I’m just waiting for the day Steam makes Proton proprietary after outcompeting all the indie open source Linux gaming solutions. And watch as gamers promptly not give a shit and be as uncritically worshipping of this giant profit oriented corporation as they are now. The speed at which people abandoned and outright started hating on other Linux gaming compatibility layers developed by individual people for “sucking” is insane. This is so on the nose Embrace Extend Extinguish but god forbid you call that out and spoil the vibe for people.
“Every other corporation of this size has proven to be my worst enemy but Steam is definitely my friend and has zero ulterior motives. In fact fuck you for daring to speak ill of them.”
You think the company facilitating DRM and micro transactions won’t ban your account the instant it detects you’re not using their approved proprietary version of Proton? You don’t think they’ll implement breaking changes to make the open source version useless?
have we seen examples of such behaviour from valve yet? i don’t think they’re without fault, but worrying about shutting down their open source developments has no basis imo
I don’t trust any corporation to keep their open source projects completely open forever. As soon as profits dip they’ll start looking at open source as a missed opportunity to squeeze more money out of users. Look at, oh I don’t know, Reddit, Android, VSCode, Redis, MongoDB, Sentry, Draw.io, Elastic, Hashi, CentOS, and especially OpenAI. Remember, they own the IPs, they can switch licenses at will and take all the community contributions with it. And it’s not always as overt as making the whole thing proprietary all at once. They’ll slowly start introducing proprietary components until the open source part is basically useless without them.
maybe if they go public, the shareholders would pressure them, but until then, they are doing well enough, by any standard, to just keep going as they were
Big publishers are the bigger threat when it comes to Linux compatibility, since they want DRM and will block anticheat support and want microtransactions and always online in their games. Like what happened to GTA V online And Apex when it came to discontinued Linux compatibility and Battlefield and Fortnite when it comes to anticheat support.
That’s less a launcher problem but big corporate gaming backed games in general. If someone is that fearful of a launcher when it comes to that they should be more concerned with big publisher games everyone gets hyped about year after year than a game launcher on an open platform.
I’m not sure that’s how that shakes out, you can’t exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.
It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that’s far from the way it is today.
Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that’s easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I’ll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.
I’m just waiting for the day Steam makes Proton proprietary after outcompeting all the indie open source Linux gaming solutions. And watch as gamers promptly not give a shit and be as uncritically worshipping of this giant profit oriented corporation as they are now. The speed at which people abandoned and outright started hating on other Linux gaming compatibility layers developed by individual people for “sucking” is insane. This is so on the nose Embrace Extend Extinguish but god forbid you call that out and spoil the vibe for people.
“Every other corporation of this size has proven to be my worst enemy but Steam is definitely my friend and has zero ulterior motives. In fact fuck you for daring to speak ill of them.”
Wouldn’t it just get forked?
Sure, once it happens they can add more features, but there’s already proton forks today that are recommended for some games, such as https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Sure, the company is for profit, but I don’t really see a mechanism where a rugpull is possible here.
You think the company facilitating DRM and micro transactions won’t ban your account the instant it detects you’re not using their approved proprietary version of Proton? You don’t think they’ll implement breaking changes to make the open source version useless?
have we seen examples of such behaviour from valve yet? i don’t think they’re without fault, but worrying about shutting down their open source developments has no basis imo
I don’t trust any corporation to keep their open source projects completely open forever. As soon as profits dip they’ll start looking at open source as a missed opportunity to squeeze more money out of users. Look at, oh I don’t know, Reddit, Android, VSCode, Redis, MongoDB, Sentry, Draw.io, Elastic, Hashi, CentOS, and especially OpenAI. Remember, they own the IPs, they can switch licenses at will and take all the community contributions with it. And it’s not always as overt as making the whole thing proprietary all at once. They’ll slowly start introducing proprietary components until the open source part is basically useless without them.
maybe if they go public, the shareholders would pressure them, but until then, they are doing well enough, by any standard, to just keep going as they were
Big publishers are the bigger threat when it comes to Linux compatibility, since they want DRM and will block anticheat support and want microtransactions and always online in their games. Like what happened to GTA V online And Apex when it came to discontinued Linux compatibility and Battlefield and Fortnite when it comes to anticheat support.
That’s less a launcher problem but big corporate gaming backed games in general. If someone is that fearful of a launcher when it comes to that they should be more concerned with big publisher games everyone gets hyped about year after year than a game launcher on an open platform.
But steam would never do that!
🥺 <-- see? It’s just a lil guy!
I’m not sure that’s how that shakes out, you can’t exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.
It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that’s far from the way it is today.
Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that’s easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I’ll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.