Yeah, I gathered as much while trying to figure out who that is :)

The cut would be less if competition was possible. I will bet my arm, first child and souls on this.

Pain tolerance to prices, how good the support is, how snappy the app is etc. Within the space of game marketplaces they’re average and that’s because every one of them kind of sucks. If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.

Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released. These days there’s nothing. Titles could be broken at any moment by a developer and nobody will have any responsibility to fix it. I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.

I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.

I’ve been reading Ars Technica for over 20 years now but that’s because I like their points, not because I write for them xd

Their cut is mathematically fair but the inputs for this formula are mostly pain tolerance levels of consumers and producers. I meant fair for having a monopoly. Either you’re a utility or need to be broken up so that actual competition can take place.

Steam Deck and Proton killed Linux gaming because nobody bothers to do native ports. While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.

There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them. Not having ARM client though means that you’re running a dynamically recompiling web browser through a translation layer resulting in terrible performance.

True Blood!

Also explains why Steam is still a 32-bit binary and didn’t get ARM port on any platform.

I think the point is that with this kind of upkeep costs it’s hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair, especially given near-monopoly in PC gaming space.

This very cool. I wonder when will we see community settling on some new standardized FPGA platform since Mister and Analogue Pocket have their obvious limitations. I’m only familiar with Analogue side of things but Analogue 64 seems promising.

I don’t see this as a China problem. It’s a lack of regulations and oversight problem. Allied foreign powers (or one specific power to be precise) push far right via social media onto Europe as well.

That’s not that long in the grand scheme of things. It’s been almost 20 years now since Steam was opened to third parties. Valve stopped most of the game development once Steam got into dominant position.