- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- technology@lemmy.world
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If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.
Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019
Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.
I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?
Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It’s just not very insightful.
Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.
I wouldn’t say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don’t prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.
Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn’t until Catalina’s release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.
That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That’s gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it’s already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.
Yeah, totally agree that we shouldn’t go all in on trusting valve, but apple is definitely the anti-consumer one here. I don’t think valve would support DX if they could get away with it. Apple deprecating everything but metal without making it an open spec basically said, “we don’t want anyone gaming on our platform”.
It’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn’t want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.
macOS 10.14 has been EOL for more than 2 years now and basically every Mac released since 2012 is compatible with 10.15. Valve also didn’t actively flip a switch and disable functionality; they’re just no longer providing updates. I don’t think Valve shoulders any blame in this specific case - it’s unreasonable to expect any company to indefinitely support platforms that are effectively obsolete.
I got my first mac a few years back off the side of the road, a 2009 imac that didn’t work. I went to a lot of trouble to find and install the most up to date mac os I could get on it for the challenge and because I’d never used a intel mac before.
Believe me, they absolutely did just flick a switch. everything about steam worked fine until the day it didn’t even load up. removing support is one thing, actively bricking your product is a total scum fuck move that is just common practice in gaming now.
Isn’t it trivial to install boot camp on this thing?
I meant more that the Steam client needs to be fully functional on modern macOS. Dropping older operating systems is more justifiable, but does still add to the picture of Valve not treating Mac owners all that well.
Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.
It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-bit libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.
That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.
It’s not just 32 on 64 bit, new Macs use ARM64 processors so x86/x86_64 code is effectively obsolete on Mac. I would love to see Valve pour resources into a cross platform x86 on ARM64 emulation layer though, it would benefit Linux as well.
The ARM translation may be less of a problem on macOS because of Rosetta. That said, integrating something like Box64 would absolutely benefit both Mac and Linux.
What a garbage article lol. The only two arguments I can pick out are 1. Old steam games haven’t been updated to work on macOS and 2. Some games require 3rd party launchers. I think the author was just angry that his mac dropped support for a 20 year old game.
Agreed, shitty read. The 30% cut is crazy high though, and IMO the best point the article has. Steam DOES have a monopoly and that’s inherently bad
A 30% cut for steam games sold on steam and a 0% cut for steam keys sold by the publisher wherever they want with the caveat that they must give steam users the same sales at around the same time. They get their games hosted on Steam’s industry best CDN, a page with support for images and videos, an API with features users like, workshop API for mod hosting and delivery, and other SteamWorks API stuff for stuff like multiplayer, patch management without charging a fee for it, forum hosting to hit the highlights. Pretty much all of that drives engagement and is mostly turn-key though you do have to programmatically interact with their API when it makes sense.
Steam provides a lot of benefit for a 30% cut of what is sold on their store front and a lot more benefit for getting all of the above for a 0% cut if they sell steam keys outside of steam.
Don’t forget steam hosting ranking ladders as well!
I’m not saying Steam is the worst thing out there right now. I’m saying monopoly is inherently bad, and 30% is a crazy high cut even including the features you mentioned.
And even then the same sales around the same time seems very lax with games often going on sale for pre-orders for a steam key that Steam games never get at launch. Most my Steam games are purchased from other storefronts than steam with more frequent sales and faster price drops.
Monopoly on a platform that they don’t own? That being Microsoft? Then seeing how epic isn’t even profitable on the launcher side and is a loss leader while their launcher is barebones it raises the question of what cut is actually realistic that allows a company to have a feature rich launcher and branch out into stuff like Linux, VR, and Steam Deck.
Current state feels more like Walmart expanding into new territory and trying to lure people with low prices, but isn’t sustainable with the main goal just being expansion.
You don’t need to own the OS to have a monopoly. What a weird thing to say. You don’t need to own the United States to have a monopoly in it. That’s an equivalent statement.
Your point about Epic not being able to compete means they have a monopoly. Steam is great, but part of that is because they essentially have infinite money to spend improving things to make sure no one else catches up.
Epic hasn’t given me a reason to buy from them. Fanatical, humble bundle, gmg, etc I find better if the only selling point is price with them having more consistent sales, bundles, and choice of platform.
Epic has done more to make me not consider them an option with their foray into the market being removing Metro Exodus near launch and taking monopolistic approaches to taking the approach of denying games from being sold on other platforms. Not just steam but GOG too with exceptions only being given to owners of the platform.
Agreed.
Them withholding a game makes me not consider them in the future. I’d rather pirate it if they were to keep withholding it.But I “allow” them to withhold 1st party games (or studios they aquire like Psyonix) from 3rd party stores. Same goes for Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard and Microsoft.
They did the work and sure are entitled to keep it. It may not be in the interested of the consumer to have the need to install yet another launcher but it’s fine.
Them buying up 3rd party releases are what I have issues with
Epic isn’t able to compete because their launcher is missing major simple features like reviews.
I don’t want multiple extra steps when I’m interested in a game. Steam has a big market share because they are giving people what they want in a launcher. That’s it.
Epic can put in the effort if they want but it’s already been like 2 years and as far as i can tell hasn’t really been updated with anything new, I use it for the free games sometimes but otherwise not really. That would only change if they make the launcher more attractive.
Epic could compete. But I believe they did their approach too forcefully.
I personally refuse to use EGS because I don’t like how they approached the market by starting this exclusive war on PC. I wished they kept that to consoles only. If they did a co-release on both Steam and EGS but offer a consistent 10€ discount compared to Steam I’d be more open to it instead.
This in addition to Tencent (and by that extent the chinese gov) have a ~40% of shares of the company. That’s a considerable amount of foothold. And I vote with my wallet by not giving them more of my data.
I have to mention though, that I have an EpicGames account and have played Fortnight as well as use and play UE-games and tried out the UE-engine. But I have the option in life to not give them more.I know they’re missing features. Steam didn’t always have all the features they have now either. We take that for granted now, but that wasn’t always the case. Steam has their market position because they were one of the first to market, and they invested their profits into making their product better. A newcomer is now met by consumers with the expectation that they’ll be equally as good, and when they inevitably aren’t they don’t use it. That’s how a monopoly works.
I agree it sucks, and that Steam is a nice piece of software, and the Valve has done good work supporting Linux. That doesn’t change whether or not they hold a monopolistic position in the market though. The barrier for new entries into the market is too high because Steam is good. It’s nothing against Steam, but it is a monopoly and that isn’t good for consumers —which includes game developers, not just end users.
That steam didn’t have features is like comparing steam from decades ago. I don’t feel like that is even a valid defense anymore when new smartphone companies are expected to come with a feature filled OS as opposed to pre smartphone expectations. Same for any other products be it televisions, monitors, etc.
Barriers can be brought up, but if someone is introducing the equivalent of a dumb phone to the market to compete against a smartphone and expecting to make money for just existing and only bothering to try to corner the market with removing products then no wonder things are playing out the way they are.
That’s why all new smartphone companies use Android. It comes packaged feature rich. It is a good comparison.
Not like any other app store does take 30% except for some high volume games/publishers.
Apple does the same. Hell they seem to have custom rules for each of the app devs (according to Linus and Luke from LTT: I believe this clip contains most of it.
They recently talked about it again. Essentially they developed the app payment like Netflix. Apple said “No, that’s against our rules” and refused the submission of the update. Meanwhile Netflix supposedly still had the same communication for a long time.)Same goes with Google and probably a number of other external stores.
Amazon seems to take up to 20% depending on the item (Source: sell.amazon.com/pricing.At least Steam does provide a forum, community features and the update framework and infrastructure.
Personally I would be happy to take the offering over maybe needing to host and maintain the tech stack myself. Now mind you, maybe some other dev would rather do it themself and maybe wish to opt-out of the ecosystem. That is totally valid.(Warning/Disclaimer: I only heard about that. I do not have first hand experience!) Apple for example takes a percentage for processing a payment and offers an invoicing system. Some may like that. Others could maybe negotiate a better deal with another provider and maybe even offer tools that integrate better with their existing accounting and ERP software.
Can’t you use Proton on Mac? I’d think that would solve most compatibility problems.
The problem is that proton needs to translate direct X to Vulcan, but Apple doesn’t allow Vulcan, it has to be their own thing, Metal.
So it’s a lot of work for valve and fully dependent on apple not screwing them.
That or Rosetta, the built-in, hardware-accelerated x86_64 compatibility layer.
Well the third-party launchers is extremely annoying, I have to say. Buying a game on Steam and then it forcing you to install yet another launcher (I have like 8 on my gaming PC now) really pisses me off.
I tend to buy on GOG now if I have the choice because they don’t stand for that kind of shit nor DRM either.
I also really love the overview of GOG of the games you have in different launchers. Before that it happened to me multiple times that I bought a game on sale without realising I had already bought it on another platform years ago on another sale. Oops.
Ethics, features that are actually great for me instead of stuff that’s just great for them. Love it. Reminds me a lot of a company that used to be like that. It was called Valve I think.
I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it’s run by a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.
Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services “telemetry”), all of which are very much anti-customer.
AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (For the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.
Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.
Edit: I forgot something that has changed in the past decade:
Valve has spent the past five years investing in open platforms: At first by funding key parts (often the most difficult ones) of the open-source software stack that now makes gaming great on linux, and more recently by developing remarkably good and fairly open PC hardware for mobile gaming. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No artificially crippled features. This has already freed many gamers from Microsoft’s stranglehold, and more of us are reaping the benefits every day.
This is the polar opposite of what the author would have us fear.
I get the risks of putting all eggs in one basket, but whenever people argue for competition using Epic as an example, a company that is demonstrably more anti-competitive and anti-consumer, it shows that they just think of the matter of theoretical ideals of evenness as opposed to benefits to the customers. I don’t see any good coming from Epic having as much or more marketshare than Steam.
Unlike GOG which only offers DRM-free games, a substantial advantage compared to any other store.
Makes me think of a Walmart opening up in a town and people arguing that the residents should buy from there because it’s competition. Company just existing doesn’t make it good.
Well said, private companies are incentivized to make their customers happy. Corporations are incentivized to make their shareholders happy. Sometimes those goals align, but they are not the same.
Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism
I’m glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn’t choose that, and they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.
It really feels like this author is just saying, “they’re resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo ‘timebomb’!”.
“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”
“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”
Never thought about it that way, welp, might as well get it over with.
The difference between Valve and almost every other company that suffers from “capitalism” is that Valve is a private company, they don’t have shareholders, investors and an outsider asshole CEO demanding enshittification in the name of exponential growth.
The issue is Steam and Valve being held up as the ‘one good company’, when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Valve does many of the same practices as Epic, EA, etc., but there’s a double standard with Valve because it’s the default experience. The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” supposition, I don’t think that really holds any water; it’s just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it’s eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I’m just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they’re by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It’s just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.
the ‘one good company’
No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.
there are plenty of examples to the contrary
Of course, it’s a company. But it’s still a billion times better than most of its competitors.
It’ll be fine until they go public (though maybe a few billion is enough for gaben and they won’t, but I’m not banking on it), then it’ll be an inevitable decline like all the others.
Whatever Gaben thinks, he won’t live forever. The moment leadership changes, we’ll see how money thirsty the new bosses are.
This is why beehaw needs downvotes. Crappy submissions like this article that don’t make any sense
Edit: OP has been spamming his nonsense across multiple communities, and has hundreds of downvotes on each of them. Except here on beehaw…
No, Beehaw doesn’t need downvotes.
I think it’s fair to acknowledge that everything is a trade-off, and without downvotes, we have to accept the downsides.
Might be due to my instance, but I see downvotes. Not nearly enough as it should have after reading the article though.
fwiw, OP wrote the article himself and then spammed it to lots of different instances. Definitely worth blocking this spammer.
You forgot the Mac
Lol, fuck Mac. If Apple cared about gaming, they wouldn’t have created Metal and collaborated on Vulkan. Fuck them. Valve went with Linux because they can change it to fit their needs. Can’t do that with Apple.
Microsoft is only supported by Valve because it has large marketshare and can’t be ignored, but it’s clear that Valve is doing everything possible to get away from them: see Steam Deck.In general, I agree with Steam wielding too much power and if they abused it, I’d be out. I have my gaming hours and can live without gaming no problem. They wouldn’t get any more money from me as soon as they enshittified.
What would get me away from steam is an opensource gaming store with games that have no DRM and are predominantly opensource. Or another gaming store that worked on Linux and allowed playing games with my other linux buddies.
Get us that and I’m out.Anti Commercial AI thingy
Have you considered gog? They may not be betting heavily on Linux or have as a big of a selection but their games are DRM free. You can even install gog Galaxy, a game manager similar to Steam.
Doesn’t seem like GOG galaxy is for linux
GOG GALAXY 2.0 Open Beta is available for Windows and Mac. Please download the installer on your PC.
That’s a disappointment, but Heroic Launcher is. I’ll give it a shot and see if there are new games on there for me. The name “Good Old Games” gave me the impression it was for stuff like boomer shooters or side-scrollers and stuff.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Heroic works really well. I’ve just installed it myself recently, motivated mostly by a desire to finally play the free games I got off Epic. I’ve only installed two EGS games so far - Civ 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy - but they’re working perfectly, running via proton.
The experience is so good I was actually inspired to buy my first game outside of steam in years, namely Wartales which I just bought yesterday on GOG. Installation is a breeze, it runs under proton, and as far as I can tell it is running perfectly.
I sort of prefer Heroic to Steam in fact, because it starts almost immediately - no waiting around for 30 seconds while it tries to connect to the Steam network etc
Add it to
configuration.nix👼 Thanks for the review.Anti Commercial AI thingy
I 100% agree
Looks like an article paid for by Epic.
Here’s a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store “debate” was brought up:
My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.
There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.
As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.
Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.
They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.
Steam is a ticking time bomb but mostly for the reason that you don’t own the games you purchase there and you can’t back them up (mostly) so when Steam decides to ban your account or just closes down, you lose all of your games forever.
More people should push for DRM-free games with offline installers, like GOG and Itch offer.
Idk, there’s a backup system that I’ve put on a hard drive with a very easy to find GitHub steam drm remover. Haven’t had any issues playing my games without a steam account – sans online services for some, but most of the time I’m on trips or without Internet anyway. That said, if the idea is that in some 5-10-20 years this will happen, I feel like a lot of the online services won’t be around… For as much as I love Helldivers 2, I don’t really expect it to be around in 7 years. Online games from 2013 aren’t all around either, and those that are aren’t super populated.
On the other hand, a lot of these online services do rely on Steam, so if it went down a lot of them would need the same unofficial online servers.
I’d be more concerned if Steam were to have extreme DRM, but it’s so laughable that it’s literally worth paying for the game just to have the streaming/per game notes/cloud saves and for current games to not have to deal with updates and online services. But a Steam Library of mostly single player games? Anyone who is concerned can get a $50HDD and install/backup their games with Steam to and then apply the patch. Of the issues Steam has, I think this particular one is low on the list. And per the articles issue, I would actually blame the OS more than the storefront. I used to game on Mac’s from 2007-2013 and let me tell you, Steam was a freaking triumph. All the Mac game stores were truly short lived, had poor support while they were alive and had things like license activations per machine, so good luck past 5 computers (talk about 15 years). Back then Aspyer ports were really great too, always something to look forward to.
Back then Steams issue was that it didn’t have refunds, Tuesday Maintenance, and sometimes it would just be buggy for a bit when trying to open (on OSX – never really had an issue on Windows). Since then they’ve only made it more service oriented, doing things they absolutely should, but didn’t have to, like refunds applying to everyone after the AUS lawsuit instead of just that region. Looking at Apple for this one.
I would implore the author of this article to go back in time, get their games on the macgames store and other similar storefronts for OSX and I would wonder how they fare today.
I have my accounts. I have no access to those games because licenses were activated too many times or because they no longer support the current OS. So I’m effectively limited to a previous version of OSX which cannot download the app because I need a new version of the OSX store. I don’t have the right terms but it was hours of hassle to find out that my OSX copy of Borderlands, Assassins Creed II and Brotherhood, and a couple others are just gone. To add insult to injury, I had to log into the account every year to keep my “platinum points” that you got for buying on that storefront, to use for discounts etc. I didn’t log in so byebye incentive!
My point? I had about 250 SteamPlay games that I bought and used on OSX as a Mac gamer, which seamlessly downloaded on PC when I switched to Windows for my desktop computer. None of this is to say that Steam doesn’t or can’t have shortcomings, but rather that it is a substantially better service than than pretty much every alternative right now, save for GOG probably.
On the topic of games with an online component, wouldn’t it be great if they could run indefinitely?
So basically Steam is fine, has been for 20 years, and has competitors waiting to step in and take over the market if Gaben and co ever succumb to the temptation to cash in for a quick boost to corporate profits for a few years at the expense of ruining the business forever after, as impatient shareholders might demand if it were a public company, which it isn’t.
It’s true though, it could fall apart at any moment. So could anything. I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Luckily it’s not a public company and it seems its shareholders aren’t interested in making a quick buck. If they were they’d have already made it obvious. If they decide to sell or IPO on the other hand (also sell), then quick buck will be the name of the game in no time.
I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)
If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.
Right now, it’s easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it’s usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you’re a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).
Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enshittification or whatever
It’s actually getting crappy being here
Like the whole section about macos. Apple constantly screws developers, and somehow, the author has seemed to blame Valve lol. There’s a lot of reason lots of people don’t develop for Mac, and they’re mostly valid rather than political
Or GitHub. In the real world, developers don’t have any issues. Only in Lemmy, where people are even focusing on stupid things, so a barely visible unobtrusive sentence on a table mentions copilot lol
Apparently people at beehaw don’t have downvote button, kinda explains this situation. The very same article on lemmy.ml is at -56 votes (at least that’s what seems to me).
It’s like people are posting that BS content to bring the mood down here on purpose.
Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enahittification or whatever
You could say that the discourse around enshittification has become enshittified
Hahaha, this article mainly sucks.
deleted by creator
I do this too. If it’s on Gog I buy it there. I hope gog manages to stay around but even if it doesn’t I can grab the offline installers for the games I have purchased and back them up elsewhere.
Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game’s offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.
I use them regularly, and have never had issues
Good to hear, I’ll check it out again and make sure I’m not having an issue on my end.
This looks like a problem with your system to me. Run a few checks on your RAM and storage devices. I had files corrupt on my NAS and a PC of mine, because both had defective memory. I only noticed it, because installers and 7zip began to produce errors.
The article in no way describes any actions taken by Valve that leads me to believe there is any impending enshittification. They simply have made decisions, a lot of which they have stuck with for many years.
Enshittification has to do with bait and switch, effectively. It’s luring customers into a false sense of loyalty and then abusing that to their financial gain (see: Reddit and Spez from 2023).
The article basically says “there are some decisions by Valve I like, and some I don’t.” That in no way provides any path toward some bomb going off. Perhaps time will prove the author right, of course, because any company can easily decide to screw over their customers, but the article is click-bait and completely speculative as to what may happen.
And due to all of the above, I think the bomb is about to go off where elephants will fly out of my refrigerator and steal my soda.
TLDR - Steam is shit because it’s still 32bit?
More like it’s because it doesn’t support Mac as much as they want them to.
More like, if the Steam app ever goes 64bit, watch out. A non-shittified app like so should never require 4gb+ of RAM or anything more complicated than a 32bit instruction set.
not correcting you on the contents of the article or anything, just that 32bit is nothing close to a mark against the Steam app.
Isn’t supporting 32-bit apps on a 64-bit OS a security concern though? I thought that’s why some linux distros were disabling 32-bit repositories by default on their 64-bit versions
Not by itself.
Distros are shutting down system 32bit repos, because they require effort to be maintained: people who patch possible security holes, and people who test and package them. As most people have switched to 64bit systems, developers are no longer maintaining 32bit versions, no longer patching them, and barely anybody cares to check or run them, so any possible security flaws can slip through.
This is all irrelevant if you run stuff in a VM, or a container: so it has a security flaw? Cool, let it get… nothing, it’s contained.
Games running in a contained Wine, or in a OS container, can have all the security flaws they want, who cares. Games also rarely get security patches, or any kind of patches at all, so running them contained should be standard practice anyway.
32-bit apps use a sub-set of the same instructions that still exist on current 64-bit systems. Running 64-bit alone does nothing to eliminate any flaws, real or imagined, from the 32-bit side of things.
As @jarfil@jarfil@beehaw.org has stated, 32 bit repos are being de-listed because no one can be bothered to maintain them(on a professional, full-time basis), and that lack of code/functional review could allow flaws to slip through. Meanwhile, a lot of those same 32-bit repos continue to exist(as community-maintained versions - my preferrence anyways) and can be accessed by interested users from most distros. They aren’t blocked, just de-listed and unsupported by those distro maintainers.
Thanks for the explanation! I didn’t realize it was mostly a maintenance limitation, I thought maybe 32-bit instructions could be an extra attack vector on a physical CPU instruction level or something like that.
This reads like an epic ad that expects people to buy from epic for just existing. Like arguing people should buy from the new Walmart that opened up in their town because it’s competition.
