Translation, “You do all the heavy lifting and then I’ll jump in to enjoy the results while I complain about it.”
Sweeney has had a chip on his shoulder with Linux for at least 15 years. It’s honestly a bit weird since if you look at stuff before around 2005, he had quite a different tone.
Yeah they used to ship Linux executables on the same disk for Unreal didn’t they?
Famously understaffed and broke Epic Games.
Sweeney does not want to contribute in any way towards making the steam deck more profitable.
I think he actually wants a monopoly. He wants to be, functionally, the only digital storefront on PC. And doing anything that could help Valve, even in another market, would detrimental to that goal.
I’d rather not play games at all if Epic ever gets a monopoly. Though I would of course keep playing games, just without paying for them. Epic won’t see as much as a single cent from me.
This is another reason Epic games will lose everything to Valve. Their storefront is useless and is a money loser. But even if it weren’t, valve is moving themselves to be the gaming king of Linux. Where no competitor exists meaningfully. Maybe GoG?
Not related to Steam Deck, but this caught my eye:
As soon as we thwarted their effort, they went around to 27 different developers and offered each one a payoff to undermine any effort we had to get their games onto our store exclusively. Activision and Riot and Supercell had direct distribution plans that they were planning on; Google paid them not to pursue those plans. Just direct blatant violations of anti-competition law, it’s crazy a company of Google’s scale would do that.
So Tim is stating that Google making exclusivity deals with applications developers is breaching laws and should be stopped, but Epic having exclusivity deals on their own stores is okay and not anti-competitive. Hypocrite much, eh?
I believe what wormtongue was saying here was that Google was paying developers to abandon their plans to release exclusively for the Epic store.
It doesn’t mention forcing anyone to drop Epic, or other platforms. Not sure what is anti-competitive aside from forcing the Epic store to compete on their merits (price/platform support) instead of their exclusive game deals.
The steamdeck-like hardware market is going to explode and they are fools for not putting in even a tiny amount of effort there. Yeah a lot of steamdeck form factor devices will run windows, but idk linux has passed a critical threshold where windows just looks less and less attractive as an OS to base this kind of device around.
It doesn’t really matter how well Valve does or doesn’t do in the near term, the existence of the steam deck right now as a functional, easy to use gaming device irrevocably changes the pc gaming market. In the future kids are going to get these things before their parents shell out for a gaming pc, they are the clear gateway step into pc gaming because you can always buy a nice pc down the road and have all the same games to play as you do on your handheld.
It will increasingly matter more and more what multiplayer action game you can pick up and get running most easily on a steamdeck-like linux device to play with your friends. Right now for example Halo Infinite is pretty perfectly situated, it doesn’t have much competition for being the easy to get into steam deck multiplayer shooter choice.
It is playable on Steam Deck… install Windows on a USB-C SSD. Problem solved.
You can run Windows on the Steam Deck but I’d argue you also introduce a bunch of new problems.
For instance, having to deal with desktop Windows’ BS. Oh, you wanted to play games? Well we have to take over your Steam Deck and install updates for the next 20 minutes.
I mean…sure you should be able to wait on the updates, but that’s not that common once you actually do the updates. And it’s not as if you don’t do updates on Steam deck (You absolutely should, and the flathub apps have tons of updates at least weekly when I run them)
The important difference is that’s on my schedule when I want it to happen.
Steam does the update thing too, nobody is immune from that.
Steam’s updates don’t prevent me from using my PC, force me to run updates on their schedule or even require me to reboot when I’m not ready.
Windows updates don’t do that either, you have a choice when to install them, delay them, or just not do them.
That’s not the case, and you didn’t read what you linked. I’m also a professional system admin with decades of experience on Windows and Linux, so we can keep arguing if you’d like, but I’m not going to accept that Windows is as you’re saying when I know better.
What that link says is that I can delay the updates by a week on Windows 10, but then am forced to update after that. I can also set active hours, but the system will still force the updates and reboot the computer.
Linux can update without forcing a reboot until I’m ready. It also never has a “Updates Applying” screen that locks me from using it. And, in fact, most updates don’t require a reboot and the kernel can be setup for live updates that almost never require one to begin with.
I’m not going to get in a certification dick measuring contest. Yes, you can in fact delay installation, and yes, you can schedule installation.
But really, an actual sysadmin knows you run a management tool for Windows updates:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/waas-manage-updates-wufb
I wanted to see how Destiny 2 ran on it. Bought one of these in 2tb.
https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/xs2000-portable-usb-c-solid-state-drive?capacity=2tb
No issues. Windows installed flawlessly, booted into Windows, Destiny 2 imstalled flawlessly.
Some stuff just requires Windows, it’s best not to be all precious about it.
I’d rather just not play a game than be forced to install windows.
I’d argue at this point it’s merely “a PC formerly known as Steam Deck”.
