A better argument is who works on Proton compatibility? It’s largely not Valve employees, yet that’s a unique stack to Valve.
Comment on Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees
imecth@fedia.io 3 months agoThese stats don't include subcontractors and as such they're very misleading. For example, who do you think produces the GPUs inside the steam deck? Hint: it's not Valve.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
imecth@fedia.io 3 months ago
It annoys me too that Valve is getting most of the credit for Proton while most of the work is actually done in winehq, dxvk... I'm sure Valve pays for some development here and there, and greases some developer wheels, but the main thing does is be a front end for consumers.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I think you’re discounting just how much they’ve invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE. But they don’t do lion’s share of the development in-house, they mostly just pay devs to work on it, and yes, manage the FE in Steam. They’re still a massive positive force for change in Windows game compatibility on Linux, and we’d be nowhere near where we are today without their investment.
imecth@fedia.io 3 months ago
I think you're discounting just how much they've invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE
I'm not really sure I am... Do we have some actual numbers into how much money they've sunk in linux?
Gaming on linux is a huge community effort, whether it's wine, dxvk, vkd3d, mesa, linux itself... and plenty of smaller projects like lutris, bottles, UMU... And all this spans literal decades, far before valve ever got involved.
maxinstuff@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Why would Valve produce their own GPU’s?
imecth@fedia.io 3 months ago
My point being that while valve itself has only 350 employees, it subcontracts far more than that.
SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Do we include the plumber that unclogs the toilets too?
imecth@fedia.io 3 months ago
Yes.
piccolo@ani.social 3 months ago
that’s really silly to argument. only a few manufactures in the world even have the capabilities to produce GPUs and CPUs. even China doesn’t have the fabrication capabilities with current generation. So of course, Valve is going to purchase GPUs from a 3rd party unless you expect them to spend tens of billions of dollars to start their own silicon fabrication…but oh wait, now they have to purchase silicon, so they’ll start their own silicon mine… but now they need trucks…so they start their own truck manufacture…
imecth@fedia.io 3 months ago
You missed my point, I only used AMD as an example because it's listed in the thread.