• chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.

      • DireTech@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        Epic makes tons of money off licensing Unreal to developers and have since before their store was a thing.

        Proton makes direct zero profit, though it does make Steam the best store for anyone on Linux.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Not sure why “direct profit” is important.

          Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.

          Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.

          • DireTech@sh.itjust.works
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            35 minutes ago

            Epic doesn’t do a single thing that doesn’t directly result in profits. Features are only added off they can derive income from them. Lawsuits are filed so they can take a larger percentage of profits. Even his twitter posts are mainly about him getting a larger cut, when he isn’t defending AI child porn.

            Valve is very old school in their ‘keep improving your offering and it will work out’ way. Usually companies like that get bought out and their name run into the ground. It sadly happens in all industries, from Samsonite luggage to BioWare games and even service companies.

            • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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              19 minutes ago

              None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.

              Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?

              Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.

              The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.

          • joelfromaus@aussie.zone
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            3 hours ago

            To quote an old comment of mine:

            Meanwhile Steam is a feature rich platform with a bunch of features that regular C-suite types would never green light because they don’t have a direct ROI.

            Direct profit is the main driving factor for decision making by C-suite types. EGS is a great example of this: it has the very bare bones of what constitutes an online store, you can see products and make purchases. Almost everything else is half assed and tacked on. It’s frankly amazing that a system like Steam exists when they could (and still could) enshittify really badly.

            Link to my other comment.

            • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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              3 hours ago

              I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.

              • DireTech@sh.itjust.works
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                41 minutes ago

                Apple directly makes money off iOS apps and in most of the world you can only buy via their store. On the other hand, I can and do buy games from GoG and run them just fine on my Steam deck and can still benefit from proton.

                The only reason I buy most of my games from Steam is they make things even easier than buying from GoG.

    • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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      16 hours ago

      That Whataboutism is Not really relevant to the lawsuit.

      Just because they made someone useful to expand their control over the games industry, that you happen to like, doesn’t mean them abusing their monopoly position isn’t still bad.

      • Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        15 hours ago

        >Open source, publicly available tool to aid in Linux adoption

        >“some[thing] to expand their control over the games industry”

        Found the Sweeney fanboy. Just because Timmy-boy can’t install kernel-level malware on Linux doesn’t mean Gabe Newell is going to use it to conquer the Earth, bud.

        • sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today
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          12 hours ago

          Steam also places DRM and states in their EULA that you pay to license the title and not own it. Looks like you’re a Steam fanboy. We shouldn’t be fanboys of anything but simply notice the good and bad thaf companies do because either way they aren’t our friends

          • Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 hours ago

            They demonized all actions of Valve, for the sake of defending Epic, even to the point of painting something that aids Linux adoption across the board as if it were a secretive, locked-down part of Steam’s environment. I pointed out the failure in that. Yeah, totally the same. 🙄

          • ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works
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            10 hours ago

            Developers place DRM, that’s not s requirement of Steam publishing. Also, 99% of digital stores state you’re only buying a license. That’s a problem with modern society, not Steam.

        • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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          12 hours ago

          Again with the complete and utter lack of ability to understand that nuance exists, and both can be bad people doing self interested things, and one bad person saying something correct does not mean you agree with everything they stand for just because you agree with the one smart thing.

          Like more than one of you are stuck in this moronic binary mindset. It’s pathetic.

        • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
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          17 hours ago

          Wine was never developed by Epic, as far as I know. Wikipedia showed nothing about Epic, not a word.

        • gens@programming.dev
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          15 hours ago

          I never said epic made wine.

          Wine is like 99% of proton. Historically it was mostly sposored by Collabora and I think they were doing it so they clould run some windows programs on mac (my memory is fuzzy, was a long time ago).

          Valve came later. There were already out-of-tree patches speciffically for games. The wine team didn’t put those in because they are hacks while wines aim is 100% compatibility with windows.

          As those patches grew, stuff like wine-staging emerged that would massage those patches into what the wine project would accept. And even later proton was born (i think from some guys repo, i think valve hired him).

          If you want to attribute something to valve, then ACO is a better option. It’s amazing.

          I’m just a bit annoyed that nobody praises wine while everybody speaks like it was all valve.

        • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          16 hours ago

          I think they misspelled “whine”.

          That, or they’re saying Proton isn’t Valve’s work alone and that it’s heavily based on WINE. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s another way to read that comment.