how i personally see it is that it welcomes devs to set a new minimum pc requirement to target. due to valve not doing contstent iterations (which imo is actually a good thing), it gives people a point of performance comparison reference to when wanting to play a new title.
Comment on Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking
Ashtear@lemm.ee 2 months agoI didn’t see that coming, and it’s a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it’ll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us dumb enough to that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think it’s more important that it gives Valve a method of avoiding being shoehorned into a “Windows only world”. The Steam Deck is largely why Linux has pushed past 2% market share on the Steam Hardware Survey consistently now. Holo, which is the codename for SteamOS on the Deck, makes up over half of Steam on Linux.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dillusional. Windows is still far and away the majority platform and will be for some time. However, there is a real, functional choice now that didn’t exist a few years ago.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Too bad Valve is not incentivizing native Linux ports.
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Chicken and Egg. Linux is barely above 2%. When it breaks 10-20% market share, I expect companies will start making native ports more common.
The fact that proton/dxvk/vulkan/wine let’s things just work with little to no changes is already pretty incredible.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Chicken egg problem is exactly why incentivizing (which is not the same as mandating) would make sense.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The benefit of Steam is backwards compatibility. The moment you force native porting you lose your greatest benefit. Since you anyway have to build backwards compatibility with Windows you gain nothing by incentivizing native Linux and the developers gain nothing from being incentivized to build native because their games will work through Proton.
There’s no reason for Valve to incentivize native builds. It’s the devs that need to have an incentive to develop natively for Linux. And with the market share being what it is there’s no incentive for the devs either.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I see you don’t know about Steam Linux Runtimes which are backwards and forwards compatible. 1.0 (“scout”) is based on Ubuntu 12.04, so already 12 years of binary compatibility.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Proton is so good that devs have actually gotten better performance by dropping their native Linux build and just running a proton-emulated version in Linux 😀
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And then they release an update for their game and it breaks on Proton. Happens every now and then. A proper native build would not have that problem.
bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It doesn’t really matter though, because Wine is mature enough that it’s not a hacky diy fix, it’s a viable solution. None of the games I play run any worse on Linux than they did on Windows, and some run better. The vast majority of people don’t care whether it’s native or not, they just want it to work.