Quoting: TevurIt's a shame that Sony at first secures a place in PC Gamers heart for bringing great games like Horizon, God of War, Returnal, Last of Us and more to PC and than so clumsily tear it down with this absolut very bullshit.
Why?
WHY? It makes absolutely no sense at all.

On the offchance that you genuinely don't understand this:

Sony already has a platform that handles storage, sales, updates, achievements and player chat for hundreds of millions of players. Of course they'd rather PC players used that than Sony having to pay Valve 30% for the privilege of using their equivalent. They're way better provisioned than the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Paradox, or Epic, who are all trying to do the same thing.

Rolling PSN out for PC players is going to take time and money, though, both of which would be wasted if there isn't actually a market for PlayStation games on PC. So you port a few games as a trial balloon - older ones, that aren't really selling PlayStations on their own any more - so if they flop you're only out the porting costs rather than the cost of the full network rollout as well.

If that works, try a simultaneous release for PlayStation and PC to gauge how much you gain from PC sales relative to how much you lose from PlayStation sales.

Then you have the data for which will give you the best outcome - rolling out PSN for PC, giving up 30% of your sales revenue on PC, or giving up PC entirely.

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Quoting: PenglingErm, weren't there people out on the interwebs saying a couple of weeks ago that PSN requirements weren't going to lead to new launchers and similar stuff being added to future Sony PC releases?

There are people on the Internet who say anything.

This one's been flagged as having PSN integration for ages, and was always going to be part of having PSN as a Rockstar/EA/Ubisoft-style parallel store and launcher move. The lesson recently was that you can't accidentally sell games that need a thing in countries where you don't have the thing.

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Quoting: Pyrate

Quotethe steam linux SDK is like 8 years old

Is that true? How is Valve and other developers releasing Linux Native games recently then?

No. If you want to do hyperbolic complaints about the age of the target libraries because you can't be arsed to do a Linux build, you'd say that they were 12 years old. That's the original "scout" set, from the very beginning of Steam for Linux, based on Ubuntu 12.04.

If you build against a "scout" container, you actually get mostly libraries from "soldier" except for those that have to be from "scout" for ABI compatibility. "soldier" is based on the libraries from Debian 10 in 2019. This (building against "scout" and getting "soldier") is the currently recommended set. You can't build against "soldier" directly and release on Steam.

There is also "sniper" for future games, based on Debian 11 from 2021. If you build against that someone from Valve has to tweak the configuration before it can be released on Steam because the plumbing for making that work with a tickbox in steamworks is being done at Valve Time.

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QuoteNova Roma

Thought, "oh, that looks interesting; I'll put that on my wishlist"... and it was already on my wishlist.

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Quoting: Augustus-OctavianWhat is the broader implication of this, explain this for a noob please

By itself the implications aren't huge.

Historically all of the Nvidia driver on PCs was closed source. Binary blob user space and binary blob kernel modules. But the kernel is GPL and the kernel devs want things in the kernel (rather than running on the kernel) to be GPL. That conflict between GPL and proprietary on the interface of the kernel has led to a lot of tension and a lot of friction.

Having a clear boundary between open source kernel modules and proprietary user space & firmware removes all of that, without the need for GPL condoms or other shenanigans.

Nvidia having open source kernel modules at all is a big step in the right direction. Nvidia making the open source kernel modules the default going forward is another big step in the right direction.

But in terms of end user impact, there ideally won't be any: things will just continue to work whichever modules you're using. It'll just be less frustrating, and hopefully more efficient, for the people doing the nitty-gritty of making a particular bit of hardware work well.

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Quoting: ToddL"The more things change, the more they stay the same"

This is pretty much how I still picture Nvidia today as I do back in the early 2000's, when they refuse to open source their graphics drivers while ATI Radeon (before AMD acquired them) did. They can contribute to the open kernel module all they want but unless they start providing open source graphic drivers, I'm not interested in what they do.

Your timeline is entirely wrong. Ati didn't open source their drivers; they had the proprietary fglrx (which was terrible) and they provided some information to some open source developers under NDA - the open source drivers were predominantly reverse-engineered (just like nouveau). AMD didn't switch their focus from fglrx to the open source drivers till a year after they'd bought Ati - after pressure and an implementation from Novell.

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Quoting: sprocketFor them that is Turing, which made its debut in 2019.

2018. Not a dig, just an FYI.

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Quoting: pete910Ok, not read the whole thing or posts but how many SD's has Valve sold to date?

Only Valve (and probably their suppliers, and that guy that trudges around delivering them all) know for sure; we can only guess. I guess around five million.

Pictured: Steam Deck delivery.

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Quoting: PenglingI was never fooled by that whole attempt to paint the "AAA" label as representing good quality, when it's self-evidently always represented buggy, unfinished experiences

That's not at all what it means. "AAA" means "likely to make money" by analogy with the bond market. Blockbuster big-budget games with a variety of well-established mechanics, ideally as a tie-in to a popular brand or a sequel to a previously-lucrative game, are the safe bets that the industry has discovered over the years, since they'll draw in the widest audience. And since some people get addicted to gambling (which is very lucrative - ask the mafia) having mechanisms to hook some whales is also a safe bet for making money. And, yes, when you're min-maxing revenue you'll want to maximise non-refunded sales for the minimum of QA outlay. The term has never meant good quality.

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Quoting: PyrateFurthermore, people asking for Deck 2 to run current games

Running current games is not adequate. If the Deck 2 is releasing in 2026/2027 then it needs to be able to run games from 2028 & 2029.

It needs to have sufficient performance to minimise the work of game devs to make that happen, and it needs to sell in sufficient numbers to make that effort worthwhile. Those two factors are inversely related: the Switch could command game developers putting in epic amounts of work for their games to run on its underpowered hardware because it sold >100 million units; the Deck 2 isn't going to sell that many so the work required needs to be less. Lower resolution and a smaller screen than the mainstream will get some of the way there, but not all of it.

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