Not sure why “direct profit” is important.
Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.
Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.
DireTech@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Epic doesn’t do a single thing that doesn’t directly result in profits. Features are only added off they can derive income from them. Lawsuits are filed so they can take a larger percentage of profits. Even his twitter posts are mainly about him getting a larger cut, when he isn’t defending AI child porn.
Valve is very old school in their ‘keep improving your offering and it will work out’ way. Usually companies like that get bought out and their name run into the ground. It sadly happens in all industries, from Samsonite luggage to BioWare games and even service companies.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.
Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?
Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.
The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.
DireTech@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Sorry if I took it the wrong way. I can see some common ground in Steam vs others and Apple vs others since both focused on the user experience against really poor competition in that area, though Apple has a helluva stronger walled garden.
I do think fanboying a for profit company is silly, but a lot of this is also driven by hate for Epic’s CEO. Epic’s just another business that wants to make money and that alone isn’t the reason people keep backing Steam on these threads. People shit on them because their CEO is an asshole who spends a lot of time bitching about other storefronts while their own still sucks 7 years after release despite the company raking in billions. Guy tries to act like he’s some underdog despite Unreal engine having a greater stranglehold over game development.