I'm back on GNOME now, but it's great to see more drawing tablet features.

They're working through these issues: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues#Graphics_Tablet_Support

And also great to see...whatever's happening with colour management.

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There was a time where I'd play Halo for hours every day after I came home from school, sometimes into the early morning, sometimes not going to school at all. Crazy to think about now.

But I haven't even bought Halo Infinite, so I don't think there's much chance of me playing this one...but still, it's nice to read news about Halo now and again.

Interesting to see they're now using the same engine as Installation 01.

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Quoting: CatKillerWhat Valve have said is that they want their customers to get a fair deal, and if it looks like they aren't they would like to find out why and if there's anything they can do to change that. Is that "getting a good deal for your customers" or is that "monopolistic price-fixing"? Given that it's publishers that set their own prices, and you can find games cheaper than on Steam, is there any actual harm from Valve's actions even if their intent was super nefarious? Those are the kinds of questions that the court would have to find answers for.

For sure, it's up to the courts and not armchair lawyer P.R.T Manual. My opinion is this:

Threatening to de-list a publisher's game from Steam if they do not bring the price down to match the game's price on other stores has a direct impact on other stores—namely, Epic Games Store (EGS). EGS takes a smaller cut than Steam, which means publishers would be able to price their games lower on EGS to get more sales. But because of Steam's price parity policy, publishers can't take advantage of this. We can argue whether Steam's cut is fair or not (I think it is), but it's that royalty split that is responsible for EGS customers getting a better deal than Steam customers. If Valve is really so concerned about making sure Steam customers get a better deal, they should match EGS' royalty split. If not, they shouldn't threaten publishers with de-listing because EGS has a more attractive deal.

I mentioned EGS because of its obvious relevance to the case, but this applies equally to smaller stores like itch.io. Wolfire is an indie publisher, and Valve is not above threatening smaller publishers. If Valve didn't enforce price parity, itch.io could rightfully be much more relevant because of its ridiculously good royalty deals for publishers. And I think that's kind of sad.

There's also the fact that Valve has said, for years, that there is no such price parity policy when in reality they actively enforce it, so clearly they think they're doing something wrong too by attempting to hide it.

Quoting: CatKillerIt's the first two attachments (reports from two expert witnesses) on the motion to exclude testimony of Dr Schwarz, as I recall. The first one is about 300 pages. It's a while since I read it. Um... these two, I think: Attachment 1 and Attachment 2

Thanks! This should make for some exciting bedtime reading.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI won't pretend to understand the specifics here (and there are a lot of documents to sift through), but my understanding is that these are direct quotes from emails. I think the only way Valve could come out of this cleanly is if the emails were completely fabricated.

But it does seem early to conclude whether that is evidence or not.

Oh, I'm sure they were excerpts of actual emails sent from actual people at Valve. Discovery dredges up a tonne of stuff - from other companies, too, as you noted. The court will look at the context of the documents, and both sides will make their arguments, and the court will decide whether it shows a policy or pattern of wrongdoing, or whether it's just perfectly fine course of business stuff.

Plaintiffs have to throw every accusation they can, since they can't generally add them afterwards, and then they have to dig around to find something that might support their position; the court case is what determines whether there's any validity to it.

Media and commentators love to look at accusations of the plaintiff, since they get to go first and they necessarily have to throw in the most salacious stuff, whereas actual court cases are really long and kinda boring.

I agree with all of this, though assuming all of these emails are factual, I don't think any amount of context will change my opinion. But we'll see.

Do you have a link to Valve's rebuttal? I'd be interested in reading it.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIn the Exhibit 85 document on Aug 23, 2024, there is some reference to emails from Valve about price parity that is being submitted as evidence.

For context, the plaintiff's expert witness produced a report saying what the plaintiff wanted; Valve's expert witness (compellingly, IMO) said that plaintiff's report was terrible and shouldn't be allowed in the case, and the document you're looking at is plaintiffs arguing that their export report should totally be allowed. None of it's actually in the case as evidence yet. Both sides are still in the "what is this case actually about" stage. Although, to be fair, once "what a case is actually about" is decided in anti-trust cases, the outcome tends to follow directly - hence the years of haggling before that point.

I won't pretend to understand the specifics here (and there are a lot of documents to sift through), but my understanding is that these are direct quotes from emails. I think the only way Valve could come out of this cleanly is if the emails were completely fabricated.

But it does seem early to conclude whether that is evidence or not.

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Quoting: fenglengshunDesktop. I mainly used Rustdesk + TeamViewer + AnyDesk, for redundancy in case of connectivity weirdness. Last I tested, unattended access is wonky on KDE and unattended login doesn't work on Wayland at all.

Oh, well, you're probably screwed for unattended login on anything except GNOME when it comes to Wayland. There's wayvnc for Sway but there's no real unattended login for that.

I can say GNOME RDP works very well for servers on Wayland.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: LoudTechieOn the anti-trust stuff

What about the price parity enforcement Valve has been doing?

There's been no evidence that that's a thing that they've done.

Maybe some evidence of that will turn up, but it hasn't yet.

I was looking through the court documents for the case the other day: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59859024/wolfire-games-llc-v-valve-corporation/

In the Exhibit 85 document on Aug 23, 2024, there is some reference to emails from Valve about price parity that is being submitted as evidence.

For example:

QuoteTom Giardino, a Steam Business Team member, described Valve’s pricing padty requirement as "a platform goal that goes beyond Steam keys[.]" See: Valve, Emails Regarding Game Pricing, 7/23/2018-7/25/2018 (VALVE_ANT_0605887-89, at VALVE_ANT_0605887).

For example, Valve withholding promotion unless the publisher prices the game the same as they do on other platforms:

QuoteWhen publisher XXX asked Valve if it could leave XXX out of a discount it was planning to run, Valve told the publisher that "we didn't want to be known as the store where XXX prices are unfair. We’ve pursued this same policy with other partners and in other regions, to make sure Steam customers aren't put at an unfair disadvantage to customers shopping at retail or online at other stores." See: Valve, Emails Regarding XXX Game Promotion, 1/21/2015-2/5/2015 (VALVE_ANT_0809427-434, at VALVE_ANT_0809428-429). (Emphasis in original.)

Valve explicitly asking that prices for games not be cheaper anywhere else, even if only by a dollar:

QuoteA drafted Valve announcement regarding new currencies on Steam asks publishers that "Just make sure that you're not disadvantaging Steam customers; if you sell your game for £8.99 on another store, it shouldn’t be £9.99 on Steam." See: Valve, Emails Regarding New Currencies on Steam, 7/9/2015-7/24/2015 (VALVE_ANT_0114214-20, at VALVE_ANT_0114215), available at Tom Giardino, Dep. Tr., 11/2/2023, Exhibit 187 (Emphasis added.)

Valve suggesting that publishers should stop selling their games on Steam if they refuse to price their games on Steam at parity elsewhere, and then saying they've de-listed games for this behaviour before:

QuoteValve remarked in another email that "if you wanted to sell a non-Steam version of your game for $10 at retail and $20 on Steam, we’d ask to get that same lower price or just stop selling the game on Steam if we couldn’t treat our customers fairly[,]" and went on to confirm that this was not a new policy: "we’ve always asked that partners treat our customers fairly, and we've often opted not to promote games or stop selling them altogether if we aren’t able to get fair treatment for our users." See: Valve, Emails Regarding Steam Key Guidelines, 6/28/2018-7/3/2018 (VALVE_ANT_0605087-89, at VALVE_ANT_0605087)0 available at Gabe Newell0 Dep. Tr., 11/21/2023, Exhibit 349.

Valve talking about how important price parity is and referencing a game they de-listed for refusing to tow the line:

QuoteValve, Emails Between XXX and Valve, 6/6/2013-6/7/2013 (VALVE_ANT_1216044-45, VALVE_ANT_1216044). ("[T]his
presents a problem for us on Steam. We want to make sure that our price on Steam is competitive with retail and other
digital stores in XXX so that we do not teach customers that Steam is always the expensive option.")

QuoteValve, Emails Between XXX and Valve, 8/15/2014 (VALVE_ANT_2576464). (Valve tells XXX that it "[j]ust saw today that the pricing for XXX on Steam is uncompetitive with other retailers, similar to the issue we’re having with XXX and XXX.... We’ve made the choice to take the game down until we can reach price parity.")

I recommend reading through some of the documents in courtlistener. There seem to be several publishers involved in this case willing to enter email correspondence from Valve as evidence.

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Quoting: LoudTechieOn the anti-trust stuff

What about the price parity enforcement Valve has been doing?

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Quoting: poiuzPlease provide the sources with the actual numbers.

Valve is a private company and they're very secretive about their financials. I doubt you're going to get any of the answers you want, but even if Valve only spent $100,000 on Linux development (which can't be true if you account for employing Joshua Ashton, Pierre, the primary DXVK developer, years of contracting CodeWeavers, recently sponsoring Arch Linux freelancers, just to start with), that's more than any other gaming company has done.

I think what's more important than the amount of money Valve has spent on Linux is the fact that all of us can clearly see and feel the impact it's making.

Quoting: poiuzPlease provide the number of actually supported games (by the developers, not by Valve).

Almost zero. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the question.

Quoting: poiuzI'm talking of getting the actual game developers to provide actual support for Steam Deck / Proton / Linux. What are they doing this way?

That's never going to happen no matter what Valve does. Some developers might change their minds if the Steam Deck had 10 times as many sales, but there aren't hat many people interested in it (including me). Get millions of people to care, and game developers will care. There need to be more Linux users on Steam.

Fact is, Valve has doubled the number of users on Steam in 4 years. That's more than any other company has done in the last 20 years. I don't think they're doing a bad job.

Signed,
Someone who doesn't think Valve is going to come out of these anti-trust cases looking good.

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It's a nice deal for publishers, but I don't care much about Epic.

itch.io is the store that really does right by developers and publishers without sacrificing the experience for players. They have a Linux client, but that doesn't even matter because every game (?) can be played without a launcher. They let publishers choose what cut they want to give itch; as far as cutting them out completely. They have all these great options for creating a store page and they've added crazy features over the years.

GOG is the store that does right by players by trying to give players as much extra as they can and ensuring DRM-free games, but publishers tend to be lazy about updating their games, and they'll offer any extra goodies on Steam anyway, so they can't get anywhere. They don't have a Linux client, but you don't need one anyway. They're nice. I like them. They have a cool mission.

Epic doesn't serve Linux players at all and requires them to work around their client. It's never a fun experience visiting their site, and I have such little trust in them. Unlike GOG, they're creating exclusives on the PC platform, which harms player choice. They're also working against Linux by not enabling their Anti-Cheat games like Fortnite for Proton, but at least they've made EAC compatible. They do free games, which is nice, and I've heard quite a few games are DRM-free, but I can't say much else good about them.

Steam is obviously favoured by Linux players due to how much effort Valve puts into the Linux experience. But a lot of the games are DRM-encumbered, which is no good. They also require you to use a launcher. But they've helped bring some noteworthy visual novels to Linux by virtue of being a popular place to publish for Japanese publishers, so I let it slide. They've got room for improvement, but Steam is a generally good experience.

DLsite is my favourite game store. DMM is my least-favourite, even below Epic.

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