I wouldn't hold my breath. I mean, I'd be all for it but what would motivate Valve to do this?

Nope. Valve do a lot of open source stuff, but why would they open source the client to directly help competitors? Not likely at all.

Nope. Their mandatory closed source client is the thing that forces you into their ecosystem. And their ability to have complete control of that ecosystem to positively tailor the user experience is what's allowed them to dominate the market. I can't see a scenario where they would consider giving that up.

Quoting: denyasisNope. Their mandatory closed source client is the thing that forces you into their ecosystem. And their ability to have complete control of that ecosystem to positively tailor the user experience is what's allowed them to dominate the market. I can't see a scenario where they would consider giving that up.

That's giving the client a bit too much credit, though; I'd say the thing that forces people in their ecosystem is the DRM, and the breadth of the user base they've built over the years, and that's about it. I don't see why the client couldn't be open source, to talk to an API that remains the interface to the locked down DRM.

... it's not as though the client provides specialized libraries, device drivers, & whatnot, that accomplish the relevant tasks (like streaming, chat, the installer, the storefront) uniquely well. It's a decent front end to a well established/entrenched system.

Other companies have worse clients, not because they're unable to figure out Valve's secret sauce, but because they aren't even trying to improve user experience.

Source available at best.

Steam has lots of legacy and proprietary Source engine components in it such as VGUI which may deter Valve from wanting to release the code.

Steamworks DRM probably isn't an issue, many Steam games don't use it, and the ones that do are as simple as being able to find a valid steam login session from the steam client. Not even necessarily in online mode either.

Overall, I would be happy if Valve did this, but I'm not holding my breath and I don't really care a lot at the end of the day. The only thing that makes the Steam client special is that it connects to Steam. I would be much more excited if Valve simply had a public and well documented API to allow third party Steam clients to be easily made. All the other stuff Steam does well are not crazy hard to implement, even for inexperienced programmers, its just that the designers working for the competing companies are braindead and don't understand what users want out of their storefronts. Epic, Origin etc could all easily out-do Steam if they put in any effort.

Last edited by bonkmaykr on 23 September 2024 at 2:36 am UTC

Quoting: RubyRose136This applies to the Steam client and possibly the server infrastructure.

When pigs fly and hell freezes over.
Absolutely not.
Valve treats open source like most of the industry.
A power sink.
Making something open source is a great way to make it grow and stop being a threat to the way you do business, so they took the power of their biggest dependency/threat(micro$oft) and threw it down the open source hole.
There's just a lot of it, so they're throwing a lot of power down that hole.

The closest you will get is based on its open source dependencies(the client is just a chromium browser)

Last edited by LoudTechie on 23 September 2024 at 12:27 pm UTC

Why would they ? Valve doesn't care about FOSS. Their Linux customer's don't care that they don't care about FOSS. They have zero incentive or pressure to change.