Amazon hiring for Proton / Wine and Linux developers for streaming service Luna

i forgot to mention, i saw an video sometime ago discussing if linux was the reason why stadia was strugling to grow, they gathered some data about the topic and came to the conclusion that only 1 game was avaliable on luna but couldnt run on any linux device or something like that, so the answer was: NO, stadia using linux didnt explain why amazon and xcloud were more sucessfull than it.

so the lack of games on linux was not the main issue, and now with amazon investing on linux...

For me, i'd rather pay a subscription fee rather than buy games individually. If the service went under then I would be more comfortable if I had paid a subscription fee rather than losing games that I purchased.

I think people are more used to subscriptions and since Stadia leans more towards buying individual games that could explain why it isn't doing so great.

Being able to play a large collection of games versus a small number of games is just so much more appealing to me.


Last edited by KohlyKohl on 15 December 2021 at 8:44 pm UTC

Regarding Valve, I'm not sure why people would think they would choose Google over AWS or Azure because both of those dwarf Google services by a large margin. Maybe Valve would setup their own infrastructure?

In my case, I think Google will inevitably get bored of Stadia and kill it. At that point, if Valve think that streaming brings value to the PC gaming space, they might want to pick up Stadia's library of Linux native games and any latency busting tech Stadia has, and integrate them into Steam. And if they're already thinking about taking over Stadia when it's dead, perhaps they'd think about a partnership before it dies, to bring that library, and that streaming tech & infrastructure to Steam and some consumer confidence to Stadia. I'd be way more likely to put money into something if it wasn't run by someone with the notoriously short attention span of Google.

I think Valve's big strength here will be that eventually their Steam client will just be able to "do it all" regarding anything gaming, and probably able to do it across all major platforms where gaming happens, when everyone else will have still only gotten bits and pieces of the "whole enchilada". They appear to be takin' the "slow and steady wins the race" approach to it all though. Just plodding along, ever forward (for the most part)…

For me, i'd rather pay a subscription fee rather than buy games individually. If the service went under then I would be more comfortable if I had paid a subscription fee rather than losing games that I purchased.

I think people are more used to subscriptions and since Stadia leans more towards buying individual games that could explain why it isn't doing so great.

Being able to play a large collection of games versus a small number of games is just so much more appealing to me.

Stadia "Pro" is Google's subscription variant, where they give you a selection of games to claim for your library each month. I built a pretty nice Stadia "Pro" library during my time subscribed. The nice thing about it is that any games you've claimed during your subscription appear to stay in your "Pro" library, so (as far as I can tell) you get access to them again if you cancel then later renew your subscription. In contrast, any games you "buy" (lease) on Stadia appear to be playable even without an active subscription to Stadia "Pro" (for as long as Stadia is still "a thing" I guess?). Mostly, my main reason for putting Stadia on hold was that I've got most of the same games on Steam already, and the vast majority of them are either native Linux, or run fine in Proton. Honestly more games than I can realistically find time to play.

In my case, I think Google will inevitably get bored of Stadia and kill it. At that point, if Valve think that streaming brings value to the PC gaming space, they might want to pick up Stadia's library of Linux native games and any latency busting tech Stadia has, and integrate them into Steam. And if they're already thinking about taking over Stadia when it's dead, perhaps they'd think about a partnership before it dies, to bring that library, and that streaming tech & infrastructure to Steam and some consumer confidence to Stadia. I'd be way more likely to put money into something if it wasn't run by someone with the notoriously short attention span of Google.

At one point in the past I used to use a streaming gaming service caled "OnLive" (before Sony bought and killed it so they could use it's tech in their own PlayStation streaming service) that allowed you to link your Steam library to it and play all your PC games on any Android device (at that time I used an Ouya for that purpose). I could totally see Steam/Valve just doing something similar when they decide there's value to be had in that space. They've already got nearly everything in place to spin such a service up fairly easily if they got that "itch".


Last edited by BlooAlien on 15 December 2021 at 10:11 pm UTC

I think people are more used to subscriptions and since Stadia leans more towards buying individual games that could explain why it isn't doing so great.

Being able to play a large collection of games versus a small number of games is just so much more appealing to me.

yes, people are willing to pay for subscriptions of an *SMALL library of games (imagine an big one), subs dont remove the option of purchasing the game elsehwere so the lack of games isnt a big problem unless you plan to count on the streaming as your only option, and those who do rightnow are casual enough to not care about playing every game out there, they want to play no matter what, instead of playing something very specific.



but the point is not just that... ok i forgot what i was going to say...




*by small i dont mean having 100~300 games avaliable to play is a small thing, i mean that compared to the ammount of games that exists, the libraries on stadia and luna are small.

yes, people are willing to pay for subscriptions of an *SMALL library of games (imagine an big one)

If the price was fair and reasonable, I'd happily pay a monthly fee to Valve for streaming access to my Steam library from a Valve server farm (for mobile gaming, and gaming on "lesser" devices than my powerful gaming rig). Of course, only if such service fully supported Linux and Android devices decently… But yea, I'd pay for that.

yes, people are willing to pay for subscriptions of an *SMALL library of games (imagine an big one)

If the price was fair and reasonable, I'd happily pay a monthly fee to Valve for streaming access to my Steam library from a Valve server farm (for mobile gaming, and gaming on "lesser" devices than my powerful gaming rig). Of course, only if such service fully supported Linux and Android devices decently… But yea, I'd pay for that.

i'm not criticizing that, quite the contrary, i'm saying: there is still hope.
if amazon didnt needed games that only work on windows to have an sustainable product and grow it, then they have an huge incentive to futher invest into breaking free of windows dependence completely.
and now with valve and amazon deep pockets, investing into wine, and... hey, wait! i just remembered another info, google said that developers dont need to support vulkan anymore!
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/stadia-gets-more-generous-revenue-models-plus-a-porting-toolkit-for-directx-to-vulkan/

now developers have 3 incentives to support linux and we have 3 big companies beting on it! things are starting to get interesting to say the least, i was worried that amazon would counter google on cloud by taking advantage of the huge windows library instead of trying to compete with microsoft, but that is not the case, windows might have been an provisory solution or an plan B just like WindowsCE was an planB OS for dreamCast.

omg, now i need to process all this info to conclude anything i'm getting confused, it worth nothing that my day was an mess with tons of things to do.

What I really like is the fact that Valve & Amazon will be pushing DXVK & Proton. It feels like these 2 pieces of tech are gaining recognition, making them hard to avoid, in the middle to long term.

as for Valve entering the cloud gaming business i dont think they have enough money to host servers, they wouldnt be doing the economics of scale nescessary for this type of service, unlike google, amazon and ms wich already have most their infrastructure in place

Bro. . .

By 2012, Valve employed around 250 people and was reportedly worth over US$3 billion, making it the most profitable company per employee in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

Also, Valve is basically a CDN and accounted for like 1-2% of all internet traffic last time I checked.

In the kindest way I know how, you may want to update your view to include these facts. There's no way.

By 2012, Valve employed around 250 people and was reportedly worth over US$3 billion, making it the most profitable company per employee in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

Also, Valve is basically a CDN and accounted for like 1-2% of all internet traffic last time I checked.

In the kindest way I know how, you may want to update your view to include these facts. There's no way.

1)3 billions? wow, hat is just 500x less money than than microsoft, google or amazon! my 6 milllion dollar corporation certainly can compete against valve!
and an 12 thousands dollars corporation certainly can compete with mine!
do you see how that is ridiculous?


2)profit per employee is completely different than having a lot of money, employee count is just part of the equation, you need other stuff like servers.


3)1~2% of the internet traffic is a lot, but those servers arent really meant for stremaing games, bandwidth is not the only thing we should consider, if i write an application that waste 1 MB of ram per user and host it on my own machine, with 8GB of ram i can have almost 8192 users (a bit less due to stuff like OS) but that dont mean i have bandwidth for that.
on the other hand, if i have bandwidth for that, that dont means that i can host applications that waste 8GB of ram, and host then for thousands of simultaneous users.
i know, that contradict what i said about video cards, but google/ms/amazon use their machines for stuff like machine learning so their machines are most likely ready for processing hude ammounts of data, wich is quite different from being an massive file server as steam mostly is.

nintendo spent 1 billion in a single deal with unity to support their platforms, valve worthing 3 billions dont seem impressive to me.

1)3 billions? wow, hat is just 500x less money than than microsoft, google or amazon! my 6 milllion dollar corporation

Don't be a disingenuous jerk, did you not read that the date was 2012 nearly 10 years ago?

Honestly, you are on the level of 1+1 = 3 right now, and you're not even worth my time to carry on a discussion -- also holy god man -- spell check your posts once in a while -- are you drunk?

Also, why the shitting all over Valve, the literal only hand that feeds -- that level of shillery makes no sense -- you are a clusterfuck of contradictions.

Oh awesome, I just discovered I can click on your profile and block you -- since you have nothing intelligible to say I will cleanse my feed of your nonsense. Good god man. I mean I'm genuinely impressed by how much of a proud fool you've made yourself out to be.

Oh I also stopped reading past the quotation btw, again -- if you want to sit at my big boy table you need to behave and prove that you are sane by making sane arguments and acknowledging facts and data.


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 16 December 2021 at 12:32 am UTC

1)3 billions?

To be fair, that was in 2012. I get the impression they've grown some since. But still, yeah . . . that's actually rather smaller than I was expecting.

1)3 billions? wow, hat is just 500x less money than than microsoft, google or amazon! my 6 milllion dollar corporation

Don't be a disingenuous jerk, did you not read that the date was 2012 nearly 10 years ago?

I think elmapul's point stands, though. Say they've tripled in size in 9 years. That would make them worth $9 billion. Still not near the same league as MS or Google or Amazon.

1)3 billions? wow, hat is just 500x less money than than microsoft, google or amazon! my 6 milllion dollar corporation

Don't be a disingenuous jerk, did you not read that the date was 2012 nearly 10 years ago?

I think elmapul's point stands, though. Say they've tripled in size in 9 years. That would make them worth $9 billion. Still not near the same league as MS or Google or Amazon.

And yet, we are still talking about "billions" (with a "b") which certainly ain't nothin' to sneeze at… Can do quite a lot of amazing things with even a small fraction of that, spent wisely. And Valve does already have a pretty wild amount of kinda heavy duty infrastructure in place to work with…


Last edited by BlooAlien on 16 December 2021 at 1:18 am UTC

1)3 billions? wow, hat is just 500x less money than than microsoft, google or amazon! my 6 milllion dollar corporation

Don't be a disingenuous jerk, did you not read that the date was 2012 nearly 10 years ago?

I think elmapul's point stands, though. Say they've tripled in size in 9 years. That would make them worth $9 billion. Still not near the same league as MS or Google or Amazon.

Back to the original context. There was an ludicrous argument that Valve couldn't afford to be a CDN or have the server power necessary to offer cloud gaming services.

My references to Wikipedia prove two things. [1] Valve has the money [2] Valve is already a massive CDN.

Arguing what Valve's may or may not be worth is just a diversion. It's immaterial and irrelevant to the plot beyond that reality that they have massive amounts of capitol to do whatever they please.

And let me be clear, the video game entertainment market has exponentially exploded since 2012. No sane level headed person could believe that Valve is somehow incapable of achieving things they have already mastered and are world leaders in for the last decade. That would be disingenuous if not grossly naive.


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 16 December 2021 at 1:22 am UTC

My prediction ... Valve are working on a streaming service and they partner with Cloudflare not one of the big 3 cloud providers.

Context:
* https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/
* https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflare-on-the-edge/

I'm nowhere near convinced that streaming games will see the same uptake as music and video. Those latter worked because the source is static. There's no input, no latency, no interaction beyond play/pause/next/previous.

Meanwhile game streaming has as a couple of really difficult problems to address, like input latency, cost of hardware required to allow people to play at a decent quality, lack of access to modding. Sure, there's a whole host of casual gaming experiences that this might be a reasonable fit for, but it'll be a long, long time before "gamers" are ready to give up their big rigs and embrace the various trade-offs streaming entails.

Don't be a disingenuous jerk, did you not read that the date was 2012 nearly 10 years ago?

i know those numbers are out dated, dont know how many years outdate, but that is beyoned the point, i was working with the numbers that i knew from head (1~2 trillion for microsoft) and the numbers he gave me. (3 billion for valve) using other numbers for valve would be an strawman argument.

Honestly, you are on the level of 1+1 = 3 right now, and you're not even worth my time to carry on a discussion -- also holy god man -- spell check your posts once in a while -- are you drunk?

english is not my native lang , so i dont need to be drunk to make a lot of mistakes, i should spell check they indeed, its just not worth the trouble of doing it, i'm not paid to comment on foruns and i waste a lot of time discussing on the internet that i should realistic spend elsewhere, most of the time i discuss in portuguese, so my english is getting kinda "rusted".

i dont have an spell checked embed to firefox and dont think it worth the trouble searching for an add'on and installing for something i do only a few times a day.

Also, why the shitting all over Valve, the literal only hand that feeds -- that level of shillery makes no sense -- you are a clusterfuck of contradictions.

sigh, i'm not shitting over valve, i'm shiting over the stupid argument.
arguing that valve having 3 billions of dollars as if this meant they could enter the cloud gaming business and any other market they want is stupid, first because microsoft, google and amazon are way bigger, and second because an company having a lot of money dont mean they gonna spend everything in a single product/service.
sure the game goes for microsoft, if we wanna be completely fair we shouldnt compare the entire microsoft budget to valve budget, the closer thing to this would be to compare the money from the xbox division (About 13 billion last time i checked) with the money of valve cloud gaming division, but if steamOS really has the power to challenge windows, i bet microsoft would spend a lot of money to keep their products competitive, not only the money from the xbox/gaming division.

Oh awesome, I just discovered I can click on your profile and block you -- since you have nothing intelligible to say I will cleanse my feed of your nonsense. Good god man. I mean I'm genuinely impressed by how much of a proud fool you've made yourself out to be.

Oh I also stopped reading past the quotation btw, again -- if you want to sit at my big boy table you need to behave and prove that you are sane by making sane arguments and acknowledging facts and data.

we can search for more precise data (wich is troublesome to do, because valve is not an public company so they only relase this data when they feel like too do) but the fact remain that microsoft has much more money and economics of scale than valve for doing cloud gaming.
now, dont get me wrong, an small company can compete with an big one in an particular market, so long their investments are smarther, shooting for all directions trying to hitsomething is not smarth, only big companies can afford to try this.
i dont think its smarth for valve to even try to enter this market right now, making an partnership with nvidia sound smarther than that, if they split their money into too many projects they might not have enough to compete in any of then.
cloud gaming will not be big any time soon, its something that will be in the long term, and investing on it contradict the investment on steamdeck.

Meanwhile game streaming has as a couple of really difficult problems to address, like input latency,

input lag? before microsoft relased xbox series and sony relased ps5, digital foundry made an analysys comparing the input lag of xbox one x, with stadia on red dead redemption.
guess what? the input lag on stadia was lower!

Reading all the comments... Maybe it's related to a not yet announced "Steam channel" on Luna?

Edit:
New world (From Amazon Gaming Studio) is already on Steam... New World for Steam Deck?
Maybe all of the above?

Yep! We live in interresting times...


Last edited by Mohandevir on 16 December 2021 at 4:28 pm UTC

Meanwhile game streaming has as a couple of really difficult problems to address, like input latency,

input lag? before microsoft relased xbox series and sony relased ps5, digital foundry made an analysys comparing the input lag of xbox one x, with stadia on red dead redemption.
guess what? the input lag on stadia was lower!

Okay...? It's still a problem though. I certainly noticed it numerous times on Destiny 2.