Posted by evolve2k 1 day ago
The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
We currently have a handful of AI companies who make no profit, have revenue far below operating costs, their entire business runs on investment and they're posturing themselves for IPOs. Meaning that the reason they can keep the lights on solely comes from attracting investors (and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future).
If they keep doing it, it must be because sometimes it works.
Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.
In that regard "bought by PE firm" (or most any prospective buyer, really) is functionally equivalent to an IPO. Selling out is, in fact, selling out.
When does this relationship with customers happen? Is it at the IPO? When they file the paperwork? When they contemplate going public for the first time? Or is it that any founder who might one day decide to contemplate going public was doomed to unhealthy customer relations from birth?
The obvious next thing we in society should do is abolish public equity as a concept as a customer protection mechanism?
It is genuinely hard to think of one. I treat all companies as adversarial relationships, where I fully expect them to treat me as disposable at least over any time horizon greater than 1-2y. There are certainly some companies that are more likely to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium. I think of Target, IKEA, sometimes Apple. But I don’t trust any of those companies to take care of me in the future. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if my next interaction with any of those companies was bad. I just typically expect it to be more mutually beneficial than Comcast, Hertz, or Verizon.
People complain about the latter because they have higher expectations because the institution is supposed to serve them and often has all the diseases of true scale without being able to pick and choose customers. Private industry skates by because people assume it's out to screw them and they can cherry pick.
No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
Passion matters.
But if you're just running the company 'badly' (in the shareholders eyes), probably no.
They have few employees and massive revenue.
It's done some good stuff for the industry and even contributed to some bit FOSS projects. But business is still business.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that Epic settled with the FTC for over half a billion dollars for tricking kids into making unwanted purchases in Fortnite.(1) Epic also stonewalled parents' attempts at obtaining refunds, going so far as to delete Fortnite accounts in retaliation for those who arranged charge backs.
Furthermore the FTC's evidence included internal communications showing that Epic deliberately schemed and implemented these dark patterns specifically to achieve the fraudulent result, even testing different approaches to optimise it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
But yew ,both private companies do their own forms of evil.
Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...
Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.
It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.
Aren't people upset about both? The whole "gamble for features" is pretty much why the mobile market and console market are divorced in audiences (or at least, community).
People are "more" upset about Valve here because this is in the console space. They've long dismissed the mobile scene as lost.
Subsidizing the game's devel/ops cost isn't a bad thing. Especially if it's optional and doesn't change the game.
The closest I've heard to something compelling is that the digital goods aren't the same as actual physical goods, and that somehow that makes it worse, but I still don't find it particularly compelling; I've heard people (often lovingly) refer to trading cards as "cardboard crack" explicitly to joke about how ridiculous it is to be paying for stuff that's essentially just ink and paper.
Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.
> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.
For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.
I'd be surprised if lootboxes only earned them 6% of profits, I'd guess they're something like 10% or more, assuming that they're like 90% margin and the regular steam store side is more like 50% margin (which is still absurd, for what it's worth).
It would be super democrat-american to address valves loot boxes before, say, fucking healthcare.
We need a government priority Jira board of things that need to be addressed. Loot boxes _might_ make the backlog.
Valve pushing for Linux gaming is for survival, not charity.
Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)
Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
That contrasts against the companies doing things that are good for business (at least short term) and bad for consumers.
It's like AMD open sourcing FSR or Meta open sourcing Llama. The outcome itself is good, but if they ever become leaders in these verticals, they will pivot to closed source quicker than you can blink, because the reason they're doing it is just coincidental to the public good, not because of a genuine motivation to do good.
I think more ARM Valve hardware is likely.
It’s more about Valve having complete control over the stack and being able to vertically integrate, something they will never have with windows, especially as it continues to enshittify
Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?
> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary
Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?
> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS
You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!
??? They didn't
All the 3rd party trading and gambling sites are up and running on the Steam API. They didn't change anything at all
They are relatively better, but we still need to keep monopolies accountable. Valve is just smart enough to remember what worked 30-40 years ago compared to the rampant greed these days.
We should remember our history so we aren't doomed to repeat it.
The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.
Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
But I totally agree, I still install windows for gaming on my machine, but it looks like that for my purpose of gaming I can stay with Linux (I play mainly older games or indie games).
I think I would say it this way: private companies can be good or bad, but public companies must ultimately become bad.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.
In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.
I haven't ruled that out yet. I am planning on trying to convince them on this next time they ask me for tech support.
[1] I'll say it again; if anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider getting out of the software game and maybe consider a job in the exciting world of janitorial or food service, because you are exceedingly bad at the whole "software thing" and you should be ashamed of yourself and how much damage you have cost the entire world with your utterly incompetent software.
they still do it because you can't play all the multiplayer games with kernel level anticheats
Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
If you don't do anything weird, you land in that 80% and everything works as it should. With developers noticing SteamOS being a thing, more of them start doing sanity checks to make sure it works on Linux, and that 80% starts growing to 90%.
Then there's the kernel anti-cheat that's unfixable though, which pulls the percentage down again.
Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows devs more than halfway.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an exploitive company
I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.
Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with me everywhere anyway.
I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably be different companies.
That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...
Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)
They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.
Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…
There are plenty of other stores to get games from. They're just consistently worse than Steam.
Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...
You need friends for a lack of friend systems to matter :)
So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.
Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.
there's no lock-in in any of the contracts
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.
But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior.
So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.
I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.
To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.
Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly that nobody even knew they tried.
I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve hasn't abused their status yet, and maybe they never will, but all it takes is a change in management for that to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to squelch, they still might just decide they want more money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games, and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years, I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about it and take out my credit card and just pay it.
Stuff like this has already happened with other companies (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).
I'm not saying that it will happen, but at this point Steam has so much of the market and so many people have their entire game collections on there that I don't think we should discount the possibility that it could happen.
I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)
Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."
That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).
https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-no-first-party-vr-game-in-dev...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
A huge missed opportunity imo, but maybe playing HL3 on a theater sized screen is nice enough.
Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?
OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.
I hope Gabe has setup Valve in such a way that they can pass on his mentality as a whole inside the business practices themselves. I think, after all these years, he must have surely thought about what leaving would look like for Valve. Considering this is a guy who seemingly thinks in decades, I feel maybe even optimistically calm about it.
I'm a huge fan of the OSS model of keeping your core business fully unrelated to OSS but allowing and encouraging the use and contribution to OSS by people on your payroll because it really is a rising tide effect. There are just too many stories of a cool project becoming a company only to eventually reverse-robinhood the project into a closed source for-profit product.
From what I see it seems like the culture of the company is shared between the leadership roles so it might be possible for the company to continue doing as it has been doing after Gabe.
I think the people at valve are smart and they understand their business and the company very well and that this issue is being taken seriously too.
Good governance exists, it's just that for most companies there's not really an interest in having that because it gets in the way of personal interests of people that are already entrenched in power.
Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.
DRM is also kind of orthogonal to their terms. Ubisoft has their own DRM; let's say I am ok with Ubisoft's since at least they made the game, would I be able to play Anno that I "purchased" on Steam if Valve suspends my Steam account for some random reason?
I copied FTL, and Into The Breach out of my steam directory to another machine
and they work fine
(answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).
it's like Nintendo having a Mario game for their new hardware, e.g. Mario 64, etc.
there weren't that many teases, nor is it great marketing; CS:GO competitive e-sports is better marketed and probably made Valve more money than any HL wink-wink-nudge-nudge ever would.
Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.
You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer, MITM, emulation, and even now AI mouse control.
The only thing you can do is watch for it and send the ban hammer. Valve has a wonderful write up about client-side prediction recording so as to verify killcam shots were indeed, kill shots, and not aim bots (but this method is great for seeing those in action as well!)
I feel like this is the same as saying "seatbelts don't prevent car accident deaths at all", just because people still die in car accidents while wearing seat belts.
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it doesn't provide value. There is a LOT less cheating in games with good anti-cheat, and it is much more pleasant to play those games because of it. There is a benefit to making it harder to cheat, even if it doesn't make it impossible.
The qualifier "good" for "good anti-cheat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What was once good enough is now laughably inadequate. We have followed that thread to its logical conclusion with the introduction of kernel-level anti-cheat. That has proven to be insufficient, unsurprisingly, and, given enough time, the act of bypassing kernel-level anti-cheat will become commoditized just like every other anti-cheat prior.
I would beg to differ. In the US at least, there does seem to be a hidden arms race between safety features and the environment (in the form of car size growth)
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security.
You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far.
But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
And the SOTA anti-cheats now use IOMMU shenanigans to keep DMA devices from seeing the game state. The arms race continues.
The vast majority of cheaters in most games are not sophisticated users. Ease of access and use is the biggest issue.
Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.
I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop all crime so you may as well not even try"
Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)
The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.
For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.
I don't hate the lack of cheating compared to older Battlefield games if I am going to be honest.
Not only does this present a huge security risk, it can break existing software and the OS itself. These anti-cheats tend not to be written by people intimately familiar with Windows kernel development, and they cause regressions in existing software which the users then blame on Windows.
That's why Microsoft did Windows Defender and tried to kill off 3rd party anti-virus.
I'm curious, does anyone know how exactly they check for this? How was it actually made unspoofable?
I think the biggest thing is that the anticheat devs are using Microsoft's CA to check if your efi executable was signed by Microsoft. If that was the case then its all good and you are allowed to play the game you paid money for.
I haven't tested a self-signed secure boot for battlefield 6, I know some games literally do not care if you signed your own stuff, only if secure boot is actually enabled
edit: Someone else confirmed they require TPM to be enabled too meaning yeah, they are using remote attestation to verify the validity of the signed binary
There are two additional concepts built upon the TPM and Secure Boot that matter here, known as Trusted Boot [1,2] and Remote Attestation [2].
Importantly, every TPM has an Endorsement Key (EK) built into it, which is really an asymmetric keypair, and the private key cannot be extracted through any normal means. The EK is accompanied by a certificate, which is signed by the hardware manufacturer and identifies the TPM model. The major manufacturers publish their certificate authorities [3].
So you can get the TPM to digitally sign a difficult-to-forge, time-stamped statement using its EK. Providing this statement along with the TPM's EK certificate on demand attests to a remote party that the system currently has a valid TPM and that the boot process wasn't tampered with.
Common spoofing techniques get defeated in various ways:
- Stale attestations will fail a simple timestamp check
- Forged attestations will have invalid signatures
- A fake TPM will not have a valid EK certificate, or its EK certificate will be self-signed, or its EK certificate will not have a widely recognized issuer
- Trusted Boot will generally expose the presence of obvious defeat mechanisms like virtualization and unsigned drivers
- DMA attacks can be thwarted by an IOMMU, the existence/lack of which can be exposed through Trusted Boot data as well
- If someone manages to extract an EK but shares it online, it will be obvious when it gets reused by multiple users
- If someone finds a vulnerability in a TPM model and shares it online, the model can be blacklisted
Even so, I can still think of an avenue of attack, which is to proxy RA requests to a different, uncompromised system's TPM. The tricky parts are figuring out how to intercept these requests on the compromised system, how to obtain them from the uncompromised system without running any suspicious software, and knowing what other details to spoof that might be obtained through other means but which would contradict the TPM's statement.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...
[2]: https://docs.system-transparency.org/st-1.3.0/docs/selected-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module#Endors...
Afaik there have been wallhacks and aimbots since the open beta.
It might just be the game too - I do think the auto aim is a bit high because I feel like I make aimbot like shots from time to time. And depending on the mode BF6 _wall hacks for you_ if there are players in an area outside of where they are supposed to be defending. I was pretty surprised to see a little red floating person overlay behind a wall.
Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.
Is it ever? No.
Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human.
In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly) legitimate player data.
It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.
Can you define what "reacting" means exactly in a shooter, that you can spot it in game data reliable to apply automatic bans?
Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two.
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data?
There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.
Looking at you Rust.
Edit:
And the rest of you. If even Microsoft's Masterchief Collection supports it, I Don't understand why everyone else does not.
Then I saw the arewe…yet url and thought you meant Rust the programming language
Then I visited the arewe…yet link and realized it was the Rust game you meant after all
More tricky for the sibling comment with Rust, where either one could be valid.
It's because the Linux versions of those anti-cheats are significantly weaker than their Windows counterparts.
FACEIT is significantly more effective.
Anti cheats are as much a marketing ploy as they're actual anti cheats. People believe everyone is cheating so it must be true. People believe nobody bypasses the FACEIT anti cheat so it must be true. Neither of those are correct.
Riot revels in this by marketing their anti cheat, but there are always going to be cheaters. And sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware. I much rather face a few cheaters here and there (which is not as common as people make it to be on high trust factor).
You think tournament organizers or pro players know the first thing about anti cheats? They buy the marketing just like everybody else.
I’ve seen so many players saying “look you can own my entire pc just please eliminate the cheating.”
It would be great to see more of a web of trust thing instead of invasive anti cheat. That would make it harder for people to get into the games in the first place though so I don’t know if developers would really want to go that way.
Maybe not 'tons', but they've got a solid reason to consider some investment: additional sales from millions of Mac users able to access a huge library of games they were previously denied.
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched? IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at Apple.
They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.
There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.
Apple is a terrible choice by that metric.
Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.
This is speculation but I suspect there's something in that contract that prevents Valve from competing with Crossover on MacOS.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817...
I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
Running x86 code on ARM macOS is the most solved part of the stack, if anything needs work it's the API translation layers.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/10/apple-to-phase-out-rose...
You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome, especially because it really is. Running x86 games or compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would only have to buy an iPad.
And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I would worry that removing the iPad limitations would increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news to me.
Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.
EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment
Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable" devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first" headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even said not to expect a great experience playing Half-Life: Alyx locally (a nearly 7 year old title).
It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging their bets.
I don't think there will ever be a competitive x86 chip. ARM is eating the world piece by piece. The only reason the Steam Deck is running x86 is because it's not performant enough with two translations (Windows to Linux, x86 to ARM). Valve is very wisely starting the switch with a VR headset, a far less popular device than its already niche Steam Deck. The next Steam Deck might already switch to ARM looking at what they announced last week.
x86 is on the way out. Not in two years, perhaps not in ten years. But there will come a time where the economics no longer make sense and no one can afford to develop competitive chips for the server+gamers market alone. Then x86 is truly dead.
We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores.
Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the Steam Deck conversation is the fact that AMD graphics performance is well ahead of Qualcomm, and that is extremely important for a gaming device. I'm willing to bet that the next Steam Deck goes with another custom AMD chip, but the generation after that is more of a question mark.
RISC-V is another wildcard that could end up threatening ARM's path to total dominance.
AMD graphics aren't married to x86, they already license their GPU IP to Samsung for use in Exynos processors, and there's rumors of AMD working on their own ARM SOCs. A future Valve device may well be ARM and AMD.
Well, compiling ARM game binaries is actually super duper easy and just totally fine. The issue Windows actually has with ARM is GPU drivers for the ARM SoCs. Qualcomm graphics drivers are just super slow and unreliable and bad. ARM CPU w AMD GPU is easy mode.
And you're seeing 20+ hours battery under normal workloads (i.e. not spec sheet "20 hours" but day-to-day). I've been mainlining a Windows ARM laptop for six months, and am yet to run into anything I couldn't do.
Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:
* Lenovo Legion Go S
* Asus ROG Ally
But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-handheld-gaming-devices
1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23884863/valve-steam-deck...
Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.
[1] - https://chipsandcheese.com/p/the-snapdragon-x-elites-adreno-...
I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you literally can just use the system however you want as a desktop OS as a bonus...
Currently, AMD Strix Halo based handhelds are the most powerful portable gaming devices out there, with the top three being the GPD Win 5, the OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex, and the AYANEO Next 2. Of these three, the GPD Win 5 has already started shipping. Problem is they're stupid expensive.
Personally, I will wait until I can run FSR4 natively on these portables, because FSR makes a pretty significant QoL improvement on these handhelds.
[1]: I don't think there's a way to link to it directly, but `PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1` (or a specific different version if you'd like) is documented in the README in this table: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom#modifica...
the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over? There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
Possibly the truth is that everyone is talking past each other. Certainly in the Moore's Law days "marginal impact" would have meant maybe less then 20%, because differences smaller than that pretty much didn't matter. And there's no way the ISA makes 20% difference.
But today I'd say "marginal impact" is less than 5% which is way more debatable.
Where are the power inefficient x86 chips? If you normalize for production process and put the chips under synthetic load, ARM and x86 usually end up in a similar ballpark of efficiency. ARM is typically less efficient for wide SIMD/vector workloads, but more efficient at idle.
AMD and Intel aren't smartphone manufacturers. Their cash cows aren't in manufacturing mobile chipsets, and neither of them have sweetheart deals on ARM IP with Softbank like Apple does. For the markets they address, it's not unlikely that ARM would be both unprofitable and more power-hungry.
Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs.
Branch prediction is where the magic happens today.
Yes, it cost Intel their smartphone contracts, but those weren't high-margin sales in the first place. Conversely, ARM's capricious licensing meant that we wouldn't see truly high-performance ARM cores until M1 and Neoverse hit the market.
There is no real business case.
why not? If it's cheaper and compatible, why not?
Besides businesses have an all in one contract with Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL Server, Office, a certain number of seats for MSDN for their developers, Azure DevOps (separate from Azure - it’s the modern equivalent of Team Foundation Server), and the list goes on. They don’t care about saving a couple of dollars on Windows license.
Sure, but how much are they realistically going to pay for it?
I guess improving compatibility with general-purpose Windows apps might help them sell a few more Steam Machines, but it's hard to think that it's really going to move the needle.
I’m sure there are lots of businesses that dislike Microsoft and the freemium model they’re using.
They definitely aren’t going to trust the long term viability of Valve over a company that has been releasing operating systems and supporting business for almost half a century.
$20 a seat is a nothing burger to basically make sure you support every Windows APi forever. You’re not going to tie your horse to valve
As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.
You can even omit that part and the result is the same: nothing
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
RISC-V total total estimated market value is only around $10 billion, and I strongly suspect a single RISC-V chip cost more than a dollar. RISC-V manufacturing needs to increase something in the order of 1000X just to match ARM volumes, and even then it’ll be half a decade for RISC-V devices to build up meaningful market share of actual in-use devices, given there’s many billions of ARM devices out there which will remain perfectly usable for many years.
This has held back Arm for years, even today the state of poor GPU drivers for otherwise good Arm SoCs. There is essentially a tiny handful of Arm systems with good GPU support.
ARM is Western
RISC is China / Eastern
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. It's roughly as Western as West realistically gets, short of being made in Hawaii.
> That's a geopolitical question
Sure, but that's not actually about where RISC-V is from. It's that it's a purposely open platform -- so much so that its governing body literally moved to Switzerland.
The reason it's a geopolitical question is more to do with what we did to their supply chains with sanctions on companies like Huawei and ZTE, and what COVID did to everyone's supply chains independently of that. Both of those things made it really evident that some domestic supply chains are critical. (On both sides -- see: the CHIPS Act)
Where RISC-V comes back in is that open source doesn't really have a functioning concept of export restrictions. Which makes it an attractive contingency plan to develop further in the event of sanctions happening again, since these measures can and have extended to chip licenses.
(Edit: I'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with valid concerns about Huawei, raised by various other sources. I'm less familiar with ZTE's history, but my point in either case is more of a practical one.)
That doesn't matter any more than, IDK, the first maid cafes being American. China is where RISC-V is getting adopted, they're the ones who are running with it.
Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading picture in bad faith, please consider this: - https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu - https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... - https://riscv.org/about/ -> "RISC-V International Association in Switzerland"
US policy makers are actively attacking RISC-V and dissuading its use.
China has an increasingly large upper hand in the RISC-V ecosystem and can use that to remove Western surveillance and replace it with their own.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c...
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/regarding-proposed-u...
I suspect that many projects—such as BOOM—have stalled as a consequence of this situation. If it continues, the long-term impact will be highly detrimental for everyone involved, including stakeholders in Western countries.
While achieving an open-core design comparable to Zen 5 is unlikely in the near term, a sustained open-source collaborative effort could, in the long run, significantly change the situation. For example, current versions of XiangShan are targeting ~20 SPECint 2006/GHz (early where at ~9).
Stuff tends to stay open until a new leader emerges. Then the closed source shell appears.
We've seen this with the hyperscalers and in a million other places.
Use open to pressure and weed out incumbents and market leaders. Then you're free to do whatever.
So we'd be replacing NSA spying with MSS spying.
That's why this is geopolitical.
The DoD and Five Eyes prefer ARM, where the US maintains a strong lead.
ARM is a RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_comput...