Latest 30 Comments

One of Valves biggest strengths through the years has been that by being private they can do things that don't need payoff for many years. They can plan long-term in a way that most companies can. They have a steady stream of revenue from Steam and can dedicate a fraction of that to these projects. They don't need to hit deadlines for stockholders or investors. The only company I can think of that functions similarly is IKEA. Both companies have fumbled (they are not perfect) but their dominant positions means they can continue to play the long game.

I think SteamOS, Proton and FEX are good examples of this slow, long term strategy. They don't employ hundreds of developers for these projects, they don't need to show results by next annual report, and they don't have to mean some fundamental shift for Valve. All they need to do is widening the market by a tiny bit and give current customers even more reasons to stay on Steam. SteamOS doesn't mean they will abandon Windows and FEX doesn't mean they will abandon x86. This is not dogma this is long-term business strategy on a level most companies can only dream of.

Right now, for gaming, Snapdragon X Elite is not competitive with Intel or AMD's offerings. This might change in the future and if that happens then Valve will be ready to switch to ARM for Steam Deck. It might also never happen and that is equally fine for Valve. Then don't care as long as they get a good price on a killer perf/watt chip. ARM can be powerful and x86 can be power efficient. Worst case they can release a Steam app for phones and give their customer yet another platform to play (at least some of) their games on.

I myself don't care if I run ARM or x86. What I do care about is that most (preferably all) my games run, I have good performance at a decent price and (since a year back) that it can run Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Once games didn't need to come on disks developers basically stopped caring.

In the days of games that spanned multiple CDs, like Tex Murphy for example, they would duplicate some assets so that you wouldn't have to change discs as often. There was a tangible benefit to that. Duplicating GBs of data on a HDD to reduce seeking sounds pretty asinine; who benchmarked an improvement when doing that, and how long ago?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Worried about people with HDDs but not people that don't have hundreds of GiBs to spare…

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Millennium + Extendium looks very enticing, for adding SteamDB, Augmented Steam, and ProtonDB Peek functionality into the Steam client. Does anyone have experience (positive or negative) they can share? I don't want to break Steam.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Every day there is a new reason to hate "AI"... it's not even really the AI we've been warned about, it's dumber.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs a consumer, not only did I not notice getting chopped, I hadn't even realized I was made of liver!

I always knew you'd be tasty with onions.

Also, that statement is hilarious.
Let me rephrase:

We are thankful to our millions of customers who made us what we are today, and who we'd now like to leave behind for temporary gains. Thank you for understanding.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: scaineI'd LOVE to see an Arch-based distro that give us a store-like experience for updates and software installs. It's frustrating that Arch is so obtuse that even tools like Discover (KDE's appstore) is "not recommended for use with Arch-based distros".

I'm on CachyOS now and it ships with Octopi, but that has multiple problems - the interface is probably worse than Synaptic, a thing I didn't believe possible. It doesn't handle the AUR, and it doesn't know about Flatpak. CachyOS does provide a one-stop "upgrade" tool (open a terminal and type "upgrade", ha!), but no GUI exists.

It's a problem, and one that's hand-waved away by dedicated Arch users who say "just use the terminal". I'm fine doing so, but it means that I wouldn't recommend an Arch distro to anyone, ever. You try Arch, tentatively, after years of Linux exposure, and you might still bounce of it because of this.

So, yeah, so frustrating. Powerful software, like Arch, shouldn't be (this) difficult to use.

Manjaro got Pamac, that is a great store.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: M@GOidThe Memory Mafia (Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology) are behind this. In February of this year they were on the news saying they will reduce production, because there was oversupply and market prices were too low. So they created this scarcity to make prices go up. I hope they rot in hell.


https://www.techspot.com/news/106815-nand-flash-weak-demand-oversupply.html

Kinda make sense. We saw it in meat prices as well. One chicken sneezes on the otehrside of the world and all of a sudden prices hikes this side of the world.
I just wonder, how much ram does these AI companies or AI data centers actually/really need. I can't fathom that they need so much that the whole worlds supply is impacted.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: PhiladelphusProton to Lepton? What kind of particle physics-themed naming is that?? Well, I suppose Electron was already taken. And it's probably too late to rename Proton to Baryon…touché, Valve.

Well, I admit it's a strange direction to go, but the name is kind of charming.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Thank god there is China still producing tangible real things instead of building castles in the sand, and smoke and mirrors like many developed countries are doing... because the situation would be much worse!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: TightRopeHow many people will go back to Crucial when the bubble finally bursts and they need real customers? This is probably a bad long term business decision.

Long term? Not sure I understand that phrase. Does it mean, like, beyond next quarter?!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: GoEsrThey can't fix that until Vulkan does (also as per nvidia forum big thread about it).

Doesn't affect Intel or AMD, which also use Vulkan....

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: tux

Quoting: kuhpunktI saw one comment... it could be a great way to bring a lot of streaming apps like Netflix to the Steam Machine as well. People might want that.

There is a script called SteamOS-Waydroid-Installer by ryanrudolfoba on github which works great with the netflix android app. I have downloaded and watched many netflix shows on the go on my Steam Deck this way. Netflix only allows high-quality content on selected whitelisted devices however, and limits all other devices to 480p. It is not up to valve to properly enable streaming apps, but to the companies behind those apps. Until then, the best option is probably to just use streaming services in a browser.

Hi thats me! I'm glad you find it useful the script to install Waydroid on SteamOS!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I'm a little surprised that the Build Your Own Killer Bundle deal was stuck in here as a footnote, when it's arguably one of the best bundles Fanatical has ever had and deserves its own separate article IMHO. I picked up 20 games for £18.04 (use OMENVIP promo code to get 5% code at checkout), so that's 90p each and I counted 7 games with an RRP of £30 or more (my RRP total for the 20 games was £479!).

No idea why Liam didn't highlight Strange Brigade Deluxe Edition as the standout either - 90p for a AAA game that's still selling for £64.99 on Steam? Surely one of the bargains of year?!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

That's bad. As if prices weren't high enough, now Samsung and SK Hynix will raise them even more.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Curious if this will lead to better optimisation in video games.

Probably not.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

… wait, December 12 is being released by it?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: walther von stolzing

I hope the RISC-V and HomeLab/Modders are paying attention, because compute is about to be dramatically reduced due to the strangulation on price of electricity, and economic warfare against the peasants.

The direction that RISC-V and ARM seem to be moving in also support the notion that locked-down systems will be replacing today's PCs. Both of those platforms appear to require a ton of proprietary extensions to be able to serve as the CPU of a PC. That doesn't bode well at all for the (farther) future of desktop Linux, needless to say.

The relative 'openness' of the x86 PC platform really was a historical accident, the result of IBM scrambling to make a late entry to the 'micro market'; and they did try to take some measures against it, but failed ultimately.

Last year (I think, Dec 2023) some russian company rolled out their first CPU built from the ground up. It wasn't ready for prime time yet, lacking a few generations behind Intel/AMD, but I was and still am hoping for a new competitor in the CPU market. Same with GPUs. I hear there are a few Chinese models not available outside China.

Say what you will about Russia/China, I simply want more competition in these markets.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Proton to Lepton? What kind of particle physics-themed naming is that?? Well, I suppose Electron was already taken. And it's probably too late to rename Proton to Baryon…touché, Valve.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It's not entirely clear what Valve uses to sort the Linux list, as distributions seem to randomly flick in and out of it each month.

Checking back for the past few months: it appears to be sorting distros by percentage, from most to least, then showing the top 13 or 14. If it just shows the top N results every month, then the natural variation in sampling would cause distros to jump in and out of the list depending on how well sampled they got each month.

For instance, Debian 12 (Bookworm) is 2.27% in April, 1.98% in June, 1.96% in July, then drops off the survey until this month where it reappears as Debian 13 (Trixie) at 1.58%. Obviously there's some noise in those numbers, but Trixie was released November 15 last year so I suspect this reflects an underlying trend of people slowly upgrading their systems over the intervening year*, causing the share of Bookworm to drop low enough for Debian to disappear from the list for a few months until Trixie had accumulated enough users for it to show up again. But it could also drop again next month if some other distro with a similar number of actual users gets better represented in the random sampling, who knows. That's my guess, anyway.

*I sat on the upgrade from 11 to 12 for almost a year because it came out right before I moved internationally, then my computer was in transit for 5 months (COVID…), then I just didn't have the brainspace for it for a while, so I get it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: spymastermattI'm looking forward to Valves next project... Electron.. err Neutron?
Whatever the name is, I'd love to see a counterpart to Proton, allowing devs to natively target Linux but still let their games run on Windows via a compatibility layer

And Mac. It would probably be easiest to do with WebAssembly and WebGPU.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: ElectricPrismIn the near future, possibly the year 2030, you will not be allowed to own a modular computer as we know it now.

Quoting: walther von stolzingThe relative 'openness' of the x86 PC platform really was a historical accident, the result of IBM scrambling to make a late entry to the 'micro market'; and they did try to take some measures against it, but failed ultimately.

To be fair, we are already extremely lucky that the IBM open PC architecture (for the young'ns, that is the ATX and subsequent *TX form factor standard layouts) is still in use today. The IBM open PC architecture, devised in the 80s! Still in use in 2025! That is incredible staying power.

If you'd asked me whether *TX desktops would still be popular in the 2020s, even as recent as 2015, I would probably have pessimistically thought "no way!". My reasoning would have been the relative surging popularity of mobile phones as primary devices. But here we are. I can drive to a store and purchase *TX standards compliant parts of just about any variety.

With that in mind, I'd say let's not be so pessimistic. May the open PC architecture stick around for another 3-4 decades yet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Not too unlike Nvidia and their efforts with their kernel driver / Nova. Baby steps are being taken and it will take a long time yet for them to earn my trust.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I hope the RISC-V and HomeLab/Modders are paying attention, because compute is about to be dramatically reduced due to the strangulation on price of electricity, and economic warfare against the peasants.

The direction that RISC-V and ARM seem to be moving in also support the notion that locked-down systems will be replacing today's PCs. Both of those platforms appear to require a ton of proprietary extensions to be able to serve as the CPU of a PC. That doesn't bode well at all for the (farther) future of desktop Linux, needless to say.

The relative 'openness' of the x86 PC platform really was a historical accident, the result of IBM scrambling to make a late entry to the 'micro market'; and they did try to take some measures against it, but failed ultimately.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Damn. The two 16GB kits of DDR5 RAM in my PC that I built back in 2023 are Crucial; they've been unavailable for months, I noticed. Between that, and the two 2TB SATA SSDs from Crucial I've bought in the past two years, I really lucked out not needing to buy any components this year.

Crucial was a good brand. This is absolutely a shitty situation for consumers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: mr-victoryThey believed they were doing HDD optimizations, but they figured out the optimizations had no effect because loading speed was not I/O bottlenecked. So they chopped off all duplications. A lot of them apparently.

The age-old mistake of premature optimisation...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Eike

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: ElectricPrismIn the near future, possibly the year 2030, you will not be allowed to own a modular computer as we know it now.

That's nonsense.
I offer a bet for 100€ to be paid on 1.1.2031.

"as we know it now."

2005 is unlike 2025

Gone:
☑ Removable Batteries on Laptops and Phones
☑ Optical CD/DVD/HD/BluRay Drive on Laptops
☑ Ethernet Port in many cases gone necessitating USB-C Hub
☑ Anything outside a single USB-C
☑ Removable MicroSD Storage on Phones
☑ Ability to open devices with a screwdriver, Screens are glued.
☑ Increasing un-affordability of Modular PC Parts eg: after 29 years in business, this article: "The RAM price and availability situation is going to worsen as Micron pull their Crucial consumer business"
☑ RAM Soldered to Silicon
☑ Phones, Tablets, and Laptops as SBC where no parts are removable or replaceable, or difficult to repair

Some tech people have "Stockholm Syndrome" for Big G, Big A, or Big M.

If we don't demand moldularity, consumers will no longer able to mix and match hardware outside of niche hobbyist markets.

Now if you'd like to move the goal post, go ahead. The facts are the facts regardless of arguments, opinions and speculations -- things are not getting better, they're getting worse, again the compute world especially with regard to modularity in 2030 will not be "as we know it now."

The RAM situation is bad enough, just imagine what your power bill will look like as AI eats needs double the power output we currently have now and everyone got the genius idea to shut down their nuclear and coal.

The West is cooked.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This has actually the potential to be the best news ever for Steam gaming - depending on what Valve has negotiated with their distributors.

Nobody is able to buy PCs & RAM usage of games must be frozen at status quo - the Steam machine suddenly looks interesting.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: TightRope

Quoting: ChuckaluphagusI've bought Crucial RAM for decades, and quite a few Crucial SSDs over the past fifteen years. A shame to see it go.

I have bought Crucial products for decades and they were always reliable. Too bad I will have to switch to another brand.
How many people will go back to Crucial when the bubble finally bursts and they need real customers? This is probably a bad long term business decision.

Yeah I was thinking how I've always liked their products, I have a few crucial ssd

But when/if they come back into consumer market it will make me think twice about my purchase

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Pyrate

Black Mesa is for fans who have already experienced the games for what they are.

Yes and no. I agree Black Mesa is definitely for fans of the series and IMO the superior way to play the OG campaign. I'd argue if someone had a mild interest in playing HL1 (they want to experience the story because they've always heard so much about it or they're new to gaming), advise they play Black Mesa. If they're the type of gamer who enjoys or tolerates older games, play HL1.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment