I will say this:

The antitrust lawsuits against Apple and Google can only help in limiting the duopoly on mobile and making the experience better for both Android and iOS users. Especially iOS users.

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QuoteSweeney's point here is that Valve make a lot of money from that 30% cut and goes on to say "If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made" and complains that when you add together Valve's cut, marketing and so on that the cut for developers is small.

So his first argument is that Valve is making more money from the games that sell really well than the publisher themselves.

Valve almost immediately reduces their cut of games that sell really well:

QuoteIt was only a few days later (quite cheekily then), that Valve suddenly publicly announced their plan to reduce their take for the top-selling Steam games.

And then Tim Sweeney complains about Valve not doing it for everyone and only the big publishers benefit (that isn't necessarily true; small developers occasionally ship hits).

If Valve reduced their cut for everyone, what would his next argument be?

I'm trying to take Tim Sweeney's side here because it's true that Valve has a near-monopoly on PC games (I wish they had a monopoly on Japanese VNs too) and monopoly power should not exist, but these arguments don't seem to be coming from a place where I can assume good faith.

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Maybe I'll buy Steins;Gate. I'm surprised I only own Darling's Embrace and not the original game. It's been a few years; maybe I'll consider this the equivalent of a rewatch. Wish doukyuusei had the Japanese script...

Or I could just play the games I own already...I'm probably going to do that.

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The last game I heard 3D Realms associated with was around 30 years ago. Now I'm curious what they've been up to.

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Quoting: fenglengshunAs far as I can see, 2024 is looking like the year where most of the Wayland stuff is done. Wine on Wayland is progressing decently, Google seems to be looking at Wayland too so browsers (and CEF & electron apps) should be getting better, new input module is being tested, display colors, drawing tablet, so many things have basic implementation that should be wrapping up this year or the next.

Not incidentally, Google has been sponsoring some of this work for the Wine Wayland driver.

Quoting: fenglengshunIt's really is just Steam that we don't have a timeline for when they may go full Wayland native - but even then we've seen the moves they've made to pay their tech debts and modernize.

Well, you can sort of run Steam in Wayland as of two weeks ago, though a lot of things are broken: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4924#issuecomment-1975248612

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Quoting: const

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: melkemind

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.

The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

That makes me wonder how much attention they'll ever give to gaming if their main focus is engineering and other technical uses. Has there been any disccussion around actual gaming use? Part of the problem with the proprietary drivers has always been their apathy toward Linux gaming. Any plans for that to change with the open source driver?

I'm tempted to say NVIDIA is thinking: "I wish they would get to tens of millions of [gaming] users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." I don't know.

But in some ways, it doesn't matter. It's open source, now, and the community is already doing great work with NVK, Zink, and the Noveau kernel driver (maybe one day replaced by Nova?). Fancy stuff like DLSS might not be there (?, I don't really use any of those features), but I don't think it will be long until Noveau + Zink + NVK is the driver stack we'll be running on NVIDIA almost everywhere because it's just a better experience in general.

I sure hope so...

NVK is turing+, isn't it?

Currently yes, but this is from the December 2023 update:

QuoteWe are also continuing to work on Maxwell support. We don't have an ETA yet but the work is ongoing. Most of the work right now is in bringing up the new compiler on Maxwell. While the overall shape of the instruction set is largely the same as in Turing, it has an entirely different encoding. There are also some Maxwell-specific bugs as well as a few features that have to be implemented differently there. If you're looking to contribute to NVK, helping out with Maxwell support is an excellent area for new contributors.

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Quoting: melkemind

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.

The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

That makes me wonder how much attention they'll ever give to gaming if their main focus is engineering and other technical uses. Has there been any disccussion around actual gaming use? Part of the problem with the proprietary drivers has always been their apathy toward Linux gaming. Any plans for that to change with the open source driver?

I'm tempted to say NVIDIA is thinking: "I wish they would get to tens of millions of [gaming] users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." I don't know.

But in some ways, it doesn't matter. It's open source, now, and the community is already doing great work with NVK, Zink, and the Noveau kernel driver (maybe one day replaced by Nova?). Fancy stuff like DLSS might not be there (?, I don't really use any of those features), but I don't think it will be long until Noveau + Zink + NVK is the driver stack we'll be running on NVIDIA almost everywhere because it's just a better experience in general.

I sure hope so...

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QuoteA keen point to remember is that the Steam Deck is only officially available in the US, CA, UK, and EU on Steam (and Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong via KOMODO). So these stats only include those regions when talking globally, and only those direct from Valve (not KOMODO) as far as we know.

Obligatory "it's still not available in Australia" comment. Maybe a Steam Deck 2?

It's good to see it doing well. It's certainly making a dent in market share, and doing it in the right way. I love how much of a difference it has made to the desktop overall, even down to work on Wayland protocols.

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Quoting: Pyretic

Quoting: ExpandingManI still wish steam would have another badge rather than "unsupported" for games which work perfectly fine on linux more generally. I can't tell you how many "unsupported" games I've played without any issue whatsoever. Miraculously the situation is *way better* than the number of "verified" and "playable" games would indicate.

The problem seems to be that Valve doesn't really give games a second pass once they've gone through the Verification process once, unless the game is popular enough for Valve to notice. Sadly, I'm not sure what the solution is here.

For starters, have a history:

- Feb 2, 2024: Game was marked as Verified.
- March 9, 2024: EA released a new launcher and the game is now Unsupported.
- March 15, 2024: Game was marked as Verified, launcher now works in Proton Hotfix.
- November 9th, 2024: Game now requires BattlEye Anticheat and the developers don't want to turn it on for Proton. Game is now marked as Unsupported.

And there should be crowd-sourced reports, like on ProtonDB. Ask users, Is This Game a Good Experience? and Do You Agree With Our Rating? once in a while. With enough reports, Valve could get testers to re-investigate.

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Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.

The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

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