Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration
Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration
We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
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Valve is a Titan doing incredible work for the open source community and making money while doing so.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
I don't think FOSS represents a lot of how they make money, the money making is probably all closed source, so I don't think it's a good example. It's more like a for-profit company also doing so good quality charity work on the side. It's mostly good for their image and a way to tell Windows that they could go without them if they don't collaborate.
I fully enjoy what they have been doing as a Linux only patient gamer for the past years, but I am realistic.In reality, it's likely a self-preservation move. Microsoft made what appeared to be a monopolistic move to control the entire Windows ecosystem when they added their own app store and the locked down S edition of Windows. If Valve both hadn't invested in Linux and Microsoft hadn't halted going down that path, they would have been screwed.
I’d doubt that. Everyone hated S mode: Corporate hated it, power users hated it, newbies…probably ignored it. Even if MS continued down it, it’d just be like Digg v4.
Personally, I think the profit incentive is a way to improve SteamOS further for free.
I’m not sure that Microsoft ever did halt going down that path. My wife recently bought a PC that came locked down by default and required some fiddling to allow running unsigned apps. This was Windows 10, not sure about 11.
I think it could be more that broad compatibility with everything is their main selling point, and by doing so they were undermining their own ecosystem.
However, this is mere speculation on my part.
I'm pretty sure the main selling point was being cheaper.
"Likely", man I am pretty sure Gaben openly talked about this, they haven't liked where windows was headed for a long time
steam on linux was officially launched because gaben said windows trying to build a walled garden can go fuck right off. and he was right on the mark; as microsoft keeps buying big studios and locking down their ecosystem more and more. steam going linux and the steam deck are direct responses to wrangle control out of microsofts hands - and with all rights, considering the debacle of directx when that launched and pushing gaming to make hardware development a priority which in turn made microsoft licenses sell for new computers.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
Their main product is a proprietary software launcher that for decades has pushed videogames and the whole industry into a closed environment making them billions. It's good that they are now supporting linux and collaborating in open source projects but let's not forget who they are.
Let's also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.
I really have a hard time accepting that they "pushed" the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.
Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn't something new for them. What's new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.
Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than "proprietary" and "too big".
On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren't doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.
Anyway, again I'll say: I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond "proprietary" and "too big".
I think a good comparison is Bell Labs and AT&T. A lot of good work was done by Bell Labs but it was mostly enabled by AT&Ts monopoly.
Beyond being one of the biggest for profits corporations in a rigged as fuck business they also engage in literally criminal activities such as promoting gambling to kids.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Anti-competitive_practices
I'd like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve's money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn't make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let's not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.
Oh come on. Mr negativity over here. FFS Valve has been a godsend compared to the likes of EA or Blizzard. I bet you complain when you get ice cream that it's too cold
Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.
But let's thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S
At the expense of literally every single game player
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren't going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That's wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren't going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That's wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you're pro landlord rent gouging?
Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.
It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they're also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
"Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he's a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?"
The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.
Steam has what nobody else does and the only thing I pay for are games that are mostly on sale or from a keys site. It seems you have an extremely biased view, it seems om average Valve employees make about 107k or something close to that. They're certainly far from a terrible company like Nestle.
Try clicking past the first result next time you "research" something to prove how unbiased you are:
https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenue-revealed-in-lawsuit/
Also, stop dick riding corporations.
Revenue per employee is not that employee's salary. Pick your jaw up from your keyboard the next time you are insulting me.
Wolfire estimated that Valve had roughly 360 employees (a number likely sourced from Valve itself in 2016) and that per-employee profit was around $15 million per year.
Even if that $15 million number isn’t exactly right, Valve, in its public employee handbook, says that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.” A document from the Wolfire lawsuit revealed Valve employees discussing just how much higher — though the specific number for Valve employees is redacted.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
If you don't want to be insulted than don't blindly dick ride a corporation.
You are grade A braindead. Once again, that is not the employee salary. That is how fucken Gabe is buying yachts. Jfc, go take a business class or swipe a Business for Dumbies at a bookstore. Thats how much each of their employees makes them. Not how much each of their employees are personally paid.
So now you're pro landlord rent gouging?
No, they're anti Starbucks price gouging. It's like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.
It might be old and clunky and never repaired
It's the opposite.
No, they're anti Starbucks price gouging. It's like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.
I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don't have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won't save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.
There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.
We hate rent seeking. We'll hate Steam if they raise the profit margin. We're not talking about rent gouging. Piv's point is that large publishers dominate the landscape and won't bulge their prices. This is compounded by Steam's anticompetitive clause against having a lower price on other platforms. That part is bad. However, the washing machine is well oiled and speedy. Epic's is the clunky one, unfortunately. The only Steam alternative I'll happily use is GOG and itch.io, where indies can still publish.
Thank you. You get it: the whole system is just broken.
Trying to shift that 15% away from Valve is effectively putting it into the pockets of publishers, as the overwhelming majority of video game sales are either developed by large publishers like Activision, or stuck with a third-party publisher that isn't just going to voluntarily pass the savings on to the consumers or developers.
If I buy a game on Steam, I know that 30% of my money is going to end up in someone other than the developer's hands. Support the devs by buying the game directly from them or on a lower-fee platform like Itch* wherever possible. Or, if it's only available on Steam and my money it going to go into some corporation's pockets, Valve is at least not legally incentivized to milk its consumers for the sake of shareholders.
*But never Epic. For as much as they preach about monopolies, their hypocritical actions demonstrate a clear desire to become one.
I'm not defending landlords or rent gouging. I'm pointing out that when production or operating costs become lower in a for-profit entity, they increase their profit margin instead of passing their savings down to the consumer. Welcome to capitalism.
If you can't see how that connects with the hypothetical scenario of having Valve to take a 15% cut instead of 30%, let me do it for you:
Ubisoft makes a new Assassin's Creed game. They publish it on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. All of them currently take a 30% cut, so they sell the game for $70. Now, suppose your petition to Valve works, and they lower their cut to 15%. Ubisoft is still going to charge $70 to buy the game on Steam, and the only thing changing is that they now make an extra $10.50 from Steam purchases compared to the others.
But, that's Ubisoft. What about an indie dev? Absolutely nothing different. Microsoft and Sony's distribution agreements make it a contract violation to have a lower MSRP on a competing platform.
In our current reality, that 15% more-than-necessry fee will never go into the hands of the consumer. You are not being a champion for the consumer by rallying against 30% platform fees, you're literally arguing to change the ratio of money going between two corporations.
Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.
Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it's about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.
Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.
Valve is the city. Indie devs can easily use itch.io or GOG instead.
It's about shifting money to the people actually creating something. Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.
You're just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn't going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.
Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.
But hey, maybe it's not Microsoft—maybe it's a couple friends in a garage who went with a publisher to help fund development and set up distribution for all the major platforms. In exchange for their services and marketing, the publisher will take 60% of the sale price. Valve or whoever takes their 30% cut from them before it hits the publisher's bank account. The guys in the garage still only get the remaining 40%, even if the sale came from EGS with its lower fees.
Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it's not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.
My point still stands: you're proposing something that doesn't actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.
You don't seem to have idea of how much a billion is and how much money is valve making. Enjoy your icecream while it's cold because you can't afford too much of it.
Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn't a public company. They don't have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins.
I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I'm not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.
I'll tell you a secret: you don't need a proprietary launcher to run software
I'll tell you something you missed:
Steam's DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don't force DRM on their platform, it's entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.
Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins
No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
And they don't have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.
No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.
It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.
Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that's beside the point.
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the "developers pay less fees here" approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn't benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn't exactly pan out.
To be fair, Epic Store was marred by exclusives and having way less features back then. Even now, their (Electron) launcher boots up way slower than (CEF) Steam, and their sales are way worse.
Is it Electron? Someone elsewhere mentioned it was actually an instance of Unreal Engine running for the webview component. Something about the EGS install directory containing the same UE settings file that games use for initializing Unreal
IDK then. spinning up an entire game engine just to do what Electron does seems unbelievably wasteful though.
I just downloaded and installed EGS to a Windows VM.
strings EpicGamesLauncher.exe | select-string "unreal"returns some interesting results:FCommunityPortalManagerImpl::SetUnrealEnginePortalViewModel{USER}Unreal Engine/Engine/Config/User{TYPE}.iniUnrealHeaderToolCannot call UnrealScript (%s - %s) while stopped at a breakpoint.UnrealVersionSelectorCreated with FUnrealEngineFileAssociationServiceFactory at D:/build/++Portal/Sync/Portal/Source/Programs/EpicGamesLauncher/Layers/Domain/Private/UserDomain.cpp:866
A search for "electron" only matches the words "Electronic Arts"
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the "developers pay less fees here" approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn't benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn't exactly pan out.
Oh really? Please do point me to the study you did where you gave 15% more revenue back to developers and then assessed their output quality.
Claiming that having the store take 15% less cut of revenue will have no effect is a quite frankly flat out absurd claim to make.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn't make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Most of those companies actually contribute to the kernel or to foundational software used on servers, but few contribute to the userspace for desktop consumers on the level that Valve does.
So?
People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them.
And the Linux Kernel which powers the whole thing directly effects them, so we should all praise Microsoft and IBM like we praise Valve right?
Userspace affects users much more. I value getting Wayland color management support much more than the following kernel gobblygook lifted straight from https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges:
Summary: This release includes suppor for x86 FRED, which is a new way of transitioning between CPU ring privileves; it also includes support for creating pidfds for threads; support for BPF arenas, which is a sparse shared memory region between the BPF programs and user space; and BPF tokens, which allow delegating functionality to less privileged programs; host support for AMD Secure Nested Paging; support for weighted interleaveing memory policies; support for a FUSE passthrough mode that makes regular file I/O faster; and a new device mapper VDO deduplication target.
So?
Just because you don't understand electrical engineering doesn't make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.
The point was "People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them." The only ways that directly affects users are improved execution times and footprints that users won't notice. So no, we should not all praise MS and IBM like we praise Valve, especially when Valve also contributes to the Linux kernel.
So basically "we should all be little dumb dumbs who praise the shiny bauble in front of us, not the actual work and effort that goes into creating something".
Interesting point.