this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
63 points (97.0% liked)
Games
31327 readers
791 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I 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.
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.
Too bad Valve is not incentivizing native Linux ports.
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.
Chicken egg problem is exactly why incentivizing (which is not the same as mandating) would make sense.
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.
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.