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Two bits of Steam news for you here, as Valve continue iterating on Steam features for players and developers.

The first of which, is that it seems Steam now supports game trials with Dead Space giving you the ability to play 90 minutes free until May 29th. As far as I know, this is officially the first proper time Valve has enabled a developer to do this. With it being announced in a Steam post, the game is also 20% off.

You can play Dead Space on Steam Deck and Linux desktop with Proton 8.0. Although if you're on desktop Linux, you might want Proton Experimental which recently enabled the NVAPI for it (for NVIDIA GPUs).

What do you think to trials of games on Steam?

Another bit of news is more for developers, but it's actually a good thing for Steam customers as well. Valve announced in a Steamworks blog post some upgrades to player tracking systems for developers. With it, Valve mentions their focus on user privacy. An interesting point here is that Valve are dropping support for Google Analytics as "Google’s tracking solutions don't align well with our approach to customer privacy" and so they're building the more useful parts directly into Steam. Nice.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam, Valve
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TheSHEEEP May 17, 2023
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Quoting: TrainDocI hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Steam Deck UI and the new Steam desktop UI are based on CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework). The same browser basis steam used for web browsing in its previous revisions of Steam. So they've become even more dependent upon google imo.
Eh, Chromium is open source (with a very permissive license, too, from having a quick look at the license file). It is no more dependent upon a single dev or company than other projects.
Would Google drop it, the community would more than likely just pick it up.

There is no harm in such projects, same as something like using React.js in projects. Yeah, it's made by Faceb-... uhhhh "Meta", but it stands on its own.
And the dependency would only exist in case it was closed source, which it thankfully is not.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 17 May 2023 at 5:31 am UTC
itscalledreality May 17, 2023
Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: itscalledrealityValve also separated the Steam Play enable checkboxes. The new default checkbox only allows you to install Windows games if the Steam Compatibility Tool says it’s okay. There is now a second checkbox for installing all software with Steam Play. Very very very annoying when I tried to install Yume Nikku.

Say what now? That's how it's been from the very beginning. They only changed it for Steam Deck.

I don’t think so, why would I have it disabled on my big rig suddenly?
14 May 20, 2023
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Quoting: TheSHEEEP
Quoting: TrainDocI hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Steam Deck UI and the new Steam desktop UI are based on CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework). The same browser basis steam used for web browsing in its previous revisions of Steam. So they've become even more dependent upon google imo.
Eh, Chromium is open source (with a very permissive license, too, from having a quick look at the license file). It is no more dependent upon a single dev or company than other projects.
Would Google drop it, the community would more than likely just pick it up.

There is no harm in such projects, same as something like using React.js in projects. Yeah, it's made by Faceb-... uhhhh "Meta", but it stands on its own.
And the dependency would only exist in case it was closed source, which it thankfully is not.
There are more examples, too. Think of Golang and Kubernetes. How about Visual Studio Code? When a company does something that meets my wishes, I will partake. It's fair.

I was hoping to see Plausible Analytics mentioned here. It would have been a big boost for them. Sounds like Valve are inventing their own wheel though.
Shoppinguin Jun 6, 2023
Apparently, Valve has not separated from Google as much as it seems. The Steam Cloud savegames are still being hosted there. I guess moving those over to another host would be a huge pain, but please, don't stop at the Analytics, go all the way.
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