From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
All this pedantic smugness and yet you still can’t present a half decent argument for why linux support matters for other vendors besides steam.
And even with steam the only reason they matter for them is that it drives hardware profits. Extra game sales are a bonus.
Steam could have sold 30 million decks and it still would hardly matter. You know why? Most people who own a deck also own a PC, and chances are that PC is running windows, the deck is likely not their main gaming platform. Furthermore, many people would be happier if it ran windows, as sad as that may be. Just throw a google search for “SteamOS frustrating”.
At the end of the day, linux support doesn’t matter much for any other vendor. Linux marketshare is small and within that small share an even smaller share are linux exclusive gamers who take a hard line when it comes to linux support and do it how you will, linux support costs money, the ROI isn’t big enough to consider, it is pocket change.
All this pedantic smugness and yet you still can’t present a half decent argument for why linux support matters for other vendors besides
steamValve.
I gave a reason why it barely requires any effort to bundle up existing FOSS solutions to make Windows games compatible, ie. expanding the potential user base by several millions. I know what I’m talking about because I package Linux software myself.
SteamValve could have sold 30 million decks and it still would hardly matter.
That’s 5 million more than Xbox Series X|S and Windows games would run with hardly any extra work required. That’s different from making native ports.
Just throw a google search for “SteamOS frustrating”.
I don’t care for annecdotal evidence. Sales numbers speak for themselves.
Learn the difference between Valve and Steam before trying to lecture anyone.
The fact that it can be done or even relatively easily means nothing. Whether teams are hired in-house or the task is outsourced does not matter, it still costs a decent sum of money and requires ongoing maintenance costs. You need additional devs, you need QA and customer support, you even need new features in your client. You can’t just wing it and bundle some packages, we are not talking hobby projects here.
Again steam did not do this to drive game sales, otherwise they’d have done this before they needed a deck solution. And this is because stand-alone the amount of game sales this would drive is nothing to major vendors because most linux gamers are willing to use heroic/lutris/bottles/wine whatever themselves or dualboot / vm passthrough to play what they want.
And you keep hinging on steams hardware sales figures but it is not like the praise or demand for steam deck comes from it running a linux base. It would be more accurate to say people love it despite that fact.
The praise steam is getting and what is driving steams device sales numbers comes almost in its entirety from the hardware platform being really good and the price being really low. And this comes back full circle - this is almost exclusively why steam invested in linux compatibility.
So no, steams hardware sales numbers don’t speak for themselves.
Again steam did not do this to drive game sales, otherwise they’d have done this before they needed a deck solution.
Proton exists far longer than Steam Deck. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
