The EGS doesn't run on Linux though, and Rocket League is leaving Steam.

Rocket League is leaving Steam?!? I guess I shouldn't be surprised but that is very annoying. I'm definitely not looking forward to the fracturing landscape that is ahead.

A fractured landscape is a competitive one. Valve had several years of high margins (meaning more money to them, less to the people that made games) and stagnation of the Steam platform. I prefer this fracturing to the monoculture.

It would be nice if any of the game stores would actually compete instead of paying for exclusives. Steam has 1000x the features of any of the other stores. Origin has had probably a decade to catch up and yet its just falling further behind.

All this fracturing means for end users is more rootkit launchers to install and less games for linux users.

It's a chicken and an egg problem. Developers won't come until you have marketshare, and users won't come until you have games. Paying for exclusives is a way to bootstrap a chicken without an egg.

I understand that side of it but valve goes above and beyond so much that even if Epic or Origin had huge user counts I seriously doubt they would put the effort in to building features like "remote play together" which streams a game to other people and streams their controllers back to you so you can all play the same local coop game. Or Proton which allows playing games on linux.

Valve even has linux kernel devs around who fix bugs in drivers for gaming hardware.

Steam may have been a monopoly but it was a pretty good one for the end user.

Worked real well for TV. Lots of people went back to piracy because you have to be on so many platforms.

I guess it's not a fair comparison though, since you can't really subscribe to steam. So I regret saying anything.

Has anyone tried that model? "Pay us $30/mo and play whatever you want."

EA has this with Origin Access (2 tiers, $5m/$30y and $15m/$100y), alongside Ubisoft with UPlay+ ($15m). And I guess platforms like Stadia would fall under this category.

Of course, the games are specific to the publisher or the partnerships the platform has.

See also Xbox Game Pass for PC (10+ games, Windows 10), and VivePort Infinity (for VR, 600+ games).

Playstation Now for PS4/PC (800+ games, PS4 / Windows)

Nonsense. Steam as a platform is head and shoulders above where it was a year ago.

All my Windows exclusive games appear side by side with my native Linux games. I no longer have to have wine installed and maintain a separate Windows (in wine) Steam installation.

Rocket League uses UE3, not UE4 (albeit heavily modded UE3)

This is awesome. If you haven't already written about this, you should, because I'd love to read about it.

I'd second that. Brilliant work.

I'd love to see a technical teardown.

I don't think the engine itself would be the problem. There might be a piece of middleware that breaks support through. Both Linux distros and MacOS are transitioning to x64-only and I can imagine a proprietary piece of third-party middleware doesn't support proper x64 or something making it impossible to upgrade the system to support modern OS's.

> Both Linux distros and MacOS are transitioning to x64-only

I think this isn’t true.

Although more Linux distros aren’t shipping full x86 images anymore, I don’t think that actually impacts x86 support on AMD64 setups. Some limited amount of x86 packages continue to be provided for running Wine and legacy proprietary software.

macOS is killing the ability to run 32 bit code at all. There’s not much of a true technical reason to do this that I’m aware of, it’s a decision similar to Windows disallowing 16 bit software in 64 bit Windows.

Under Linux AMD64 not only can you run 32 bit software, you can still create 16 bit code segments as well. No vm8086, but it can still be used for emulating old Windows applications.