Steam Deck

This is why I have respect for Valve. They're willing to invest into changing the status quo instead of seeing it as not profitable immediately. They're playing the long game, and they've put their version of Linux into millions of hands. They've built hardware for it, they've invested a ton into Wine/Proton, they've invested in open-source graphics drivers. They're actively fixing up third party games to the point some of them run better on a their handheld than decent Windows PCs. And a good chunk of it is open-source and given away for free to everyone to use.

Meanwhile Sweeney is just there whining that Linux is too hard. They can't even be bothered to try.

I would give money to Valve just so they keep going. I have no desire to buy an Epic game they're not even willing to try to at least make it easier to run in Wine.

If we only had a few more programmers

Poor, poor Epic, a tiny startup barely making it to the next month with their 3000 employees and $5B annual revenue

Translation, "You do all the heavy lifting and then I'll jump in to enjoy the results while I complain about it."

There's an interesting issue here that shows Linux support is a cultural thing, not a business thing.

They've presented it as "it doesn't make sense to financially support Linux due to low player count." But they don't need to provide official support, they just need to tick a box and say "yeah, we don't support this, do it at your own risk."

From a purely financial point of view, Linux support is almost free. If you release your game, a bunch of developers off of your payroll will just add Linux support. You don't even need to give them technical support because they use an unsupported platform.

To use business lingo, blocking Linux support is just leaving money on the table.

But I think a lot of companies feel like they have to have full control of everything. That everything they do most be fully supported and approved by them. That they are scared of letting the community take charge of things because it might tarnish your brand or whatever.

They are worried that there'll be graphical bugs or something and that'll make Fornight look bad, so it's better for their brand image to just block everything they don't have control over.

It's a worrying pattern I've seen in a few places, including Mozilla of all things.

... Or maybe it's just that Epic are too stubborn to accept help and contributions from anyone else, especially their "enemies".

I have been wondering why they don't just take Heroic launcher and add a skin around it to make an "official" launcher. It's probably just because they are too prideful to support anything open source or Valve. They think that they need to make their own thing, rather than using existing code.

Sorry for the rambling post, but I think this situation is more due to an unhealthy company culture than "lol 2% market share" as they present it.

Sweeney does not want to contribute in any way towards making the steam deck more profitable.

I think he actually wants a monopoly. He wants to be, functionally, the only digital storefront on PC. And doing anything that could help Valve, even in another market, would detrimental to that goal.

Famously understaffed and broke Epic Games.

This is another reason Epic games will lose everything to Valve. Their storefront is useless and is a money loser. But even if it weren’t, valve is moving themselves to be the gaming king of Linux. Where no competitor exists meaningfully. Maybe GoG?

Sweeney has had a chip on his shoulder with Linux for at least 15 years. It's honestly a bit weird since if you look at stuff before around 2005, he had quite a different tone.

Are there really that many people up in arms about this? Fuck epic and fuck fortnite, but were there really that many steam deck users that even wanted to play it in the first place? I see no issues with epic continuing to make dumb and short sighted business decisions, so long as somebody salvages unreal if they ever crash and burn.

Jokes on him. There is a whole infrastructure to make windows games work on linux, except those that are explicitely programmed not to work on that.

I recently had a game I was waiting for released on steam and epic. The steam version (with some supporter pack stuff, because I like the dev) was $100, while the epic version was less than $50(with the same extras). I considered for a moment buying it on epic, but then I thought - "fuck, it's epic games" and bought it on steam instead. I just couldn't handle the thought of epic fucking games being in charge of my ability to play the game. I don't trust them. Not even if all their shit is 50% off.

Idk much about business, but if you can't be trusted to be reliable even when you're offering massive discounts, maybe you don't have a lasting business on your hands.

Full verge article

The steamdeck-like hardware market is going to explode and they are fools for not putting in even a tiny amount of effort there. Yeah a lot of steamdeck form factor devices will run windows, but idk linux has passed a critical threshold where windows just looks less and less attractive as an OS to base this kind of device around.

It doesn't really matter how well Valve does or doesn't do in the near term, the existence of the steam deck right now as a functional, easy to use gaming device irrevocably changes the pc gaming market. In the future kids are going to get these things before their parents shell out for a gaming pc, they are the clear gateway step into pc gaming because you can always buy a nice pc down the road and have all the same games to play as you do on your handheld.

It will increasingly matter more and more what multiplayer action game you can pick up and get running most easily on a steamdeck-like linux device to play with your friends. Right now for example Halo Infinite is pretty perfectly situated, it doesn't have much competition for being the easy to get into steam deck multiplayer shooter choice.