Helping Valve to Power Up Steam Devices
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Regulars are buzzing about Igalia's collaboration with Valve to enhance the Linux graphics stack, a crucial step in powering up Steam devices. Commenters riff on the potential implications for Linux gaming and the open-source community, with some highlighting the importance of Valve's contributions to Linux development. As discussion unfolds, a consensus emerges that this partnership could be a game-changer for Linux on gaming hardware, with some users eagerly anticipating improved performance and compatibility. The thread feels particularly relevant right now as the gaming industry continues to shift towards more open and interoperable technologies.
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Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
Hardware not so much
Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.
In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.
I have hope for Veryl though.
With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.
On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.
Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying.
And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.
Obviously it has to “work” at sale but ongoing maintenance could be shared with the community.
It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate devices.
Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own themselves.
Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront.
Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community.
Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing right by the consumer. I'm not sure if there's more to the secret source, her sauce, because we've yet to see another CEO pull their head out of their arse far enough to see how lucrative this approach can be: consumerism is fickle, fanaticism is loyal.
It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion.
When your competition is EA... it's not hard.
Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail.
But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.
Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?
[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/17/gabe-newell-leviathan-superya...
They only begrudgingly conceded refunds in 2015 after the no-refunds policy they had maintained for 12 years was found to be illegal in Australia.
Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.
Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.
Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)
Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!
So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.
Loot boxes done well are not user hostile, players pay because they like them, and sure, it uses all the tricks from the gambling industry to get as most money as they can, but player don't feel scammed or considering it an obstacle to their goals. It is just an additional feature they may or may not use. Compare to say, locking part of the game behind a paid DLC, players don't like that, they feel forced. Same end goal, that is to make their money your money, but the latter is considered hostile.
And ads, Steam is full of ads, from recommendations to the store page showing up right as you launch steam. But they won't put a popup between you and your game. They show you the ads you want to see... And you buy games you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
And Steam has DRM, that's weak DRM, but effective at what it does, and importantly, if you bought the games legally, you won't even notice, contrary to some other company intrusive practices.
I just buy single player offline games with no IAP, and Steam is amazing. It's a million miles ahead of the competitors, and it's really surprising that EA/Ubi etc.. try to compete but don't get the reason they're losing. They screw customers and then act surprised that customers hate them.
All other games require you to keep opening loot boxes to get what you want.
Their worst failure is allowing games with Denuvo on their store.
Look me in the eyes and read this quote to me again. Then think about how yourself from 20 years ago would feel about reading this quote from someone else. You've gone so far down the rabbit hole but you don't realize you're in one.
My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.
It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".
It looks like false without sources.
I acknowledge that there's a legitimate ethical concern there the same way there is for, say, Magic the Gathering or other card games. But much like MtG, I can't bring myself to be all that upset about it.
Sounds like we need someone to.. raise the bar.
You listed one thing. What's the "etc."?
I wish more companies were private for profit but not inf growth.
Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve responded by investing in open source OS stuff. Their goal is to commoditize Windows, so that Microsoft doesn't wrest control of video game sales away from them. Commoditize your complement is a strategy as old as the software industry itself.
We've known all this for years, it's been discussed publicly and no one is hiding it. It always annoys me when people think we're in Lord of the Rings and one company is Sauron or another is Gandalf. It's all just business. To everyone who makes decisions, it all boils down to numbers on a spreadsheet. They want their number to go up.
What you SHOULD care about is competition. Valve would never have invested in all these OSS technologies if Microsoft hadn't tried to compete with them. They wouldn't be consumer friendly and they wouldn't make investments if they thought they could sit on their ass. They would just coast and enshittify (like Microsoft has in the OS space with its Windows monopoly).
We don't need good guy companies, we need strong pro-competition laws and strong enforcers of those laws. You can vote accordingly at the ballot box, and you can also vote accordingly with your wallet, buy stuff from the little guys.
With the context that a lot of modern enshittification, outsourcing, layoffs, anti-consumer practises follow from these short term approaches
These responses to incentives are in the DNA of every corporation and any solution which ignores that will fail. Competition for the consumer's dollar is the key and what you need to promote. These are basic economic principles that go all the way back to Adam Smith, a lot of problems would be solved if more people were aware of their significance and considered restoring competition to markets where it has been eliminated a main function of our government.
The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.
For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.
I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.
I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To be sure, formal procedures can also be window-dressing: it's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I'm just skeptical of ascribing too much benefit to lack of structure.
Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.
With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
This isn't about valve specifically
I've always been interrested in organisations, but not so much by the theory that I've always found too dry.
> or publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
That threat is limited because the other shareholders do not want to reduce the value of their investment either. Look at what a firm of Musk has on Tesla with something like a 15% stake.
Like you touched on, for whatever reason, most large enough companies haven't seemed to figure out this obvious truth. I tend to believe it's because it's harder than it looks, once a company reaches a certain size. Now sure, they are by no means perfect, but I'd like to at least give them credit for being far better than any of the competition, no matter the rational behind it.
Often when people run into problems with a GPU they blame "the drivers". How confident are you that the problems you ran into originated from the drivers, and not from other sources, such as the hardware itself? Just because an issue goes away with a driver update it doesn't mean that the problem originated in the driver -- most of the time what happens is that they found a hardware bug and implemented yet another software workaround.
I am not throwing the HW folks under the bus, either. The hardware is immensely complex and it's not that they can release a new revision every month.
One of the main responsibilities of GPU drivers is working around the bugs that are found after hardware is released. That, and getting all the blame.
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...
Hardware can have issues, but firmware and drivers usually work around those issues. When firmware and drivers crash, you get "masterpieces" like the one above.
We've hit a ton of bugs on the adreno 830, with even basic stuff like barriers being broken.
The problem isn't exclusive to Qualcomm fwiw, we've run into plenty of bugs in ARM's driver. Apple's too
OSS isn't this caricature good-vs-evil situation people sometimes imagine, it is all about economic incentives.
> But the incentive to making something open source is that someone might improve your work
Device drivers, particularly on mobile, aren't evergreen sorts of software. New hardware is released several times a year, and maintenance after shipping is limited to critical issues. By the time it hits the market, the people who developed that driver have moved on to newer products.
> It is somewhat arrogant to assume that nobody else out there could possibly improve this code or add value
Whatever they did would have completely missed the release schedule. It may provide value to people who want to keep using a 10 year old phone, but how does that benefit a company that only makes income when they sell new models?
> Just like it is arrogant to assume that your competitors don't already know your 'secrets' and haven't reverse engineered anything they found interesting.
This made me laugh. You would be surprised by how minimal reverse engineering goes on in this space. It boils down to the same reason as before: by the time you have made any progress, the product you are reverse engineering is semi obsolete. The vast majority of the time it makes more sense to invest those resources into developing your own stuff.
That's my $.02 from having worked for four major GPU vendors out there. Upper management knows what they are doing, even if outsiders don't get it. The incentives simply aren't there for most GPU vendors most of the time.
Goes for console controllers too.
Also possible the touchpads are better for fatigue than joysticks
I bought the SteamDeck because it looked like a cool product and I liked the openness ("it's just running Linux"), and I love it. And it got me back into gaming :-).
Replaying my favorite GBA/DS/etc games again on the Deck was so much fun. Huge screen for my (older) eyes, ability to speed up/rewind/save slots, and other tweaks if I wanted were all a blast. I played back through some of my favorites as a kid and enjoyment and nostalgia were both off the charts.
I ended up selling it to a friend because I enjoy making things much more, but the Deck is such a fantastic device.
My comment was more to prove that it possible to do open source while having share holders. My claim that Google does more is auxiliary to it.
Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.
The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.)
[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud
It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.
Do you understand now what I'm reading?
They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.
Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.
I can understand that, OTOH I have a $1500 gaming PC (probably worth far less now--I built it over a year ago) for explicitly that purpose. What I don't have is a modern, low-power living room HTPC with native/first-class Linux support on which to run Kodi (I have a custom one that's quite long in the tooth). If I could dock a steam deck in my living room and use it for Kodi 80% of the time with games for the remaining 20%, why should Valve care? I have already given Valve hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in game sales.
That's a mark against the Beelink for many :)
I'm expecting say ~£20, which is significant.
The price for Win 11 home on https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0kr... is £120.
I've wasted $1000+ on console games over the years that I don't have access to anymore, yet I can still install the first Steam game I bought decades ago.
I personally preferred Fedora for this but mostly because my employer is a redhat shop. It's not otherwise (as far as I know) any better or worse than any other distro for gaming.
Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"
Their customers, Valve, in this case, deserve credit for being good FLOSS citizens (even if they are building a DRM walled garden on top of it :/), but the actual workers are the real unsung heroes. Them, Codethink, Collabora, and other open-source consultancies I might have missed are doing the community a huge service."
Additionally you can get a lot of the benefits of Steam (Proton etc.) even for titles you didn't acquire through Steam - you can add and launch third party executables through the Steam client.
Steam is not exactly a walled garden save for some rather light curation of their own store.
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