QuoteOther claims like the 30% cut Valve take being "supracompetitive", and another antitrust issue of Valve tying together the Steam Store and Steam Platform seem to be dismissed.

The royalty rate is still in, although the tying has been thrown out. Last time, the judge concluded that Steam didn't become a dominant platform until 2013, so the rate not changing was sufficient to determine that there wasn't anything else to address. In their amended complaint the plaintiffs claim that because Valve bought WON in 2001, Steam has been dominant since 2 years before it existed. And everything the plaintiff says is true is assumed to be true in a motion to dismiss.

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Quoting: TermyI'm just confused that the judge didn't ask for any sort of evidence (which wolfire wouldn't be able to provide of course) - guess he wants to keep enough work for the court going? ^^

Quite the opposite. This is a motion to dismiss, which is to get cases sorted out quickly (and cheaply for the parties). In a ruling on dismissal, the judge assumes that everything the plaintiff says is true, and then sees if there's a reasonable likelihood that they could win: if not, the case gets thrown out. Which is how it got thrown out before. That time, the judge let Wolfire amend their complaint and try again, which is how we're at this point where the case has mostly been thrown out.

Seeing if what the plaintiff has said is actually true comes later.

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Quoting: UsernameUsernameWhy did they make them as ELF in the first place if PE is better?

PE isn't better, it's just more Windowsy. The executables and libraries were ELF because they're Linux executables and libraries, and ELF is the Linux format.

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Quoting: kuhpunktI'm just curious how they handle people using multiple OSs.

Like plenty of people use Windows on their desktop, but switch over to Linux when they use their Steam Deck. How does that count?

It's a hardware survey rather than a user survey. If you have two machines (including one machine that runs two OSes) then they both get counted.

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Quoting: a0kamiI know market share is a meaningful information but has anyone been keeping tab on absolute linux user number estimates ?

Because Steam userbase is constantly growing so a market share growth within a absolute numbers growth is kinda cool actually.

From Liam's handy-dandy Steam Tracker page:

QuoteFor an estimation of the total number of Linux users on Steam, Valve reported they had 132 million "monthly active users" in March 2022 (source).

Using the latest months recorded share (Apr-2022 - 1.14%): 1,504,800 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.

To be clear, that is not the total, that is monthly active.

QuoteBut I do keep in mind "being this or that OS user" does not necessarily mean "there have been sales for this or that OS" or "people equally play that amount of time regardless of their system".
I mean there are tons of statistical biases which prevents us to ultimately declare whether Linux is doing well or not but with some hindsight it's looking good.

Some developers talk about sales per platform, but most don't. Of the ones that have gone public with their sales data, those that don't market to Linux users specifically have sales proportions in line with the Linux marketshare, or sometimes a bit lower; those that do market to Linux users specifically tend to have sales proportions higher than that, sometimes significantly so. And in both cases those are generally given as unit sales rather than revenue.

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Quoting: BlooAlienYeah, I keep seeing people say that Proton is killing native Linux development (or guaranteed to be the death of native Linux games, or already has been/is), then I see on a fairly regular basis native Linux builds of various new (and old) games released. In addition to those native Linux games, I also see more games I've been told will never ever in a billion years run on Linux running on Linux (thanks to Proton).

I highly doubt that Proton's gonna be the death of native Linux games, but it sure does give us all access to a shit-ton of games we'd not be able to play otherwise, and gives publishers and developers a dead-simple way to support selling their games to a platform that many such publishers simply don't understand well enough to give us a native Linux build even if they wanted to. I'm thankful for all the work Valve's put into the WINE project, even if it is totally self-serving and profit-driven. An "everybody wins" scenario still means I win, even if Valve wins also.

There is definitely a market segment that's been completely evaporated by the existence of Proton: third-party ports. Your Tomb Raiders, your Life Is Stranges, your Civilizations, your Borderlands. If you're after an out-house after-the-fact means of making your existing Windows game work on Linux why would you pay for someone to do it when Valve will do it for free? The fact is, though, that the lack of growth in the Linux gaming market since the introduction of the Steam Machines meant that that segment was drying up anyway before the introduction of Proton.

Developers that make a Linux build themselves, because they appreciate the additional insight when bug hunting, because they use Linux themselves, because they're using multiplatform tooling, will continue to do so because it makes sense, regardless of the existence of Proton.

However, there's another segment: new developers, or seasoned developers starting a new project. They could develop their next project as multiplatform from the start, and use cross-platform tooling, and Vulkan & SDL rather than DirectX, and it would benefit them and us if they did so: more users of the software means faster bug finding, faster and more innovative development and improvement, actual testing and support for Linux gaming customers, and a wider recognition that Linux is a valid gaming platform. When those developers are looking around to see how they should proceed, and what the benefits and costs are, the "just use Proton!" mob are going out of their way to discourage developers from even trying to do multiplatform in a way that includes Linux. That is what harms the Linux gaming ecosystem rather than Proton itself.

In principle the growth of Linux marketshare could provide positive pressure for proper multiplatform development at a level that outpaces the negative pressure from people telling developers not to bother, but it's a long way from being a given.

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If they can make sure that it works well on the Deck, that could be a really good experience. Hopefully it will be better polished than the previous one, too.

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Quoting: kaimanPretty conservative Kernel choice, there. I had hoped they'd at least ship with 5.16. OTOH, it will be summer before the .1 release is out and I'll upgrade, and then it's not too long for the first HWE update to materialize. But still ...

There's not really an unambiguously good choice. They've been off-by-one from the LTS kernels before, and it gives them a much higher maintenance burden because they're doing all the maintenance rather than the kernel devs. If they go with the LTS kernel (as they have here) then they either miss out or have to backport useful changes from the next version. Given that they have the HWE mechanism now, it's probably the better choice to use the LTS kernel for those users that aren't on the HWE track (servers, mainly), and have desktop users upgrading on the HWE cycle.

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Quoting: subWell, I guess we're easy to overlook the numbers.
While it seems to be big money, it's actually significantly less compared to Steam sales
and putting all your resources in there.

The figures from the Epic-Apple case suggested that Valve makes about the same amount of money from Steam and from sales of their own stuff.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe real question is why there's no momentum internally to get those projects rolling.

Shipping a game is really, really hard. Having an idea and knocking a prototype together is pretty straightforward in the grand scheme of things, but getting to a polished, tested, finished product that works and that you can sell takes orders of magnitude more sustained and dedicated work that isn't especially fun. On the bright side, Valve have said that shipping Alyx gave them a nice buzz, so they realised that they'd like to do it again.

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