<story><title>Valve Introduces Proton Next</title><url>https://linuxgamingcentral.com/posts/valve-introduces-proton-next/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>firecall</author><text>The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.&lt;p&gt;My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms.
They would rather buy&amp;#x2F;re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher.&lt;p&gt;Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.&lt;p&gt;They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard&amp;#x2F;Battle.net aren&amp;#x27;t even on their radar.&lt;p&gt;They are mostly indifferent to MS&amp;#x2F;Xbox Store.&lt;p&gt;With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!</text></item><item><author>zamalek</author><text>I watched a talk by GabeN &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt; ago, where he explained his business philosophy (which also had to do with his exit from Microsoft). It was strikingly simple: treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well (even if the majority of customers don&amp;#x27;t understand that... yet).</text></item><item><author>manchmalscott</author><text>Valve&amp;#x27;s continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released &lt;i&gt;eight&lt;/i&gt; years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it&amp;#x27;s things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck.&lt;p&gt;The only thing that doesn&amp;#x27;t really work I&amp;#x27;ve noticed is when games have an online component, whether it&amp;#x27;s like easy anti cheat which I&amp;#x27;ve heard &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be just flipping a switch to enable but I haven&amp;#x27;t seen anyone actually do that,  or some weirdness happening with whatever the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is doing that makes it seemingly a 50&amp;#x2F;50 coin toss as to whether it&amp;#x27;ll run with the exact same settings.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AceJohnny2</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve certainly come a long way. I remember when they first tied the release of CounterStrike to installing Steam (CS 1.6, 2002), and that was not received well. Online auth was spotty. People were not happy about having this extra software hogging their memory.&lt;p&gt;But Valve steadily improved it, and made a worthwhile value proposition.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s worth comparing to Microsoft&amp;#x27;s incredibly clumsy and ill-fated &amp;quot;Games For Windows Live&amp;quot;. At a macro level, why couldn&amp;#x27;t they repeat Valve&amp;#x27;s success? I suppose it&amp;#x27;s a management problem.</text></comment>
<story><title>Valve Introduces Proton Next</title><url>https://linuxgamingcentral.com/posts/valve-introduces-proton-next/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>firecall</author><text>The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.&lt;p&gt;My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms.
They would rather buy&amp;#x2F;re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher.&lt;p&gt;Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.&lt;p&gt;They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard&amp;#x2F;Battle.net aren&amp;#x27;t even on their radar.&lt;p&gt;They are mostly indifferent to MS&amp;#x2F;Xbox Store.&lt;p&gt;With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!</text></item><item><author>zamalek</author><text>I watched a talk by GabeN &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt; ago, where he explained his business philosophy (which also had to do with his exit from Microsoft). It was strikingly simple: treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well (even if the majority of customers don&amp;#x27;t understand that... yet).</text></item><item><author>manchmalscott</author><text>Valve&amp;#x27;s continual focus on Linux (SteamOS 1.0 was released &lt;i&gt;eight&lt;/i&gt; years ago) is honestly incredible, Proton even sometimes works better than native Linux builds. Truly nobody else (in the gaming space) is doing it like Valve are. I saw a talk[1] from a KDE dev talking about features Valve sponsored to be added to KDE Plasma and it&amp;#x27;s things that are useful for everyone outside the context of the steam deck.&lt;p&gt;The only thing that doesn&amp;#x27;t really work I&amp;#x27;ve noticed is when games have an online component, whether it&amp;#x27;s like easy anti cheat which I&amp;#x27;ve heard &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be just flipping a switch to enable but I haven&amp;#x27;t seen anyone actually do that,  or some weirdness happening with whatever the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is doing that makes it seemingly a 50&amp;#x2F;50 coin toss as to whether it&amp;#x27;ll run with the exact same settings.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=a0gEIeFgDX0&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>denkmoon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m the same, as a 30-something. Steam is so much better and Gabe has fostered my undying loyalty. He&amp;#x27;d have to shoot my dog to stop me using Steam.</text></comment>