their own code than Valve. Valve should have just made the code proper open source. Keep the art assets proprietary, basically what id Software did when they were still cool. It’s not like the Source 1 Engine contains great trade secrets after all those years since release and if it did, the non-commercial license would not keep snooping eyes away.