Yeah, this is an awesome change of pace for an industry that notoriously locks down its hardware.

While I am happy to hear this, this is par for the course for Valve.

The Steam Machines were also equally open, and the (otherwise streaming-focused) Steam Link supported sideloading.

I still use my Steam Link, and still love how smooth and easy it is to bring the game picture to my living room's TV. (wow that sounded like a commercial)

btw to this day it still receives updates!

But, what were people sideloading on it? any alternative usage that might be interesting to explore?

Its just a small computer, really. You can even run Steam Link on a Pi if you prefer (Steam Link are not made anymore AFAIK). So I suppose you could argue the reverse: run something on it which you'd otherwise run on a Pi.

It can run Kodi and Retroarch natively. They released an SDK for it but it kind of flew under the radar.

Wait you can get to run Kodi on the Link? I might be missing on some fun there... guess it's time for me to do some searching!

It's one of the official SDK examples: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steamlink-sdk/tree/master/e...

Steam is the platform for games on non locked computers

Yeah, they're more focused on screwing the content creators rather than the consumers.

Steam is the only place I ever actually pay for software. They earned my trust where so many others have lost it.

I pay for software on Steam, too -- but it makes me incredibly nervous consolidating lots of purchased goods with a single walled-garden vendor who holds the keys ; and they never really earned my trust, they're just the only game in town for most titles now.

The internet is filled with stories about locked accounts, lost libraries, games being pulled out of the library due to 'low quality of gameplay' while people are actively playing them on Steam, DLC and in-game currency sold that can never be redeemed or used in the game it's bought for (see: 'Wizardry Online' debacle, Steam/Valve continued selling in-game currency far beyond the point that it was being discussed to remove the game from the library all together.. then removed access from the game for Steam users after making a tidy profit. This was a current/active/new game with a bad launch, not an old title.)

So just to re-state: Valve never won my trust with their behavior with Steam and associated acts. There is just no one else; let's call this phenomenon 'Walmart Syndrome', perhaps?

If you're concerned about losing your games, you can easily do backups from the Steam application, copying game folders, or using something like SLSK https://github.com/skyformat99/SLSK

Bypassing Steamworks basic DRM is easy. Other DRMs obviously require special workarounds.

Or you can buy games on GOG instead and support DRM-free (I think they are unfortunately the only fully DRM-free store at this point).

Valve are a lot more serious about Linux support though, going as far as employing graphics driver developers.

GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.

Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]

[0] https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep...

> Valve are a lot more serious about Linux support though, going as far as employing graphics driver developers.

> GOG (and CDPR) on the other hand can't even be bothered to port their own client and games.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure GOG has a hell of a lot less money than Valve. They don't benefit from any of the gambling-mechanics or multiplayer game "bling" sales that bring in so much of Valve's money, aside from having a much smaller share of PC game sales than Valve does. Valve's got to be way more profitable plus have much higher income, so have the margin to play with stuff like this—which is in their interest, because the weaker alternative operating systems are, the more Valve operates only at the pleasure of Microsoft.

> Also, GOG is not 100% DRM-free anymore, even if they want to advertise themselves that way. [0]

I'm not happy about these features requiring an internet connection, but they seem pretty minor. The alternative would probably have been that those features were left out of the GOG versions completely.

That doesn't make it OK to lie.

It's not quite a lie, though. The games are 100% playable offline; some optional features are not.

I've bought many many games on GOG for years because of this. Lately, GOG games come in installers made out of 20 or so parts which take ages to download manually. The only real way to download their games is by using their GOG Galaxy Client. Not that much better than Steam, which on the other hand has fantastic Linux support, while GOG can't be bothered to port their GOG Galaxy client to Linux.

Luckily Lutris allows me to somehow compensate for GOG's lack of interest in Linux, but still, I feel they really do not care about the DRM thing.

I've found that Minigalaxy is an excellent GoG application on linux

https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/

It deals with both downloading and installing as well as integrating Wine.

It's only as good as long as someone keeps developing it. I'd prefer first party support any day.

While I haven't used it, there is the open source lgogdownloader:

https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader

I only have 12Mbps DSL and an offline game system that I use a FAT formatted microSD card to transfer to so I appreciate the split files, even though it does get annoying with the huge games.

I agree that GOG's Linux support is minimal; often they don't even provide Linux versions that are available on other stores :(.

Two of the isses on the list account42 links to are more serious, although most are fairly minor (there are also a few issues not on the list). Not to excuse those exceptions, however I don't know of any other store that is anywhere close. I have no inside info but my my suspicion is that many CD Projekt investors resent the DRM-free aspect of GOG and would like it to change, while the people running GOG realize it is the major unique aspect of GOG and trying to change it could sink the business. OTOH, I suspect the CD Projekt investors mostly see GOG as a way to get a better deal from Steam for CDPR games. Hard to say what will happen in the future.

Out of curiosity, which Linux games on GOG are so difficult to install? I have bought many games on GOG and refuse to install galaxy and so far experienced no problems.

If you download with Galaxy, can you remove the game from Galaxy and play it without Galaxy/DRM?

I haven't used Galaxy but I'm almost certain the answer is yes since Galaxy doesn't have DRM like other store clients and you see Galaxy related dlls in the standalone installers as well so I'm guessing the integration is the same either way and doesn't cause trouble without Galaxy present. As of semi-recently you can buy games on Epic via Galaxy but if they are DRMed you still need the Epic launcher to play them since GOG won't add DRM to Galaxy.

GOG has zero Linux support (or close to none) so they don't get my money at all.

Which I've always thought was weird since I'd expect a store with their stance on DRM would be one of the first in line to at least have a linux client.

Yeah. It never made sense to me either.

What do you mean? I bought plenty of Linux games on GOG (or games bundled to run on Linux).

where is the Galaxy Linux client?

I don't need it. I install games by clicking on the provided .sh installer, then click on their desktop icon to start them (or find the app using shortcuts) and all of this is seamless on Ubuntu.

This is also how we used to install and play games on Windows, before the Steam era.

Why do I need Galaxy?

If a company pretends to support Linux, they should have a Linux client, whether I need it or not. They basically offer no Linux support, and all the Linux clients that come on their store pages come from developers' willingness, not GOG's.

Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way.

They sell games that work in Linux, what is there to "pretend"?

I disagree that they "should" have a Linux client, for the reasons I explained. I don't have a use for such a client, and as such, I'm happy to ignore it (and love that it isn't mandatory, unlike Steam).

I've never received support from Steam for any technical issue. I'm resourceful and if there's a way, I'll make it work; but almost every help I needed with Steam games was taken from user's forums, within and outside Steam.

Case in point: I learned browsing Steam's forums that the Linux version of The Eternal Castle is glitchy and in many cases the keyboard input doesn't work at all; one user helpfully suggested just using the Windows version using Wine or Proton; this suggestion worked.

> Itch.io has a Linux client, by the way

Good for them! I hope it's optional, since I've no use for it.

What I love about Humble Bundle and GOG is that their games (mostly) don't try to take over your games collection, unlike Steam. I do use Steam and support Valve, but I'd prefer Steam was optional.

Well, automatic updates is a nice feature on the Itch client.

Also I'm pretty sure steam has a clause in its TOS that will open the DRM on all your steam games if steam shuts down

Yeah, they definitely don't have my trust at all. I have something like 600 games on my account, but unfortunately I'll never play any of those on my "old" Mac anymore because it runs OS X 10.10 ("Yosemite"), and Steam no longer supports that version. If I even launch Steam, the application will auto-update to a version that doesn't run anymore. Of course most of the _games_ run on versions of OS X as far back as like 10.2, but no, because Valve decided to lock me out, I can just never play Steam games on that Mac again. Cool, right? Of course everyone's response to this is "update the OS, it's free!", but I have software I need that doesn't run on newer versions of OSX.

I mean, all they had to do is let users disable automatic updates and keep running the old version of the client "without any guarantees" -- if the Steam APIs end up changing enough that I can't log in anymore, well, so be it. But to permanently lock users out simply because of a forced update… seriously uncool.

We can just call them a monopoly!

And thanks to the availability of differential pricing, Publishers can ensure many around the world can get a chance to enjoy their work.

In what way, if I may ask? I am not aware of any controversy surrounding the steam store with that regard.

Now that the store had that facelift the only issue I am aware of is the honestly pretty lacklustre curation... Which is an extremely hard issue so pretty forgiveable

Some people are deeply upset that a gigantic storefront and distribution network [0] would dare take a 30% cut, despite that being well below brick and mortar rate and also pretty standard for a digital storefront.

But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.

[0] not to mention community forum, reviews, and art gallery.

I don't even know how to actually check what I have on my Epic account without going to past purchases. It's baffling how a company that's trying to take more marketshare from a platform as polished as Steam without focusing more on UX.

Any chance they had of getting me as a customer died when they started doing Epic store exclusives. I won't give them money to build another walled garden. There's more than a few games I haven't purchased because of those deals and by the time they finally come to steam I don't care enough about them anymore to spend the money.

Even though Borderlands 3 is now on Steam, I still refuse to buy it because of their exclusive deal... I own every other Borderlands game, but I will never buy that one

If you buy it from steam, they might have an incentive to actually move more games over there.

I understand the sentiment though.

They're just annoyed and lashing out by spending their unexpected Fortnight fortunes. There was no strategy.

> But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.

Which is kind of odd, since the Unreal Marketplace in the same launcher does have a shopping cart.

What’s the problem here? Check out reviews on steam and participate in the discussion forums, and make your purchase in Epic, to support the developers.

My personal number one issue with Steam (aside from the obvious fact that it's still DRM at the end of the day) is that I think their family sharing feature is kind of bullshit. You cannot let somebody play a game in your library and be able to play yourself another game in that same library at the same time.

There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.

This "feature" bothers me a lot. When my girlfriend tries to play Planet Coaster from my account via the family sharing feature, sometimes she kicked off even though I'm not even playing a game at all! I think this is a big reason cloud based services like Steam are a step down from physical games with no reliance on internet connectivity. Truth be told my friends and I were doing fine before Steam existed, even if it meant sometimes needing to get friend's IP addresses and troubleshoot firewall issues to play multiplayer games.

If it's of any help, you can play games at the same time if you go into offline mode in your main account. That way you can atleast play one multiplayer and one single player game at the same time

I'm aware of that workaround but there shouldn't be any need for a workaround in the first place. Valve shouldn't get to freeze my entire library when I want to share a single game with a family member or friend.

They take a bigger cut then most other digital store fronts and they have a history of using the loyalty of fans to do unpaid work such as translations and perform the majority of moderation on Steam.

... So basically they're exactly like every other content network that currently exists?

Pretty much, yes. They're just more consumer-friendly in some ways, and they do some cool stuff. Also, trading cards.

> screwing the content creators r

Good to know, then devs can sell their games somewhere else? Oh, I guess they don't. Nevermind.

Haha, agree but most places do it anyways, steam screws content creators about equally.

PS3 allowed other OSes like Linux or BSD. It was eventually scrapped due to no market demand for it.

> It was eventually scrapped due to no market demand for it.

Rather the opposite. I think it ended up as part of several compute clusters because the console was sold for less than it cost to produce, something normally offset by game sales. So suddenly Sony had a large market that only cost it money.

You know we're all bullshitting here apparently but my guess is that happened relatively little. The PS3 was too exotic of hardware to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.

I'm sure internally it was pitched as a neat idea why don't we see what happens (god can you imagine the corporate politics in a decision like that?), but practically it allowed Sony get get special import status.

I'm sure eventually they realized they didn't care about that enough it outweigh allowing those filthy users to possibly do something interesting.

Sony throws a lot of stuff at the wall. There was a good chunk of hardware cut out of later PS3s, not to mention continued attempts and silent canceling of things like those move lightguns, etc.

My university had a few PS3 clusters. The CS department loved them because you could buy three of them for the price of a good server. The department even offered a crash course on programming for the PS3. I didn't take it, but from what I understand, it wasn't that difficult to program (for the department use cases).

The major use case for these was for number crunching (training neural nets, running physics simulations, etc). And these things were something crazy, like 100x faster than a similarly priced PC server. There were plenty of libraries out there for doing linear algebra.

A quick google search suggests that this was extraordinarily common in academia. I found materials from lots of different universities that were close to what I remember my peers talking about.

This was also a little bit before CUDA hit. So there really wasn't a mainstream offering for doing massively parallel, SIMD calculations.

Edit: I went to Wright State Uni and most of my CS professors did research associated with the Air Force, which as forgotpwd16 notes, had at the time a super computer made from PS3s. This might explain why the PS3 was so popular among our department.

Thanks for that reply, that's very cool. It seemed like a marketing gimmick, I'm surprised to see it was the real deal.

> The PS3 was too exotic of hardware

Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.

> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.

There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

> They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.

That’s what being exotic hardware means.

It would be the same issue for whatever supercomputer code you want to run. If you don't specifically target for the Cell SPEs, you're left with a single PPE that could barely keep up with the Pentium 4s and Athlon64s at the time.

I remember reading an article about the US military using a PS3 supercomputer cluster for something, but it was so long ago I don't remember where or if it was a puff piece or something actually significant.

It was the 33rd most powerful supercomputer at its time and, according to[0] AFRL director, it cost them 5~10% the cost of a system made with off-the-shelf computer parts.

[0]: https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/399987...

No, the real reason as I believe it, is because Sony wanted to eliminate a potential door to being able to unlock the console because this is something that was being very actively worked on by geohot and a few others.

I never believed they're selling it at a loss, selling at a very low margin I can believe.

It's very common to sell game consoles at a loss. They make it back in game sales.

I said I don't believe, not I've never heard of that.

I think it's an urban legend fueled by marketing, I've never seen any hard proof of that, except some BOM calculations from independant analyse, but I don't think mass production work that way.

Those are basically the same thing, depending on how you bookkeep the fixed cost of development.

No that feature was included to sidestep taxes in some markets (general purpose computers usable for research being lower tax category than game specific computers). They never intended it to be used by many consumers. The PS3 was cracked because the feature was removed.

AFAIK, they pulled it because geohot got an "exploit" running under linux (unlocked the GPU or something, can't remember now) and their reaction was it was too much risk that it could lead to piracy

This is the actual reason the "Other OS" support was pulled. The other speculation in here is pretty funny. It was also pretty limited for many purposes - you couldn't access the GPU at all reducing total system memory to 256mb IIRC.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/25/playstation_cracked_w...

https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-histo...

It's arguable giving hackers a platform to explore the innards of the PS3 was the biggest contribution Other OS made to the PS3, and I'm not surprised it scared Sony management. In the release notes for the PS3 firmware update that removes "Other OS", Sony also state it was for "security concerns":

https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-u...

"...will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update."

The "security concerns" were of course geohot/others using it to crack the PS3 DRM.

Pretty sure the actual reason was to prevent exploits that lead to piracy.

Pretty sure the actual reason was console margins and non-gaming buyers. At the time [1], it was believed that Sony lost hundreds of dollars per console. The business case for the losses was that the cost could be recouped with games. But people and organizations buying the PS3 for its computing capabilities, running OtherOS, were not buying enough games to recoup the losses.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/11/8239/

This, it was powering ML clusters irrc.

US Air Force built a PS3 cluster.

Hundreds of dollars sounds bigger than the average game library's licensing fee.

I’ve read the other replies but I remember well why it failed: only single precision floats.

You can’t run physics simulations on single precision. So the people who would have bought and tinkered and pushed it forwards were all turned off by it.

The military was allowed double precision; but there was no point making it a compute cluster otherwise.

I don’t know if it was a marketing or budget decision but basically all the early adopters who would have championed doing impressive things on there (I was so hyped at the time for the cell architecture) couldn’t do anything useful with it.

There's a lot of physics you can do in single precision. In fact, current gen climate models are mostly in single precision, and some of the next gen models are trying to do a lot of the work in half precision (float16).

I’ll give you it’ll be algo and scale dependent. I work with climate modellers and I think they’d get more bang for their buck with optimising for GPU architectures.

I recall I was very excited at the prospect of getting my hands on a ps3 for modelling, but all my work (1) at least required double precision and it left a long bad taste in my mouth when it wasn’t to be.

(1)chaotic plasmas

Should have done ML! ML loves single precision

i bought a ps3 and not a xbox to be able to install linux, and use it as a computer to see later that they disabled it in an update. jailbreaked it. will never buy again a sony product.

rewriting History much? That's not at all what happened.

I love Valve.

The little bit if gaming I’ve ever managed to do has mostly involved their games and then later their platform. I really couldn’t agree more.

This allows them to proceed without having to obtain new platform rights from every single publisher on Steam.

Interesting point. If they made a console or handheld, it could conflict with publisher's exclusive licensing deals. Making a PC and being able to defend it as a PC in court works around it, even if the form factor happens to be a console or handheld.

It is still a PC though. You can plug it into a monitor, attach a mouse and keyboard, and write a book with it.

Console is supposed to mean simply a type of interface and form factor. The fact that incumbent consoles are all crazily locked-in and DRMed (that it requires to explain that this is in fact a PC and you as a user can control it) has nothing to do with them being consoles per se. So let's call it a console, but without all the garbage.