this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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https://www.steamdeck.com/ is a good one.
You can play any games you want, though? Throw an emulator on there and play all your old games. Install non-steam games, add them to Steam using its very easy to use "Add a non-Steam game" button, and play as normal.
Heck, if you don't like Linux you can just install Windows on the thing.
Steam takes a lot of money and then turns around and invests it into the gaming community.
They also use that money to pay their employees more than the industry average and to make their owner a billionaire that owns a yacht collection. They could 100% afford to take a smaller cut with only Gabe "feeling the impact".
I saw a review where it was said that you can only play steam games, but I just looked it up and apparently you can play all the other games as well by simply adding them or launching other launchers..
Steam invest's into the gaming community? Do you have any source for that so that I can read about that?
They're pretty much the entire reason gaming on Linux is as active as it is today.
I'm not AwesomeLowlander but you asked for something that can be googled in literally 5 to 10 seconds:
Yes, maybe it just takes 5 seconds. But it's not my turn to Google things people claim here, especially because I nicely asked for sources ( to inform myself about it ).
Anyway, I'll not respond here anymore
It always it. That's basic media savviness. Asking for things that take 5 secs to google is rude.
In the same stroke though the onus to supply backing to any given position or assertion is on the one claiming facts. Else one can go around claiming anything they want and just yell at others to "google it".
This one is easily found out through a simple search and all but burden of proof isn't on the one asking for proof, it's on the one making the assertion. If they want to verify the proof, then that's on them of course.
Valve supporting gaming on Linux is common knowledge here. For very niche knowledge or hard to google terms, I'd agree but there's a limit. One cannot expect to cite sources for every single bit of common knowledge.
The amount of work required to ask for a source is similar to googling it directly, maybe asking is even more work because usually selecting the claim and then right-click --> "Search web for XYZ" works just fine.
Yeah I agree they should have just looked it up because it's easy to check. Just was disagreeing that it's their responsibility to prove it. Their responsibilities are verifying and they failed. It was a stupid pedantic point and I probably shouldn't have bothered. Sorry if I ruffled feathers. Typed before I thought.
Source, please?
I know you don't give a flying fuck. Have it anyways. 😘
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
https://www.logicalfallacies.org/burden-of-proof.html
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/46627/frontmatter/9781107046627_frontmatter.pdf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof
Yeah, I have a Steam Deck, and it's literally just a PC in the form factor of a Switch. It has a BIOS menu, you can install Windows on it (but you really shouldn't), you can install a different flavor of Linux (I recommend Bazzite) -- you can even install and play pirated Windows games through Proton, more or less fine, though you have to work for it a bit more.
They developed Proton so that they could get Windows games working on the Deck, and the reason they didn't make the Deck run Windows is they wanted greater control over the OS than Windows affords. Proton has benefited all gamers on Linux. More recently, they've officially partnered with Arch as of a few days ago (which is what SteamOS is built on): https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/the-arch-linux-team-is-now-working-directly-with-valve-steamos-and-arch-should-both-benefit-greatly
and just to gush a bit more: the Deck is the only thing I can remember pre-ordering in the last 10 years and being genuinely happy that I did.
And add to that the story behind DXVK, which was the turning point around 2018 for Linux gaming. Valve hired the guy who created it, so they could develop it professionally instead of as a hobbyist. With it remaining open source and free.
Yes, they do it because it helped them achieve what they wanted. But they don’t lock it down and they work with a lot of OSS which is then upstreamed.
I don't own a deck, but i know it's way more then JUST a steam game player.
My fault, I watched a review where it was said that you can only play steam games, but I see that this isn't true. You can indeed play all your PC games or whatever
They take the same amount of money as other console makers and the store cut is completely unrelated to what Nintendo's lawyers do which is the actual topic here.
The topic is Nintendo who make a handheld console and unless CD Project make a GOGBoy with a bespoke SteamOS-like "console OS", yet another storefront for Windows PCs is hardly an actual alternative.
I also though of them because they recently improved their subscriber agreement (apparently not for selfless reasons but still an improvement esp. in the light of what Nintendo is currently doing).
www.emudeck.com.
Not that you need to use special tools. SteamOS is built on Arch so you can just... y'know, install shit on there.
Thx, I did not know about this one
Steam getting a cut isn't a problem, it's a well deserved rewsrd.
I wonder why you think that way? Do you know how high their cut is?
I'll give my own experience as a Steam customer and aspiring game dev:
I've never had a problem with Steam that wasn't quickly and satisfactorily resolved. Usually, in ways that go above and beyond Valve's stated responsibilities. They have been quick to respond to the two hardware tickets I've raised over the years of owning a Steam controller, two Steam Links, a Valve Index, and my own Steam Deck.
In the many years that I've used all flavors of Linux and installed all manner of native games and non-native games, it has only been in the last 4 or 5 years that the process has become, in my own experience, painless enough for me to not only consider suggesting other less technical people I know to try Linux, but to enthusiastically recommend it. They were the strongest single driving force I am aware of in bringing day-one mass-market release games to Linux.
I have, over the years of my dealing with them, come to believe that money spent towards Valve is materially making my life better in ways that just playing games through Steam doesn't fully encapsulate.
They provide development assistance and funds for open source projects in a way that truly gives back to the projects they work with, their company is run in a way that I find personally satisfying and aspirational, their leadership feels like they're maintaining their relevance in the industry instead of being disconnected money-men...
I respect their decisions enough to consider their cut reasonable as compared to the services they provide both directly and indirectly to the PC gaming industry as a whole.
I see why you have a positive view on Valve / Steam. However, while this can be the case for many people, it still doesn't adress what is typically criticised.
One is that they take 30% of the money, which can be described as incredibly high, compared to other paltforms like Epic Games (12%). Is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has? I don't know.
I think there is much room for discussion about this, however, I won't discuss it any further here, because brainless people just downvote my comment.
I understand that you aren't interested in responding, the only point I felt I wanted to clarify my own thinking about "is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has?"
I would happily and readily say that I don't know of any other single *gaming company that provides the same amount of services to the general population and to, if we follow the tenets of OSS, humanity as a whole. They provide code and money to KDE, Arch, the Linux kernel, they work directly with AMD on Linux drivers, they are working on accelerating what I believe are common-sense additions to Wayland, they've pushed VR on PC from being a futuristic wishlist item to having a section dedicated to games for their headsets and the countless others (including Metas, whom they also directly support) on their store and helping maintain and develop the open source frameworks needed to make them.
In my mind, Steam the storefront is how Valve does everything else that they're doing, and I haven't heard of anything that they do that I find reasonably objectable. I mean, maybe the TF2 stuff could count against them, and also given that there are 17 year old people who weren't alive when that game came out any amount of work they keep putting into it is just wild from my perspective.
My Steam Deck has a 512GiB SD card full of pirated games using lutris and sega genesis and nintendo ds roms on it. it is more comfortable to just buy stuff and play, which i do with titles that are worth it (thats the internal memory for), but you are not limited in any way (except that it has to work on linux)
FTFY 😁
to be fair, most of those "backups" are played once, if they suck they get thrown off instantly and if they are good they stay until the price point in the store doesn't pain me anymore. so it's really just a temporally displaced backup, you are right :-)
ETA: "Doesn't pain me" depends on the content: i did not shy back from buying for example Baldurs Gate 3 at full price. Indie devs normally get full price and automatically bought DLCs too, but i'm not into throwing my cash after the Bethesdas and EAs of the gaming world.
You can still install other game stores such as Epic or GOG and add games to the SteamOS gaming mode. Autoflatpak also works for that as well. I don't have the steam copy of FFXIV but no issue, I added it to my library without issue.