<story><title>Valve secrets spill over in new Steam documentary app</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ss3000</author><text>I used to be a huge Valve fanboy, but throughout the years they&amp;#x27;ve managed to burn away all of that goodwill through a combination of not building good games anymore (or at least not releasing them, as I learned in the article), and pioneering microtransactions and loot boxes (read gambling) added to their existing games that profit mainly off of gamers with poor self control (most of whom are literally children).&lt;p&gt;Although I also blame the gaming community as a whole for collectively rejecting the subscription model for games, which made the much more exploitative f2p + microtransaction&amp;#x2F;lootbox business model the only real viable option for games that require ongoing development.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ilugaslifk</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know enough about the history of microtransactions and loot boxes to evaluate your charge that they &amp;quot;pioneered&amp;quot; them, and that indeed could be quite important to any calculation of how much goodwill they deserve.&lt;p&gt;But I know that in making that calculation, I personally couldn&amp;#x27;t give less of a shit about whether or not they released Half-Life 3, when they&amp;#x27;ve been &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; patron saint of gaming on Linux.  Which they haven&amp;#x27;t just barely saved from oblivion, but been the biggest single force in turning into an actual viable competitor.&lt;p&gt;I hope I don&amp;#x27;t need to explain why that matters for reasons that go beyond whether or not you are personally directly invested in gaming on Linux.&lt;p&gt;Their strongest recent competition (Epic) has not just been indifferent to gaming on Linux, they&amp;#x27;ve actively done enormous damage to it: they&amp;#x27;ve bought exclusive rights to popular mainstream games which fully supported Linux, and &lt;i&gt;removed that support&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Though the picture is further complicated in that the other big competitor, GOG.com (run by CD Projekt, the Polish developers of the Witcher series), are &lt;i&gt;easily&lt;/i&gt; the best citizens altogether, most importantly for their commitment to DRM-free distribution.  But they also aren&amp;#x27;t the ones doing Proton.</text></comment>
<story><title>Valve secrets spill over in new Steam documentary app</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ss3000</author><text>I used to be a huge Valve fanboy, but throughout the years they&amp;#x27;ve managed to burn away all of that goodwill through a combination of not building good games anymore (or at least not releasing them, as I learned in the article), and pioneering microtransactions and loot boxes (read gambling) added to their existing games that profit mainly off of gamers with poor self control (most of whom are literally children).&lt;p&gt;Although I also blame the gaming community as a whole for collectively rejecting the subscription model for games, which made the much more exploitative f2p + microtransaction&amp;#x2F;lootbox business model the only real viable option for games that require ongoing development.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmerl</author><text>I never liked their DRM stance and personally not using Steam and buying games in DRM-free stores instead, but Valve gained a lot of goodwill by backing Linux gaming and important gaming related FOSS projects like Mesa, Wine, dxvk, vkd3d and advancing Vulkan and OpenXR in general.&lt;p&gt;They are still lacking effort in marketing of Linux gaming, but their technical backing is really great.</text></comment>