GabeN has mentioned he has put thought into who would run Steam/Valve after he is gone. If Steam wanted to be for profit*, well they would effectively keep doing what they're doing now. Steam makes a lot of money, constantly. Proton may or may not vanish, because it allows them to create an ecosystem without having to rely on whatever Microsoft is doing. If they moved away from doing anything hardware, I could see them potentially not working on it, but it seems like its a big part of their plans going forward.
The Deck has remained in the top sellers category for...a year? Regardless how it calculates it (units sold vs profits earned per sale), that's still incredible. They have their own VR headset v2 in the works, potentially another shot at a controller. Its not impossible things could get worse post GabeN, but the sheer act of just keep on keeping on would just net them constant money. As a private company, they are really only beholden to themselves.
Edit- * I messed up the phrasing, I didn't mean that Valve or Steam is a non-profit, that would be silly. I meant "if they just wanted to turn a profit". Granted they could also become short-term profit driven as well.
Yeah, about the only thing that could destroy Valve would be an IPO, when they then become beholden to generating value for shareholders. That would slowly nudge Valve towards the same crap Microsoft and Apple and EA and Ubisoft etc get up to.
For sure, as a private company steam doesn't have to worry about constant growth forever, they can be content with making the same (insane) amount of profit each year, and making long term plans that lose money in the short term but put them in a much better position in the long term. EA and Ubi specifically are constantly making short term plans that make everything shitty so that they can make 2% more profit
Agreed. Publicly traded companies are soulless, evil entities that don't care about anybody inside or outside of the org, only the almighty dollar.
Can't stand that mentality. It's fine to make a profit, even to be greedy and make it big. Not ok to step on people / fuck them over to get there.
Wish more stuff was still privately held.
So, even if it's privately held the CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. If the CEO does something that is not profit-centred enough the shareholders can sue.
Basically, private companies can be just as evil.
What you want is co-ops. The only way to make sure the companies goals and the shareholders goals stay the same is to make sure the employees are the shareholders.
The business does not make the stakeholder. That's a lie told to us by capitalists so we are grateful for the scraps they chose not to steal.
> So, even if it's privately held the CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders
I guess it depends on how the private company is structured. A lot of small- and medium-sized businesses are either single-owner or owned by a small number of people... usually the founder(s).
I see what you're getting at that private does not necessarily mean that this the case tho.
> What you want is co-ops.
Oh, hell, yeah.. was late when I made my previous comment and hadn't been thinking about them. But co-op's are fucking awesome. Not-for-profits are also nice but usually don't operate in the same verticals as public/private companies and co-ops.
I agree with you. IPO just makes a company beholden to its shareholders and it ruins it. Unity is another good example of what happens when something good gets ruined by being an IPO, in my opinion.
GabeN is a maverick, he's an engineer, a nerd, and Valve is his baby. The vast majority of career CEOs will not make the same decisions Gabe makes.
I sometimes look at IPOs and think, this doesn't benefit the consumer, this doesn't benefit the company or its employees... So why are they doing it? Then you see the CEOs remuneration 10x in the first year.
It is actively in Valve's best interest to separate themselves from Microsoft; to create a competing platform for PC gaming. I think looking at the data, Proton has been a huge success for them. I can imagine the current devices that utilize it are also hugely successful. I can't think of a cheaper PC to get for gaming than a Steam Deck.
But Steam started developing for Linux since 2012 and we only really saw the fruition of that **11 years later**. Imagine the pitch in a fictional shareholder meeting, if Valve were public:
Valve: "We plan a project that aims to develop the Linux gaming ecosystem, so that we can reduce our dependence to Microsoft, which can make the company more resilient in a time frame of projected 8 years!"
Shareholders: "Yeah, or we can just take that money to increase the company value for the next quarter instead. We don't even know if we would want to hold shares a year later."
I think it's realistic that Proton would be one of the first things to be axed after an IPO, because of the inevitable "cost" cutting of public companies. Most of the time they just don't care if that risks bigger costs in the future.
Valve could develop Proton further to become de facto API target for games that would work regardless of what OS you have under. Epic would raise hell for it but they would benefit from joining in long term.
Microsoft tried to use .net as the platform that would work on Xbox and Windows, but that really didn't happen as success of Switch and PlayStation continues.
Other companies have tried to lockdown both API and hardware to their benefit (Apple and Metal, for example) and the result has been towards more open hardware and common APIs.
I don't think that there is no hierarchy at all, i think it's executed very well. No hierarchy at all would mean that every decision valve makes would need an internal voting or something. And let's be honest that would be costly and inefficient.
Meanwhile, if the team leaders and whatnot have resources available and don't have to meet annual quotas, they can do amazing things.
The Steam Deck was a massive leap of faith, but for a good reason: I'm uncertain if the steam deck by itself right now has come even in terms of roi. But it honestly doesn't matter, cause even if it didn't, Valve now has a platform they can rely on no matter what. They are also almost the only ones that can rely on that platform - not because they are evil and don't let others in on the fun, but rather than the other companies didn't take that leap of faith.
Not short term profit, they've spent years(like a decade at least) separating themselves from Microsoft and developing their own platform and hardware without a clear immediate profit.
They were earning millions, but putting all this work and developer's time into building their platform would have significantly reduced their profit margins. Companies listening to shareholders that don't care about their future beyond the next quarter will slowly decimate any edge they had over their competitors when bean counters are in charge of all spending. IBM was the largest company in the world for years, a pioneer in the tech industry, but beginning with John Akers in 1985 they hired ceos who have zero engineering experience who make decisions to downsize and reduce research and development. Now, IBM is a glorified tech consulting firm.
According to Forbes, he owns about 1/4 of Valve, and is their president. To hazard a guess, its more like a work ethic and prinicple. By thinking himself as much an employee of Valve as anyone else, it doesn't put him in a position beyond other employees at Valve, above everyone in a higher degree of office. Clocks in, attends meetings, does work like anyone else.
It's always plausible that whoever comes after could alter the course, ever so slightly, and eventually we could see Valve/Steam fall toward short-term profit margins, go public, sell out to the highest bidder, reduce the quality of service, charge users for what were once free features as premium; the usual common day practice of companies. A tale as old as time.
I just hope that whoever GabeN picks, they share his ideals and work ethic. One of the worst decisions a company can ever make is putting a strictly business oriented person in charge of a company that does not understand explicitly what the company does. They just view the company as one big retirement fund.
> The Deck has remained in the top sellers category for...a year? Regardless how it calculates it (units sold vs profits earned per sale), that's still incredible.
I would not be so sure if Valve has made a net profit off the Deck. Be sure to include all the work hours (at decent pay I'd guess) they had to spend to plan and develop their own distro, design hardware and establish supply lines, promotion, support, ...
Also, at least a part of the folks who bought a Deck would've bought the games on PC anyway, netting only the overhead Valve earns off the hardware.
>. If Steam wanted to be for profit, well they would effectively keep doing what they're doing now.
The problem here is that your assumption is wrong.
Shareholders don't care for stuff like "constant high profitability"
They want "constant *increase* of profitability"
So a publicly traded company would happily throw out all the awesome principles you mention, it it could increase profitability 5% for that year.
Its more that if they chose to do nothing, they would still make money. You are correct that many companies do shift priorities toward short-term goals to drive up profits faster. Although thankfully they are a private company, and those in charge don't currently seem to be steering toward going public like Zenimax did, with intent to sell.
Right? The man has enough money to have an army of dieticians and health experts on payroll full time monitoring everything he does. He doesn’t need Ozempic.
How is it not bad to paralyze your digestive system so you feel full more of the time and therefore eat less? If you ever stop it, most people go back to (or worse) their previous patterns
I'm not worried about it.
If Valve was a mom & pop pizza shop, I might be worried, but a privately-held company with \~10bil equity owned by a Harvard educated computer scientist?
My money's on him having had a robust succession plan for a while now, that covers financials and changes in leadership in a way that he's happy with.
We've seen it time and time again, you can't force people to use/stay on your platform. These platforms are offering games, or in steams case at least some extra services. But nothing that people can't easily get elsewhere.
Valve is so far ahead right now because they're genuinely the best platform to play games on, and that's it. They have the best features, good customer support, their launcher is feature rich and straight forward, devs get great support, etc. Cutting linux support, trying to strong arm devs or customers, or any other anti consumer tactics that other launchers like to employ just don't work in this sort of market.
It's not like amazon or something where they can commit to enshittification and get profits from it. There's no other amazon right now, people have to put up with it if they want amazon products.
Valve isn't the only way to play games for cheap, and they never will be no matter what they do to try and abuse their place in the market. That's why they need to just be good.
Nintendo has been on a serious bender to unalive rom sites. My beloved Vimm's Lair is the latest victim to abandon providing roms that are legally unobtainable without paying exorbitant prices from 3rd party sellers. Steam has been a very good example of how games can be marketed to the masses and I hope the trend continues until they pry my Steam Deck from my cold dead hands.
I feel this is just drowning in a glass of water because we don't know if he is going to die at 75, he may live until next year or until he has 100 years
We don't know who is going to be the successor or how is he or she as a person or the decisions/changes that would occur after
I know that a bad scenario is something that nobody wants but we can't fret over a supposition
Ownership will for sure be transferred to a trust, not his kids, as the inheritance tax on a multi billion company would actually impoverish them if they didn't sell the company.
An easy guess is that the trust will be structured like the Hershey trust, where the administrators would be screwing themselves out of lifetime income if they tried to take the company public or sell it off.
Gabe is also not the only owner: he has partners who also privately own the company, plus employees also get stock.
Why? There are quite a few stories out there from employees about how it was really crappy to work there, and how Valve generally treats its employees poorly.
Proton can be forked. you have nothing to worry about.
With launchers like Lutris and Bottles Linux gaming will be fine for eternity. at least up to the point, and if, this happens.
Yes but you cannot undermine the money valve puts into proton and thus wine development. Surely the codebase will still be there, but the manpower won't.
Technologies come and go, surely said foundational work is relevant today, but there is no guarantee it also will be in 10 years.
What if winAPI gets replaced? Most of not all of wine's foundational work goes to sh*t. Old games will be playable but new ones won't.
Same for directx and vkd3d dxvk.
The list goes on and on.
they already tried to replace win32 and failed. If they try again, it won't be to allow generic PC gaming, but rather force you to clouds or more console like experiences. That's more of a thing to watch out for than just replacing win32.That's what's gonna ruin all that foundational work is taking out of being able to run anything outside of their custom hardware. It'll be interesting to see what say japan or the EU will have to say about that though.
Yes but it ain't like software doesn't evolve. It's a matter of time before the next big thing drops and someone needs to be there to maintain the software.
Like, how much are you willing to wait out development?
Linux as an OS is well established too, would cutting out 70% of the manpower behind it not severely impact it? IMO about gaming specifically, valve probably has more than that.
It's nice to think that it's all community effort, but it's hard to imagine what the Linux ecosystem would be like today if not for Red Hat, Canonical, Valve and a bunch of others
If he dies in 15 years computing and gaming will look completely different to how it looks now. Steam itself is just over 20 years old. By the time he passes Steam may be irrelevant, or Linux gamers may have become the majority (looking possible with how shit Microsoft is being recently). Hell, 15 years from now he might've already shut down proton development. Not much point in speculating this far into the future imo when just about everything is likely to have changed.
That's what I bet on too. Hopefully Linux gaming will be the norm by the time this inevitably happens.
It would still really suck to see valve become another rotten corporation though, so I really hope gabe lives as long as possible and that after death he shall pass the leadership to another fellow that shares his values.
I completely agree. You seem to have forgotten how Linux gaming was a frew yeyars ago. Thankfully we won't return to that at least. I will be patient and enjoy my backlog then and as new gamems start running I will play them in a slow pace as well . :)
Noone says it's not gonna be a blow, just not the blow that will destroy everything.
It's exactly because I remember how Linux gaming was before valve that I raise these concerns.
A really slow development and bug fixing pace, most games borked, no guarantee if a bug will ever be dealt with. Hacky custom wine forks maintained by a single dev.
It all changed when valve stepped in.
And yes the work they've done so far is great, but if they were to disappear it wouldn't be long before future games became unplayable again. At least we would have a million games, enough for a lifetime to play.
The games wont either. Currently AAA devs do /actually/ put effort into testing for steam deck compatibility. If valve were to drop linux, they would too. We'd be back to wine devs constantly playing catchup instead of the gamedevs trying to meet them in the middle.
I'm not sure we'll be having much to keep catching up to in 10 to 20 years, at least when talking about regular "mouse/keyboard/controller to control game displayed on screen" gaming (i.e. excluding VR or whatever new thing we invent that absolutely can't be replicated with pixels on screens controlled by peripherals). At some point you simply kinda run out of new stuff to add to specs and new features to add to engines and we'll probably start settling with _actual_ standards that last longer than a few GPU "generations" and don't have a billion random extensions.
To be honest, I'm not even sure in 2040 will be using GPUs that won't just be the same GPUs made in 2030 but with more RGB and somehow costlier, with no actual changes in chipset. Consumer gaming-oriented hw is kind of reaching a ceiling, and that will probably make the software side of it all also slow down.
There's probably not gonna be another "Everyone is going from OpenGL to needing to support Vulkan" in 20 years.
Wine rejects a ton of stuff. They want to keep a somewhat clean codebase and also value reliable correct execution over performance. That's why there were tons of unofficial wine patchsets and projects like wine-staging which pretty much just merged most of them together long before Proton was a thing
Are they not going to rely on the ntsync stuff that they themselves added to the kernel? I heard that they were, but obviously it'll just fallback to the old behaviour if it's missing.
All the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc). Mostly these are used on servers, for instance if there was some performance enhancing Linux-only video encoding thing that everyone used, that would fuck over Netflix for starters (though I'm sure they'd patch FreeBSD real quick), or if some cool networking thing had a hard dependency on systemd.
Also various experimental operating systems like Haiku that are able to run mainstream software like Firefox (and of course, wine) due to some POSIX compatibility. Linux also didn't start from nothing, so it'd suck if the Linux community pulled the ladder up after them.
>you have nothing to worry about
I think people underestimate the amount of work it takes to make something like Proton happen. The reason Proton works is that there are several people who are working (paid) on Proton and make updates every time a new game comes out. They probably have early releases of games. They sign NDAs. It's very unlikely for Proton to "work" in the sense that the driver level actively fixes issues in the main game in the long term, especially if Microsoft create a newer DX layer or similar.
That why I said "up to the point". Look at my other replies, I'm kinda bored reciting everything again.
It's gonna be a massive blow, but definitely not the blow that will destroy Linux gaming.
While that is true, how many of them do actually interest you?
I'm happy with the 4 games I play right now but if new versions of them come along I'll likely want to play those as well, and that's where the future of steam, proton and other tools come to play.
The corporates would see this has an opportunity to update older games to break proton compatibility and force users to use Windows, this is not a solution this is a coping mechanism, as painful as this is for me to say, this is actually a real possibility and a depressing one of that.
why the heck would companies that aren't microsoft do that. That doesn't make any sense. They wanna sell games they don't care about what microsoft wants. In fact, they are doing the opposite. They wanna wrest control from microsoft AND steam. You should be more concerned about say helldivers requiring a PSN account or stuff like that.
It's a real possibilty for sure. But as someone who has 500 games to play still on Steam I don't mind it.
You're forgetting the fact that DXVK and WINED3D are both open source and also the community can work on them. It may be much slower but it's not gonna be non-existant.
I'm not forgetting anything as a matter of fact VR would be the most impacted, just like Windows 7 lost VR capabilities when steam left it, so will Linux. VR is a big subset of what I enjoy playing on Linux in spite of the complications getting it to run. I would lose all VR games because steamvr is a requirement to play VR in Linux. Especially if you have a quest XR headset.
> Proton can be forked. you have nothing to worry about.
It can but its integration with steam and steam drm won't be if something happens to Gabe/Valve
When Gabe started his push for gaming on Linux, it wasn't because he loved Linux.
He wanted to help prop up a credible alternative for PC gaming in case the Windows Store was a success and third party digital stores started losing market share or being banned or penalised by Microsoft in favour of their own store.
I'm assuming the reason they continue to invest is because he (or others inside the the company) feels like the value of having a platform outside of the control of any potential competitors is still there.
I've been thinking about this too recently, Valve is putting a lot of money into making Linux gaming possible, if it is suddenly cut off, we could be back to a situation similar to 10 years ago?
That's the neat thing of this kind of investment. Since it's open, nothing is lost. We may see a slowdown, but not as if we are going to revert back. Also, there's momentum that has to die off. Valve will not stop their steam deck adventures because internally it made sense to have a device away from Windows/Microsoft.
True, that's the good thing about free software, but I think Valve's contribution is some times underestimated. We already had Wine for decades but until they started paying all these engineers full time, the games that ran on Linux out of the box could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That's what I mean by returning to a situation similar to what we had years ago.
And you're underestimating all foundational work codeweavers was doing before that that valve is standing upon. Valve is mostly paying codeweavers to do the wine work. It's outside of wine that they are really hiring/contracting folks themselves. I'm definitely impressed with what valve is doing, both with wine and outside of it, but I think we were getting close to tons of games working day 1 even without them (barring video and audio codec issues).
I do doubt however that the easyanticheat stuff would have been solved without valve though.
I know that this is really a personal thing and not an answer, but if Proton stopped working for any game released after tomorrow it would not bother me. There's just too many games around to play. Gaming is at this point an entire ocean. I could explore it for the rest of the time I have in life and still wouldn't find everything I enjoyed.
The good thing is that it won't stop being developed for I'd say at least 10-15 years. By that point that "ocean" will have doubled in size. And it'll still be operated by a community - just with much less budget, in the hypothetical that Valve cuts support. I'm sure many games would still be getting support.
I see this hard to believe. Companies that go public usually do this to get money so they can grow faster for their needs and that's why they also have to prioritize their investors (or at least that's how I understand it).
You don't really need to go public if you're already a super big company that makes a lot of money. I think all the founders of any big company would rather be the actual owners of the company if the opportunity was given with no downsides. This model means you get most of the profit of the company and you get to do whatever you want with it, and also you have the luxury of investing in long-term plans.
Which leads us to valve and Linux... Even if valve goes public I don't think that's stopping now that they started. Valve doesn't work on Linux being a gaming platform just because they think about Linux gamers, it's a logical business move.
Microsoft is also a gaming company, they sell games, they sell subscriptions and they OWN the main platform for gaming in PC, while also being somehow aggressive with what they can do in it (like the f**king Xbox gamebar).
Now Microsoft is investing in windows as a gaming platform more seriously, as they plan on consoles disappearing in the near future. We can discuss about how well they're doing... But that's another subject.
The thing is, if you're a game seller in windows you're exposed to Microsoft having the tools to make you less accessible or just a worst option than their services.
Not to mention devs make games "optimized" for windows which is another problem.
Sooo the logical move for valve for the future is jump into another platform, one of their own or at least one that doesn't have windows problems. Making their own operative system is not viable since no one will ever release games for a new platform (this already somehow happened once with steam machines) that has no players.
So they have to bet the ones porting the games to that platform, which is easier if there are already tools for that... Like wine. So there we have proton.
Second thing is to drag people into this platform, because having the games is one thing, but if I already have them in windows why would I shift? Well maybe if you offer a gaming device that is both convenient and affordable (this is console makers strategy since forever).
So now you have your new free land, populating with new gamers everyday, which in the long run will receive more attention, therefore: tools.
If all of that goes well we might get to be able to play in Linux as our main platform and and valve gets to don't worry much about what Microsoft does in their platform.
Even if people don't want to install a Linux distro because they're comfy with windows I can see a future with Linux "consoles" that works for non-pc gamers.
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The clear solution to this problem is to download GabeN's mind to a super computer in a well protected location so that he may continue to run Valve from Cyberspace.
While the work of valve with proton is invaluable, this work is based on wine, and wine works very well. So there is wine, GOG, heroic game launcher and lutris as backup to build from.
Bruh community efforts while appreciated are not nearly enough, I hate this over reliance some people have in the open source community. Wine existed looong before Valve took any interest in Linux and guess what .. it moved at a snails pace, as well as OpenGL (no Vulkan) and Linux graphics drivers. If Valve goes under tomorrow Linux gaming goes back to being on life support. Community is not enough you need CASH.
I'm not talking about community effort, I'm talking about open source. Free software is what makes the effort build up over time. It means it's not lost if shit happens. Linux is growing not because of valve. It's growing because it's the only reliable thing there is to build on.
If valve collapses, it will be a cataclysm. Something will come out of the void. And it will build from the free software bricks we have.
We cannot rely on one company. It's not reliable. It won't be easy, but there is a way to go.
Look I get what you're saying but right now Valve is the sole reason Linux is slowly catching up to Windows in terms of gaming. In the hypothetical scenario Valve disappears tomorrow we are left in the dust and still relying on some other company grabbing the mantle and investing in Linux, because again ... CASH. Open source is a great base to build on but somebody still has to come with the cash to pay for the building materials and the construction workers.
This isn't even up for speculation there is a before Proton and after Proton era if you want to see what Linux gaming will be without funding.
>Either sells to microsoft or makes Steam worse in some way
I don't think antitrust regulators would allow that Microsoft already had to jump through a lot of hoops to buy Activision Blizzard & considering that Valve is a much bigger company than Activision Blizzard I think the FTC would have a pretty good case against MS in court
+ Theres also a lot of other arguments that regulators could use against MS in court like for example
1. The Xbox & Steam deck are both console & therefore Are competitors, & theres no way that Microsoft 1 of the biggest companies in the world would just be allowed buy out one of there competitors
2. Windows & Steam are both monopolies & Microsoft controlling both Windows & Steam would be too much power over the PC market + Steam is a competitor to MS store & Xbox launcher
3. If Microsoft were to discontinue Proton then the regulators could argue that MS is trying to maintain it's windows monopoly by making it so Linux can't play games anymore by discontinue Proton
In a way yes, but I am kind of reconciled with that seeing the state of the popculture in general. If they destroy it, I'll just read more books that's all. They won't enshittify old paper books, they won't put ads in them either.
Yes it is possible to happen. Many companies changed their course through generations. Let's hope Gaben has a good successor.
To be exact, nothing in this world lasts forever. Everything will die eventually.
Why would he die before 75? I've met lots of old people in their late 80's and 90's, these people definitely had less money than him. Health care benefits the wealthy so he'll probably be fine for a while.
wine has been around before proton was a thing it will be around after too, if steam goes down the can? someone else will step up to take the crown, maybe gog?
I’m a linux newbie so forgive my ignorance, but why would proton go away? The steam deck seems pretty popular and it requires proton to function. Also my understanding is proton is a folk of wine, made in collaboration with CodeWeavers. Why wouldn’t they just continue development of proton on their own, or create another folk of wine as a spiritual successor if that was not possible for legal reasons?
Valve sunk millions into proton, they wouldn't just kill it. What *would* happen in this worst-case scenario, is proton gets completely locked down and will only run on steamdecks. That way the entire linux gaming scene is strongarmed into either buying steamdecks or returning to windows.
If they **really** want to be evil, they could pull a "suddenly all of our code is proprietary" move and retract every commit they've made to wine, dxvk, mesa, etc forcing them to significantly regress, face legal action or just outright shutdown (this is the extinguish step in EEE). They wouldn't benefit from pulling the rug like this at all, but if the corporate bullshit i've seen has taught me anything, it's they'll do it anyway.
However, Gaben seems to have already picked his successor (who I think is one of his children), and very much did so in a way where the above has no way of happening. Gabe's playing the long game.
Yes, we're on borrowed time, which means we *have* to win the fight against economically illiterate, irresponsible manchildren getting milked by 85 IQ psychopaths. Which, honestly, we simply won't. Enjoy the good things while they last.
\> Gabe dies
\> New leadership hires a management consulting company
\> They're assigned a single-celled MBA to analyze their business
\> Dudes just cut costs (no more Linux investment, slower/less reliable downloads, shut down older games)
\> Dudes just raise prices (30% fee goes up, all game prices go up)
\> Dudes just innovate more (AI generated games, add a streaming-only gamepass competitor)
\> Valve profits go up for a few years, MBA gets his bonuses long before the company collapses
\> Microsoft and/or Epic move into to pick up the scraps
This is more or less the future scenario that's been floating around in my head for so long. Something like it is inevitable. It's why I don't like Valve even though they're doing almost everything right, and I will support any government action against them, even something as drastic as a break up (although I'd hope the gov't would go after the other big tech companies first)
> Something like it is inevitable
Not necessarily. I read somewhere that Gabe Newell is already delegating most of the decisions that fall within his responsibilities, in which case whatever inner circle he's doing the delegating to right now would also likely succeed him and keep doing so.
I can imagine with the extra profit generated by more and more steamdeck+Linux users buying windows games, that proton wouldn’t just be cut off like that. Gaben isn’t the one developing proton, valve’s devs and the community are.
This scares me too, I hope Microsoft users wake up and switch to Linux and get away from that shithole that is windows 11 so Microsoft will be forced to be a company that cares about its users.
Whoever takes over Valve would be an idiot to change anything with their core business.
Valve makes an absolutely absurd amount of money for a company its size, and I don't really see anything shaking up the PC gaming world in the next few years that'll force them to do anything radically different.
Steam/Valve is rather profitable so not much will happen. Even if microsoft buys it, there will be no significant change to worry (just recall the "microsoft will destroy github" thing which apparently didn't and won't happen).
I know many companies who force their clients to use Windows..
And honestly? If there won't be alternative, people will come back, but.. Nor Proton, neither Linux gaming depends from Gabe.. From any company..
Still, I'm gonna stay faithful to stuff I own and use other platforms
I doubt valve would abandon linux simply because its an amazing tool for them to use if windows decideds to take their stupid levels and crank off the knob. Their long term plan is probably to be good enough for gaming that it convinces a good chunk of players to switch to linux so nobody could clamp down on them. Which yes brings up other topics but im keeping the scope simple for this.
If this is an existential threat to you, maybe you should re-think your life. Gaming was here before Steam and it'll be here after Steam. It might change but, everything changes.
As long at there's money to make, games will exist.
If things get really shitty, you can always sail the seas.
People retire too. Wouldn't shock me if Gab decides to move on well before his death.
Proton is essential for two things - First, it dissuades MS from setting up a rival MS store. Second, they need it to run the steam deck. A MS license for each device would be costly
Imagine being on the receiving end for 1.62 million refunds x 500$ each, plus a few million games probably.
I don't think they will discontinue the Software that runs the Steam Deck, especially since that's what keeps them afloat no matter what Microsoft does.
Valve wanting to make a profit isn't an issue (and they are a wildly profitable company). It's going public and getting investors/shareholders that would kill it as you know it.
Making profit is easy, especially for Valve. When you've got investors/shareholders, then that profit is expected to be *higher* year on year. Merely being 'in profit', or even just as in profit as you were last year, is seen as a failure of business on those terms. *THAT* is when you get enshitification, because the customer is the shareholder/investor, not the consumer.
The best any consumer hope for any company that makes things they love, is that they never go public and don't rely on outside investment. In theory, there's actually no limit on how big a company can get in those terms, but it's the American way to get a company to a point it gets noticed by investors then sell up and sail off into the sunset with a fat cheque, not shepherd a company so it always remains consumer driven.
Proton benefits them because they have an in house solution to not have to depend on microsoft and continue to offer linux devices like the deck which saves them money long term and they already print money faster than the federal reserve so I definitely see this practice staying if GabeN picks a worthy successor.
Edit: I do agree with what was said below though definitely going public and releasing an IPO is the only instant grave for Valve
Unpopular opinion, but Steam is already fairly "Profit first" when you compare it to how they used to operate 15 years. Like when they introduced their "Steam levels" back in the day and tied some rather important stuff like the size of your friends list to that with the only possible way of leveling up being to buy these "trading cards" with Steam offering a convenient way of buying them through the community market, where Valve takes a 20% cut of course.
Or how they completely changed the Steam client's UI to be effectively a glorified web browser which is like 10 times more ressource-intensive than the old VGUI-based UI and performs like shit, completely against the will of the community, ignoring pleas for at least an option to continue using the old UI. But the new web-based UI makes it easier for them to shove "content" down your throat and is also able to display all of the stuff they now want to sell you like animated profile pictures, animated profile frames and so forth, something the old UI was incapable of rendering.
Linux gaming is not being held up by one fat guy. It's being held up by one fat guy and an entire corporate system explicitly designed to make sure it can't be sold to somebody like Microsoft.
Steam is a really f****** weird company and a lot of the standard motives that most other companies operate on just can't be applied to it. With very few exceptions their developers don't seem to have set projects. They seem to be able to work on whatever they think is going to do well and whatever they want to do, it's part of why we have never gotten a half-life 3. Secondly, steam really doesn't need to do much except be a custodian of the platform. Most of their money comes from other developers selling stuff on steam. They don't need to directly monetize users. They don't even really need to be pushing hardware, but they're pushing hardware in an attempt to draw more users to a platform that uses their service.
GabeN has mentioned he has put thought into who would run Steam/Valve after he is gone. If Steam wanted to be for profit*, well they would effectively keep doing what they're doing now. Steam makes a lot of money, constantly. Proton may or may not vanish, because it allows them to create an ecosystem without having to rely on whatever Microsoft is doing. If they moved away from doing anything hardware, I could see them potentially not working on it, but it seems like its a big part of their plans going forward. The Deck has remained in the top sellers category for...a year? Regardless how it calculates it (units sold vs profits earned per sale), that's still incredible. They have their own VR headset v2 in the works, potentially another shot at a controller. Its not impossible things could get worse post GabeN, but the sheer act of just keep on keeping on would just net them constant money. As a private company, they are really only beholden to themselves. Edit- * I messed up the phrasing, I didn't mean that Valve or Steam is a non-profit, that would be silly. I meant "if they just wanted to turn a profit". Granted they could also become short-term profit driven as well.
Yeah, about the only thing that could destroy Valve would be an IPO, when they then become beholden to generating value for shareholders. That would slowly nudge Valve towards the same crap Microsoft and Apple and EA and Ubisoft etc get up to.
For sure, as a private company steam doesn't have to worry about constant growth forever, they can be content with making the same (insane) amount of profit each year, and making long term plans that lose money in the short term but put them in a much better position in the long term. EA and Ubi specifically are constantly making short term plans that make everything shitty so that they can make 2% more profit
Exactly. The real death of Valve and huge injury for PC gaming would be an IPO. It must never happen.
However, if it did happen, I would certainly buy some shares.
We should set up a trust fund for Linux Gaming to buy the same % of Valve as there are Linux players and just insist that they keep as is
In fact, maybe we can set up a fund that buys publicly traded gaming companies and always votes in favor of Linux support in shareholder meetings.
Agreed. Publicly traded companies are soulless, evil entities that don't care about anybody inside or outside of the org, only the almighty dollar. Can't stand that mentality. It's fine to make a profit, even to be greedy and make it big. Not ok to step on people / fuck them over to get there. Wish more stuff was still privately held.
So, even if it's privately held the CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. If the CEO does something that is not profit-centred enough the shareholders can sue. Basically, private companies can be just as evil. What you want is co-ops. The only way to make sure the companies goals and the shareholders goals stay the same is to make sure the employees are the shareholders. The business does not make the stakeholder. That's a lie told to us by capitalists so we are grateful for the scraps they chose not to steal.
> So, even if it's privately held the CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders I guess it depends on how the private company is structured. A lot of small- and medium-sized businesses are either single-owner or owned by a small number of people... usually the founder(s). I see what you're getting at that private does not necessarily mean that this the case tho. > What you want is co-ops. Oh, hell, yeah.. was late when I made my previous comment and hadn't been thinking about them. But co-op's are fucking awesome. Not-for-profits are also nice but usually don't operate in the same verticals as public/private companies and co-ops.
I agree with you. IPO just makes a company beholden to its shareholders and it ruins it. Unity is another good example of what happens when something good gets ruined by being an IPO, in my opinion.
This is the real threat- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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GabeN is a maverick, he's an engineer, a nerd, and Valve is his baby. The vast majority of career CEOs will not make the same decisions Gabe makes. I sometimes look at IPOs and think, this doesn't benefit the consumer, this doesn't benefit the company or its employees... So why are they doing it? Then you see the CEOs remuneration 10x in the first year.
It is actively in Valve's best interest to separate themselves from Microsoft; to create a competing platform for PC gaming. I think looking at the data, Proton has been a huge success for them. I can imagine the current devices that utilize it are also hugely successful. I can't think of a cheaper PC to get for gaming than a Steam Deck.
But Steam started developing for Linux since 2012 and we only really saw the fruition of that **11 years later**. Imagine the pitch in a fictional shareholder meeting, if Valve were public: Valve: "We plan a project that aims to develop the Linux gaming ecosystem, so that we can reduce our dependence to Microsoft, which can make the company more resilient in a time frame of projected 8 years!" Shareholders: "Yeah, or we can just take that money to increase the company value for the next quarter instead. We don't even know if we would want to hold shares a year later." I think it's realistic that Proton would be one of the first things to be axed after an IPO, because of the inevitable "cost" cutting of public companies. Most of the time they just don't care if that risks bigger costs in the future.
I get that, but at the same time I'm sure that there are publicly traded companies that have visions longer than three months.
Valve could develop Proton further to become de facto API target for games that would work regardless of what OS you have under. Epic would raise hell for it but they would benefit from joining in long term. Microsoft tried to use .net as the platform that would work on Xbox and Windows, but that really didn't happen as success of Switch and PlayStation continues. Other companies have tried to lockdown both API and hardware to their benefit (Apple and Metal, for example) and the result has been towards more open hardware and common APIs.
Steam is for profit. They just aren't a public company.
I messed up the phrasing and edited my post. I am aware that Steam is not a non-profit company.
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I don't think that there is no hierarchy at all, i think it's executed very well. No hierarchy at all would mean that every decision valve makes would need an internal voting or something. And let's be honest that would be costly and inefficient. Meanwhile, if the team leaders and whatnot have resources available and don't have to meet annual quotas, they can do amazing things. The Steam Deck was a massive leap of faith, but for a good reason: I'm uncertain if the steam deck by itself right now has come even in terms of roi. But it honestly doesn't matter, cause even if it didn't, Valve now has a platform they can rely on no matter what. They are also almost the only ones that can rely on that platform - not because they are evil and don't let others in on the fun, but rather than the other companies didn't take that leap of faith.
Steam is a non-profit???
Not short term profit, they've spent years(like a decade at least) separating themselves from Microsoft and developing their own platform and hardware without a clear immediate profit.
A 30% cut off of all the sales on the largest pc gaming storefront worked out just fine, don’t you think?
They were earning millions, but putting all this work and developer's time into building their platform would have significantly reduced their profit margins. Companies listening to shareholders that don't care about their future beyond the next quarter will slowly decimate any edge they had over their competitors when bean counters are in charge of all spending. IBM was the largest company in the world for years, a pioneer in the tech industry, but beginning with John Akers in 1985 they hired ceos who have zero engineering experience who make decisions to downsize and reduce research and development. Now, IBM is a glorified tech consulting firm.
I just hear tim sweeny from this reply. I hate it. (He is totally ignorant dougebach) Valve just reinvests that money to benefit US gamers!
US as in United States or did you just want to write **us**?
I should have said. We gamers benefit from it. Well. It happens. Thank you.
> benefit US gamers Valve is nice and all but please... they are a company.
If i had to choose other store than steam. I pick gog. Because drm free is awesome. Epic just doesn't have any benefit to use.
Gaben's interviews make it clear his efforts are to make money first and foremost, but doing so by respecting the customer.
I thought Gaben Newell isn’t the boss in Valve? He said it from himself. Just an employee like everyone else.
According to Forbes, he owns about 1/4 of Valve, and is their president. To hazard a guess, its more like a work ethic and prinicple. By thinking himself as much an employee of Valve as anyone else, it doesn't put him in a position beyond other employees at Valve, above everyone in a higher degree of office. Clocks in, attends meetings, does work like anyone else.
But what about those short time big profit schemes, where they ruin the company
It's always plausible that whoever comes after could alter the course, ever so slightly, and eventually we could see Valve/Steam fall toward short-term profit margins, go public, sell out to the highest bidder, reduce the quality of service, charge users for what were once free features as premium; the usual common day practice of companies. A tale as old as time. I just hope that whoever GabeN picks, they share his ideals and work ethic. One of the worst decisions a company can ever make is putting a strictly business oriented person in charge of a company that does not understand explicitly what the company does. They just view the company as one big retirement fund.
> The Deck has remained in the top sellers category for...a year? Regardless how it calculates it (units sold vs profits earned per sale), that's still incredible. I would not be so sure if Valve has made a net profit off the Deck. Be sure to include all the work hours (at decent pay I'd guess) they had to spend to plan and develop their own distro, design hardware and establish supply lines, promotion, support, ... Also, at least a part of the folks who bought a Deck would've bought the games on PC anyway, netting only the overhead Valve earns off the hardware.
i for one have bought games on steam i would not have if not for the deck
>. If Steam wanted to be for profit, well they would effectively keep doing what they're doing now. The problem here is that your assumption is wrong. Shareholders don't care for stuff like "constant high profitability" They want "constant *increase* of profitability" So a publicly traded company would happily throw out all the awesome principles you mention, it it could increase profitability 5% for that year.
Its more that if they chose to do nothing, they would still make money. You are correct that many companies do shift priorities toward short-term goals to drive up profits faster. Although thankfully they are a private company, and those in charge don't currently seem to be steering toward going public like Zenimax did, with intent to sell.
he's not fat now btw
Wait actual?
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Probably because of ozempic, not that that's a bad thing.
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OR just discipline? Why straight to the drugs claims?
Right? The man has enough money to have an army of dieticians and health experts on payroll full time monitoring everything he does. He doesn’t need Ozempic.
How is it not bad to paralyze your digestive system so you feel full more of the time and therefore eat less? If you ever stop it, most people go back to (or worse) their previous patterns
Yeah, he almost looks like a different person [https://starfishneuroscience.com/team/](https://starfishneuroscience.com/team/)
I'm not worried about it. If Valve was a mom & pop pizza shop, I might be worried, but a privately-held company with \~10bil equity owned by a Harvard educated computer scientist? My money's on him having had a robust succession plan for a while now, that covers financials and changes in leadership in a way that he's happy with.
A Harvard dropout nonetheless
To graduate from Harvard, you have to stay at Harvard. To get *into* Harvard, you (usually) have to be smart.
Ahhh that's why freedman's an MIT graduate
Well, some criminals are smart.
Also, I doubt linux gaming wouldn't already be in a decent place in 14 years
We've seen it time and time again, you can't force people to use/stay on your platform. These platforms are offering games, or in steams case at least some extra services. But nothing that people can't easily get elsewhere. Valve is so far ahead right now because they're genuinely the best platform to play games on, and that's it. They have the best features, good customer support, their launcher is feature rich and straight forward, devs get great support, etc. Cutting linux support, trying to strong arm devs or customers, or any other anti consumer tactics that other launchers like to employ just don't work in this sort of market. It's not like amazon or something where they can commit to enshittification and get profits from it. There's no other amazon right now, people have to put up with it if they want amazon products. Valve isn't the only way to play games for cheap, and they never will be no matter what they do to try and abuse their place in the market. That's why they need to just be good.
Just a reminder that steam has better service than piracy and that is why it's on top.
Yes, that's part of what I'm saying. Most people are willing to pay for a well priced, good service over pirating inconviniently.
Nintendo has been on a serious bender to unalive rom sites. My beloved Vimm's Lair is the latest victim to abandon providing roms that are legally unobtainable without paying exorbitant prices from 3rd party sellers. Steam has been a very good example of how games can be marketed to the masses and I hope the trend continues until they pry my Steam Deck from my cold dead hands.
I feel this is just drowning in a glass of water because we don't know if he is going to die at 75, he may live until next year or until he has 100 years We don't know who is going to be the successor or how is he or she as a person or the decisions/changes that would occur after I know that a bad scenario is something that nobody wants but we can't fret over a supposition
Usually CEOs aren't replaced because they die of old age, they retire well before that. Who wants to work until they drop dead?
Any company founder who enjoys their time at the company. Usually CEOs are not company founders. Gabe is.
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But is accepting bribes and shady deals really *work*? I'm not convinced, I need some bribes and shady deals to test this hypothesis /s
Didn't he manage the whole thing while living in New Zealand? I don't think it's very taxing to him.
Ownership will for sure be transferred to a trust, not his kids, as the inheritance tax on a multi billion company would actually impoverish them if they didn't sell the company. An easy guess is that the trust will be structured like the Hershey trust, where the administrators would be screwing themselves out of lifetime income if they tried to take the company public or sell it off. Gabe is also not the only owner: he has partners who also privately own the company, plus employees also get stock.
my guess is he'd sell it to the employees
Valve becoming a full blown worker owned cooperative would certainly be an interesting development
Why? There are quite a few stories out there from employees about how it was really crappy to work there, and how Valve generally treats its employees poorly.
Is Linux gonna die with our benevolent dictator for life too? No, you just gotta prepare for how it goes on afterwards.
Proton can be forked. you have nothing to worry about. With launchers like Lutris and Bottles Linux gaming will be fine for eternity. at least up to the point, and if, this happens.
Yes but you cannot undermine the money valve puts into proton and thus wine development. Surely the codebase will still be there, but the manpower won't.
A lot of that work is foundational work, so it'll benefit us long down the road no matter what happens to valve.
Technologies come and go, surely said foundational work is relevant today, but there is no guarantee it also will be in 10 years. What if winAPI gets replaced? Most of not all of wine's foundational work goes to sh*t. Old games will be playable but new ones won't. Same for directx and vkd3d dxvk. The list goes on and on.
they already tried to replace win32 and failed. If they try again, it won't be to allow generic PC gaming, but rather force you to clouds or more console like experiences. That's more of a thing to watch out for than just replacing win32.That's what's gonna ruin all that foundational work is taking out of being able to run anything outside of their custom hardware. It'll be interesting to see what say japan or the EU will have to say about that though.
It will be much slower development for sure. But it's gonna be there.
Yes but it ain't like software doesn't evolve. It's a matter of time before the next big thing drops and someone needs to be there to maintain the software. Like, how much are you willing to wait out development? Linux as an OS is well established too, would cutting out 70% of the manpower behind it not severely impact it? IMO about gaming specifically, valve probably has more than that. It's nice to think that it's all community effort, but it's hard to imagine what the Linux ecosystem would be like today if not for Red Hat, Canonical, Valve and a bunch of others
If he dies in 15 years computing and gaming will look completely different to how it looks now. Steam itself is just over 20 years old. By the time he passes Steam may be irrelevant, or Linux gamers may have become the majority (looking possible with how shit Microsoft is being recently). Hell, 15 years from now he might've already shut down proton development. Not much point in speculating this far into the future imo when just about everything is likely to have changed.
That's what I bet on too. Hopefully Linux gaming will be the norm by the time this inevitably happens. It would still really suck to see valve become another rotten corporation though, so I really hope gabe lives as long as possible and that after death he shall pass the leadership to another fellow that shares his values.
I completely agree. You seem to have forgotten how Linux gaming was a frew yeyars ago. Thankfully we won't return to that at least. I will be patient and enjoy my backlog then and as new gamems start running I will play them in a slow pace as well . :) Noone says it's not gonna be a blow, just not the blow that will destroy everything.
It's exactly because I remember how Linux gaming was before valve that I raise these concerns. A really slow development and bug fixing pace, most games borked, no guarantee if a bug will ever be dealt with. Hacky custom wine forks maintained by a single dev. It all changed when valve stepped in. And yes the work they've done so far is great, but if they were to disappear it wouldn't be long before future games became unplayable again. At least we would have a million games, enough for a lifetime to play.
"At least we would have a million games, enough for a lifetime to play." Exactly my point.
The games wont either. Currently AAA devs do /actually/ put effort into testing for steam deck compatibility. If valve were to drop linux, they would too. We'd be back to wine devs constantly playing catchup instead of the gamedevs trying to meet them in the middle.
I'm not sure we'll be having much to keep catching up to in 10 to 20 years, at least when talking about regular "mouse/keyboard/controller to control game displayed on screen" gaming (i.e. excluding VR or whatever new thing we invent that absolutely can't be replicated with pixels on screens controlled by peripherals). At some point you simply kinda run out of new stuff to add to specs and new features to add to engines and we'll probably start settling with _actual_ standards that last longer than a few GPU "generations" and don't have a billion random extensions. To be honest, I'm not even sure in 2040 will be using GPUs that won't just be the same GPUs made in 2030 but with more RGB and somehow costlier, with no actual changes in chipset. Consumer gaming-oriented hw is kind of reaching a ceiling, and that will probably make the software side of it all also slow down. There's probably not gonna be another "Everyone is going from OpenGL to needing to support Vulkan" in 20 years.
Proton also just was a fork of wine. And all the proton changes slowly get back added to wine.
Most, not all. Wine rejected all the futex stuff as they're trying to be unix-agnostic and futex is very much linux only
Wine rejects a ton of stuff. They want to keep a somewhat clean codebase and also value reliable correct execution over performance. That's why there were tons of unofficial wine patchsets and projects like wine-staging which pretty much just merged most of them together long before Proton was a thing
Are they not going to rely on the ntsync stuff that they themselves added to the kernel? I heard that they were, but obviously it'll just fallback to the old behaviour if it's missing.
Oh good. I'm a little tired of Linux doing the Embrace Extend Extinguish pattern to POSIX/UNIX.
What POSIX/UNIX is out there? macos?
All the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc). Mostly these are used on servers, for instance if there was some performance enhancing Linux-only video encoding thing that everyone used, that would fuck over Netflix for starters (though I'm sure they'd patch FreeBSD real quick), or if some cool networking thing had a hard dependency on systemd. Also various experimental operating systems like Haiku that are able to run mainstream software like Firefox (and of course, wine) due to some POSIX compatibility. Linux also didn't start from nothing, so it'd suck if the Linux community pulled the ladder up after them.
The Playstation OS has been based on FreeBSD since PS3 as well.
Proton is already forked is it not? I thought that's what GE is?
>you have nothing to worry about I think people underestimate the amount of work it takes to make something like Proton happen. The reason Proton works is that there are several people who are working (paid) on Proton and make updates every time a new game comes out. They probably have early releases of games. They sign NDAs. It's very unlikely for Proton to "work" in the sense that the driver level actively fixes issues in the main game in the long term, especially if Microsoft create a newer DX layer or similar.
That why I said "up to the point". Look at my other replies, I'm kinda bored reciting everything again. It's gonna be a massive blow, but definitely not the blow that will destroy Linux gaming.
just incorporate some Windows UWP dependency scheme to break everything from wine/proton..
you have 2 options free drm games like GOG or pirates of the caribbean edition
I mean there will be so many games to be played already we won't run out for multiple lifetimes.
While that is true, how many of them do actually interest you? I'm happy with the 4 games I play right now but if new versions of them come along I'll likely want to play those as well, and that's where the future of steam, proton and other tools come to play.
The corporates would see this has an opportunity to update older games to break proton compatibility and force users to use Windows, this is not a solution this is a coping mechanism, as painful as this is for me to say, this is actually a real possibility and a depressing one of that.
why the heck would companies that aren't microsoft do that. That doesn't make any sense. They wanna sell games they don't care about what microsoft wants. In fact, they are doing the opposite. They wanna wrest control from microsoft AND steam. You should be more concerned about say helldivers requiring a PSN account or stuff like that.
It's a real possibilty for sure. But as someone who has 500 games to play still on Steam I don't mind it. You're forgetting the fact that DXVK and WINED3D are both open source and also the community can work on them. It may be much slower but it's not gonna be non-existant.
I'm not forgetting anything as a matter of fact VR would be the most impacted, just like Windows 7 lost VR capabilities when steam left it, so will Linux. VR is a big subset of what I enjoy playing on Linux in spite of the complications getting it to run. I would lose all VR games because steamvr is a requirement to play VR in Linux. Especially if you have a quest XR headset.
> Proton can be forked. you have nothing to worry about. It can but its integration with steam and steam drm won't be if something happens to Gabe/Valve
When Gabe started his push for gaming on Linux, it wasn't because he loved Linux. He wanted to help prop up a credible alternative for PC gaming in case the Windows Store was a success and third party digital stores started losing market share or being banned or penalised by Microsoft in favour of their own store. I'm assuming the reason they continue to invest is because he (or others inside the the company) feels like the value of having a platform outside of the control of any potential competitors is still there.
I've been thinking about this too recently, Valve is putting a lot of money into making Linux gaming possible, if it is suddenly cut off, we could be back to a situation similar to 10 years ago?
That's the neat thing of this kind of investment. Since it's open, nothing is lost. We may see a slowdown, but not as if we are going to revert back. Also, there's momentum that has to die off. Valve will not stop their steam deck adventures because internally it made sense to have a device away from Windows/Microsoft.
True, that's the good thing about free software, but I think Valve's contribution is some times underestimated. We already had Wine for decades but until they started paying all these engineers full time, the games that ran on Linux out of the box could be counted on the fingers of one hand. That's what I mean by returning to a situation similar to what we had years ago.
And you're underestimating all foundational work codeweavers was doing before that that valve is standing upon. Valve is mostly paying codeweavers to do the wine work. It's outside of wine that they are really hiring/contracting folks themselves. I'm definitely impressed with what valve is doing, both with wine and outside of it, but I think we were getting close to tons of games working day 1 even without them (barring video and audio codec issues). I do doubt however that the easyanticheat stuff would have been solved without valve though.
we'd also lose compatibility with steam, so proton would likely only work with non-steam launchers and pirated games.
I know that this is really a personal thing and not an answer, but if Proton stopped working for any game released after tomorrow it would not bother me. There's just too many games around to play. Gaming is at this point an entire ocean. I could explore it for the rest of the time I have in life and still wouldn't find everything I enjoyed. The good thing is that it won't stop being developed for I'd say at least 10-15 years. By that point that "ocean" will have doubled in size. And it'll still be operated by a community - just with much less budget, in the hypothetical that Valve cuts support. I'm sure many games would still be getting support.
Eventually as new tech comes out but it wouldn't be an immediate thing
I pretty sure Gabe has mentioned naming a successor that aligns with his views. I don’t think most of this will occur.
At the end of the day the man’s a billionaire — life happens so it’s no guarantee, but I suspect he’s got many years left
I see this hard to believe. Companies that go public usually do this to get money so they can grow faster for their needs and that's why they also have to prioritize their investors (or at least that's how I understand it). You don't really need to go public if you're already a super big company that makes a lot of money. I think all the founders of any big company would rather be the actual owners of the company if the opportunity was given with no downsides. This model means you get most of the profit of the company and you get to do whatever you want with it, and also you have the luxury of investing in long-term plans. Which leads us to valve and Linux... Even if valve goes public I don't think that's stopping now that they started. Valve doesn't work on Linux being a gaming platform just because they think about Linux gamers, it's a logical business move. Microsoft is also a gaming company, they sell games, they sell subscriptions and they OWN the main platform for gaming in PC, while also being somehow aggressive with what they can do in it (like the f**king Xbox gamebar). Now Microsoft is investing in windows as a gaming platform more seriously, as they plan on consoles disappearing in the near future. We can discuss about how well they're doing... But that's another subject. The thing is, if you're a game seller in windows you're exposed to Microsoft having the tools to make you less accessible or just a worst option than their services. Not to mention devs make games "optimized" for windows which is another problem. Sooo the logical move for valve for the future is jump into another platform, one of their own or at least one that doesn't have windows problems. Making their own operative system is not viable since no one will ever release games for a new platform (this already somehow happened once with steam machines) that has no players. So they have to bet the ones porting the games to that platform, which is easier if there are already tools for that... Like wine. So there we have proton. Second thing is to drag people into this platform, because having the games is one thing, but if I already have them in windows why would I shift? Well maybe if you offer a gaming device that is both convenient and affordable (this is console makers strategy since forever). So now you have your new free land, populating with new gamers everyday, which in the long run will receive more attention, therefore: tools. If all of that goes well we might get to be able to play in Linux as our main platform and and valve gets to don't worry much about what Microsoft does in their platform. Even if people don't want to install a Linux distro because they're comfy with windows I can see a future with Linux "consoles" that works for non-pc gamers.
RemindMe! 14 year
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A legend
RemindMe! 10 year
portal 3 / half life 3 comes out and it an unfinished microtransaction mess
Quickly Gabe! Adopt glorious egg roll as your son!
Who let tim sweeney post on 4chan?
The clear solution to this problem is to download GabeN's mind to a super computer in a well protected location so that he may continue to run Valve from Cyberspace.
Portal lore
Valve is already a corporation with "profit first" motivations
While the work of valve with proton is invaluable, this work is based on wine, and wine works very well. So there is wine, GOG, heroic game launcher and lutris as backup to build from.
Bruh community efforts while appreciated are not nearly enough, I hate this over reliance some people have in the open source community. Wine existed looong before Valve took any interest in Linux and guess what .. it moved at a snails pace, as well as OpenGL (no Vulkan) and Linux graphics drivers. If Valve goes under tomorrow Linux gaming goes back to being on life support. Community is not enough you need CASH.
I'm not talking about community effort, I'm talking about open source. Free software is what makes the effort build up over time. It means it's not lost if shit happens. Linux is growing not because of valve. It's growing because it's the only reliable thing there is to build on. If valve collapses, it will be a cataclysm. Something will come out of the void. And it will build from the free software bricks we have. We cannot rely on one company. It's not reliable. It won't be easy, but there is a way to go.
Look I get what you're saying but right now Valve is the sole reason Linux is slowly catching up to Windows in terms of gaming. In the hypothetical scenario Valve disappears tomorrow we are left in the dust and still relying on some other company grabbing the mantle and investing in Linux, because again ... CASH. Open source is a great base to build on but somebody still has to come with the cash to pay for the building materials and the construction workers. This isn't even up for speculation there is a before Proton and after Proton era if you want to see what Linux gaming will be without funding.
It would be fun for Gabe to do a "Ready Player One" kind of move.
>Either sells to microsoft or makes Steam worse in some way I don't think antitrust regulators would allow that Microsoft already had to jump through a lot of hoops to buy Activision Blizzard & considering that Valve is a much bigger company than Activision Blizzard I think the FTC would have a pretty good case against MS in court + Theres also a lot of other arguments that regulators could use against MS in court like for example 1. The Xbox & Steam deck are both console & therefore Are competitors, & theres no way that Microsoft 1 of the biggest companies in the world would just be allowed buy out one of there competitors 2. Windows & Steam are both monopolies & Microsoft controlling both Windows & Steam would be too much power over the PC market + Steam is a competitor to MS store & Xbox launcher 3. If Microsoft were to discontinue Proton then the regulators could argue that MS is trying to maintain it's windows monopoly by making it so Linux can't play games anymore by discontinue Proton
In a way yes, but I am kind of reconciled with that seeing the state of the popculture in general. If they destroy it, I'll just read more books that's all. They won't enshittify old paper books, they won't put ads in them either.
Fun fact: a lot of old paperbacks do have adverts in them.
Yes it is possible to happen. Many companies changed their course through generations. Let's hope Gaben has a good successor. To be exact, nothing in this world lasts forever. Everything will die eventually.
except microsoft…?!?!?!?!?
I think many said this about Xerox 20-30 years ago.
Why would he die before 75? I've met lots of old people in their late 80's and 90's, these people definitely had less money than him. Health care benefits the wealthy so he'll probably be fine for a while.
wine has been around before proton was a thing it will be around after too, if steam goes down the can? someone else will step up to take the crown, maybe gog?
Valve do not face any serious competition in the pc storefront market. They can only crumble from within
Steamdeck?!
The good thing about valve is its not one man company, there are many employees have opinions and they are able to affect the company.
It’s held up by several fat guys.
I'm worried about iPhones' future when Steve Jobs is gone.
I’m a linux newbie so forgive my ignorance, but why would proton go away? The steam deck seems pretty popular and it requires proton to function. Also my understanding is proton is a folk of wine, made in collaboration with CodeWeavers. Why wouldn’t they just continue development of proton on their own, or create another folk of wine as a spiritual successor if that was not possible for legal reasons?
Doom porn
Valve sunk millions into proton, they wouldn't just kill it. What *would* happen in this worst-case scenario, is proton gets completely locked down and will only run on steamdecks. That way the entire linux gaming scene is strongarmed into either buying steamdecks or returning to windows. If they **really** want to be evil, they could pull a "suddenly all of our code is proprietary" move and retract every commit they've made to wine, dxvk, mesa, etc forcing them to significantly regress, face legal action or just outright shutdown (this is the extinguish step in EEE). They wouldn't benefit from pulling the rug like this at all, but if the corporate bullshit i've seen has taught me anything, it's they'll do it anyway. However, Gaben seems to have already picked his successor (who I think is one of his children), and very much did so in a way where the above has no way of happening. Gabe's playing the long game.
why would they get rid of proton...? the entire purpose of valve investing into linux is to not rely on microsoft. it's a business decision
time for a Ready Player One style competition for CEO of Valve
Yes, we're on borrowed time, which means we *have* to win the fight against economically illiterate, irresponsible manchildren getting milked by 85 IQ psychopaths. Which, honestly, we simply won't. Enjoy the good things while they last.
[удалено]
umu isn't relocating it, it's just allowing the steam Linux runtime to be used out of steam tf?
\> Gabe dies \> New leadership hires a management consulting company \> They're assigned a single-celled MBA to analyze their business \> Dudes just cut costs (no more Linux investment, slower/less reliable downloads, shut down older games) \> Dudes just raise prices (30% fee goes up, all game prices go up) \> Dudes just innovate more (AI generated games, add a streaming-only gamepass competitor) \> Valve profits go up for a few years, MBA gets his bonuses long before the company collapses \> Microsoft and/or Epic move into to pick up the scraps This is more or less the future scenario that's been floating around in my head for so long. Something like it is inevitable. It's why I don't like Valve even though they're doing almost everything right, and I will support any government action against them, even something as drastic as a break up (although I'd hope the gov't would go after the other big tech companies first)
> Something like it is inevitable Not necessarily. I read somewhere that Gabe Newell is already delegating most of the decisions that fall within his responsibilities, in which case whatever inner circle he's doing the delegating to right now would also likely succeed him and keep doing so.
Gabe, remember your daily exercise and eat healthy mediterranean food 😁😁 It'll give you (us) at least 20-30 more years until we need to worry 😊
Gaben is not fully supervising steam I think.
I can imagine with the extra profit generated by more and more steamdeck+Linux users buying windows games, that proton wouldn’t just be cut off like that. Gaben isn’t the one developing proton, valve’s devs and the community are.
It does scare me too, but also proton is open source and someone would probably still maintain it even if valve stops doing so
This scares me too, I hope Microsoft users wake up and switch to Linux and get away from that shithole that is windows 11 so Microsoft will be forced to be a company that cares about its users.
Whoever takes over Valve would be an idiot to change anything with their core business. Valve makes an absolutely absurd amount of money for a company its size, and I don't really see anything shaking up the PC gaming world in the next few years that'll force them to do anything radically different.
even if he died today I doubt the company would be left with someone like that.
There’s a good chance many of us will die before Gabe— you know, because heroes live forever.
Steam/Valve is rather profitable so not much will happen. Even if microsoft buys it, there will be no significant change to worry (just recall the "microsoft will destroy github" thing which apparently didn't and won't happen).
I know many companies who force their clients to use Windows.. And honestly? If there won't be alternative, people will come back, but.. Nor Proton, neither Linux gaming depends from Gabe.. From any company.. Still, I'm gonna stay faithful to stuff I own and use other platforms
I doubt valve would abandon linux simply because its an amazing tool for them to use if windows decideds to take their stupid levels and crank off the knob. Their long term plan is probably to be good enough for gaming that it convinces a good chunk of players to switch to linux so nobody could clamp down on them. Which yes brings up other topics but im keeping the scope simple for this.
If this is an existential threat to you, maybe you should re-think your life. Gaming was here before Steam and it'll be here after Steam. It might change but, everything changes. As long at there's money to make, games will exist. If things get really shitty, you can always sail the seas. People retire too. Wouldn't shock me if Gab decides to move on well before his death.
No fear here. Lutris works fine, bottle works fine. What valve are using were built by AMD(mantel API into vulkan API) and other companies(wine)
Gaben is great, but don't trust anyone under capitalism
He forgot "Reviews get removed from the Steam store so that people are more likely to buy bad stuff as well"
Proton is essential for two things - First, it dissuades MS from setting up a rival MS store. Second, they need it to run the steam deck. A MS license for each device would be costly
if that happen, i'll stop gaming
Open Source Steam Would be great
The only thing, that Uncle Gabe doesn't give Us, is a new properly continuation with Half Life 3.
> referring to this image Someone doesn't understand open source software Proton won't "go" because it can't go
Gonna torrent all my steam games and save to hard drive
Bro, now I'm really worried. Gaming is the only thing keeping me alive rn and it's already worsening as it is.
Imagine being on the receiving end for 1.62 million refunds x 500$ each, plus a few million games probably. I don't think they will discontinue the Software that runs the Steam Deck, especially since that's what keeps them afloat no matter what Microsoft does.
Isn't Gabe slim and healthy these days? I wouldn't assume he kicks the bucket before 75.
why would valve just shut down proton all of a sudden when they've built an entire ecosystem around it
Gaben lost a ton of weight, he is going to live longer than 75.
He has son and stable company system.
Valve wanting to make a profit isn't an issue (and they are a wildly profitable company). It's going public and getting investors/shareholders that would kill it as you know it. Making profit is easy, especially for Valve. When you've got investors/shareholders, then that profit is expected to be *higher* year on year. Merely being 'in profit', or even just as in profit as you were last year, is seen as a failure of business on those terms. *THAT* is when you get enshitification, because the customer is the shareholder/investor, not the consumer. The best any consumer hope for any company that makes things they love, is that they never go public and don't rely on outside investment. In theory, there's actually no limit on how big a company can get in those terms, but it's the American way to get a company to a point it gets noticed by investors then sell up and sail off into the sunset with a fat cheque, not shepherd a company so it always remains consumer driven.
Bill Gates isn't going to be a threat, if he somehow does manage to eek it out until 83 years-old. Nobody wants his old floppy disks either.
We should give gaben the mr house makeover. Make him survive the bombs.
How do I stop that second window of ads?
Microsoft got investigated for monopolistic practices when buying activision no way in hell would they be allowed to buy the biggest game library.
Without Proton half my games would not work. I am not going back to Windows. Barf
Proton benefits them because they have an in house solution to not have to depend on microsoft and continue to offer linux devices like the deck which saves them money long term and they already print money faster than the federal reserve so I definitely see this practice staying if GabeN picks a worthy successor. Edit: I do agree with what was said below though definitely going public and releasing an IPO is the only instant grave for Valve
Wait how can I turn off the second popup screens with ads? I search in the settings but never found the option to turn it off
Unpopular opinion, but Steam is already fairly "Profit first" when you compare it to how they used to operate 15 years. Like when they introduced their "Steam levels" back in the day and tied some rather important stuff like the size of your friends list to that with the only possible way of leveling up being to buy these "trading cards" with Steam offering a convenient way of buying them through the community market, where Valve takes a 20% cut of course. Or how they completely changed the Steam client's UI to be effectively a glorified web browser which is like 10 times more ressource-intensive than the old VGUI-based UI and performs like shit, completely against the will of the community, ignoring pleas for at least an option to continue using the old UI. But the new web-based UI makes it easier for them to shove "content" down your throat and is also able to display all of the stuff they now want to sell you like animated profile pictures, animated profile frames and so forth, something the old UI was incapable of rendering.
This gotta be the world end. (for me)
almost as if Steam is part of the public good and should be owned by the public
Linux gaming is not being held up by one fat guy. It's being held up by one fat guy and an entire corporate system explicitly designed to make sure it can't be sold to somebody like Microsoft. Steam is a really f****** weird company and a lot of the standard motives that most other companies operate on just can't be applied to it. With very few exceptions their developers don't seem to have set projects. They seem to be able to work on whatever they think is going to do well and whatever they want to do, it's part of why we have never gotten a half-life 3. Secondly, steam really doesn't need to do much except be a custodian of the platform. Most of their money comes from other developers selling stuff on steam. They don't need to directly monetize users. They don't even really need to be pushing hardware, but they're pushing hardware in an attempt to draw more users to a platform that uses their service.
That aside but why 4chan on Reddit lol