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Valve Reveals First Month of Steam Linux Gains
An anonymous reader writes with news that Valve has updated its Hardware & Software Survey for December 2012, which reflects the first month of the platform being available for Linux. Even though the project is still in a beta test, players on Ubuntu already account for 0.8% of Steam usage. The 64-bit clients for Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04.1 showed about double the share of the 32-bit versions. MacOS use also showed growth, rising to about 3.7%. Windows 7's usage share dropped by over 2%, but balanced by the growth of Windows 8, which is now at just under 7%. The total share for Windows is still about 95%.
I wonder how many of the "Windows" users are actually just Linux users using Wine. Despite the Beta, I still do that for games (e.g. Civ 5) that don't have a Linux version.
Lot sof playable-on-Linux-DRM-free games at gog.com.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Steam IS DRM.
I'm against DRM when it's a problem, but I've never had a problem with Steam.
If the only reason I'd ever even notice your DRM is trying to do something illegal, I really don't have a reason to take issue with it.
The Mac version tends to lose windows quite often as well. The news, library, game windows, etc. will be active (including the odd duplicate) and not appear on screen. Sometimes it just takes an extra five minutes for the news to load to tell you the latest deal.
Hopefully that's not the case for the Linux users as well.
That's a very good point made by the parent, and it has plenty of precedent outside of the Valve/Steam games space. I appear in the statistics as a "Windows User" for Guild Wars 2 (and for many years previously for Guild Wars 1), yet there hasn't been a Windows box at home for years and years. This is sure to be happening for Steam "Windows" games as well.
Wine works perfectly for gaming these days. Beware the "Windows User" statistics!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You know, I often find myself forgetting that Steam is essentially DRM. This struck me most lately last night as I started thinking about the new SimCity that's coming out this year and how it's suppose to be "always online" for DRM purposes. I started to think, "Well, hell, I have SC4 on Steam I could just fire that u....waaaaaait".
I don't know if I can really pinpoint why I don't consider Steam to be the kick to the dick that almost all other DRM is. Is it the constant sales and love that get chucked my way? The ability to move game folders/files anywhere and everywhere and have it work as long the signed in account owns the game (my old apartment would frequently dump our Steam games on our NAS to save everyone else who bought it the trouble of downloading it, all legit)? The relatively good server uptime (compared to other game companies)? The ability to add non-Steam games to my library? I don't know, but I just feel like I'm using a service instead of being locked up.
Is it pure? Hell, no. Is it good? I'd certainly say so. If the balance of the two don't balance to your favor I'd certainly see why you'd avoid it. I don't, personally, and my big wish is that the Linux/Mac Steam clients get some sort of built in VM in order to easily play the huge back catalog of Windows only games. This could either increase Linux/Mac growth by easing the pain of transition or it could stymie development by giving developers a lazy out. Either way...VIDYO GAMES!
Yes, Steam is DRM. However, Steam is DRM that gives something back in return.
Being able to download your games as you please, store your saves (on supported games) in the cloud, automatic updates, and the ability to easily download mods for games (when supported), makes Steam more palatable when it comes to DRM. Most DRM schemes just take away from the user without giving anything back in return, Steam is different.
Steam IS DRM.
Steam is a distribution system that uses DRM. They could choose to stop using it and still be a distribution system.
Moderators, please explain which part of "Steam is a distribution system that uses DRM. They could choose to stop using it and still be a distribution system" is a troll. Steam is a distribution system. Steam uses DRM. The DRM is not an integral part of Steam; some titles on Steam don't actually use it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nothing is worse than iTunes on Windows. It's literally the worst program in the entire world.
Perhaps their engineers are not that skilled?
They started with getting it to work on one distribution (on of the more popular ones), they will get it to work on others.
The articles describing how the worked with graphics card manufacturers to improve performance on linux suggests that their engineers are quite skilled, but only human, so they cannot do everything at once.
Well not really. You can only filter Windows vs Mac. No Linux specific support at all.
AC
I don't know if I can really pinpoint why I don't consider Steam to be the kick to the dick that almost all other DRM is.
Two reasons.
1) It continues to just work.
2) You get at least the game-play value out of it that you spent.
I've picked up a lot of sub-$5 games on steam. You know how much I will care if at some point I can no longer play them? About as much as a care that I let $5 worth of cheese spoil in my refrigerator this week. I wish it didn't happen, but it doesnt pain me.
"His name was James Damore."
That was my impression. I've tried the Linux Steam beta and it is terrible. It's slow, clunky and navigating it is a pain. it doesn't integrate into the desktop either, so the app looks out of place.
Which is surprising since the Windows client runs pretty well using WINE.
I have both installed, and you are full of crap. Steam is slow, clunky and navigating it is a pain on both Windows and Linux. I suppose you could laud Valve for providing the same experience on both platforms, but that's really not much of an accolade considering how crap Steam on Windows is. Regardless, it takes just about as long for either Steam to connect, but it actually takes longer for Steam for Windows on Wine to display its interface after the nigh-interminable login process.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm generally fine with the DRM encountered with Steam. Only issue has been the Steam client frequently crashing on quit, which in the past meant it won't allow offline mode when I relaunch it. That's been a pain when I'm travelling and would fancy a quick bout of zombie hunting before my battery dies, and have no Internet access.
Overall the balance between usability and DRM has been pretty good.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
You've gone to far. RealPlayer is literally the worst program in the entire world.
It's about control. You give up control over your own games and your own computer and hand it to a third party. Regardless if you're doing anything illegal, they have the power you your property. Normally they're kept in check because abusing that power would lend them fewer sales, but occasionally, due to greed or a bug or a conflict of interest, you can be sure that they will.
No. Steam is a distribution system. Steamworks is a DRM, community and cloud integration API which is provided through Steam, but which is entirely optional. There's a fair number of games available on Steam that already do not use Steamworks DRM, or any sort of DRM.
You can spend all your time fighting extraordinarily un-restraining DRM, or you can play games.
Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. From the numbers, having Steam support linux games at all is pretty silly from the business perspective.
It's an act of good will that it exists at all.
So, keep complaining, if you think that's getting you anywhere. I'm going back to playing games
Are we running the same Steam? I've been using it for years, and never encountered anything just described. It's quick and gets out of the way as soon as I tell it I want to play a game. In fact, my only irritation is that it has to install the DirectX runtime or VC RED (whichever it is) for each new game, but I sort of understand why it's doing that, and it only happens once.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
The Steam client itself works just fine. The problem is Valve's distribution system. I had 4 games that were listed as supported. Of those, two of them would not install (as in you can click the install button and it would give a message that it was installed but there would be nothing downloaded). One of them installed but would not launch. The last is TF2, and I really don't care to play that.
I'm not faulting them, it's still beta after all. I'm just not excited about a new platform to play games that are mostly available outside of Steam already with the added bonus of more TF2.
You obviously haven't used Excel for Mac.
1) No multi-threading, which is a problem when the application pretty easily maxes out a core.
2) Bizarre keyboard shortcuts that don't match the standard ones used in most applications
3) Piss poor support for multiple displays, with a resizing bug that's been around for way too long
4) Excel documents don't show up in recent items in Finder
5) Excel addresses files using a path - not a reference to the file, meaning that it doesn't notice when open files are renamed or moved. It also gets confused if you have two mounted volumes (including the home folder) with the same name.
6) Very buggy AppleScript support. I know of no other application that so easily crashes while scripted to do fairly mundane things.
7) Uses its own internal clipboard, meaning that copying and pasting can be pretty bizarre. Copying something, and then closing a document alters the contents of the clipboard. It's also slow as hell. It's not unusual for me to sit there waiting 5 seconds to put a value from a cell in to the clipboard. I could understand this if it's pasting in to a cell that is referenced in heavy calculations, but for just copying a value?
iMovie 3.0 was pretty bad. I'd take Steam of that any day.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
And at the very least, with the games on your system you can always crack them. This is an advantage over streamed games like onlive/gaikai and consoles.
You are the most retarded AC I've seen on /. in the past few weeks. Congrats! So much wrong in so little text.
Also I loved the word "paytard", it tells us exactly the type of person you are.
Steam is less annoying DRM.
The problem with most DRM on PC games is that it breaks and prevents yo u from doing things that seem obvious. This includes simple things like playing the game without the CD or an Internet connection.
There's actually a tradeoff going on with Steam. It's not just some misguided suit deciding to add extra fail to a product that doesn't really benefit from it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> 3) Piss poor support for multiple displays, with a resizing bug that's been around for way too long
Why would this ever be a problem? This is something that should be transparent to applications.
What happened to this great multi-monitor support in Macs and Windows that's supposed to make Linux look so shameful?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there. Contrast to that of CD's of yore where if you forgot to put the right disc in the drive, your game won't start even though it doesn't actually need it. Or when you had those challenge response code books. Or worse, the ones where you had to read the damn manual with a red filter.
Also offline mode is an option with steam too, unlike say diablo 3.
One thing about older DRM was that the pirated version offered better value than the legit version because you didn't have to bother with that crap. Steam on the other hand the legit version offers many benefits that you don't get with a pirated version, like cloud save data and no need to hunt down the game discs if you re-format your PC.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
It's definitely a bit on the clunky side with a Mac... Never mind that half the games they advertise to you don't run on your current system. Look at all these games on sale! XCOM: Enemy Unknown is on sale. You click it. Oh look, this doesn't work on your system. Want to discover a RPG or strategy game? Well you can't filter by OS X client and RPG. I'm sure you'd get less windows users if you treated them the same way. 342 games supporting OS X, unsortable... 1859 PC games, 38 Linux games.
Just because it offers something doesn't mean the DRM part is offering it. DRM offers the content industry something. It is the delusion that they're going to make more money. In reality it detracts from people who dislike DRM and from those who end up not pirating it (because fewer people who pirate means less publicity which means fewer sales). There are a lot of shitty movies that have sold well. It has to do with publicty and piracy fuels that.
In most countries they can't revoke, and most countries consider this "licensing" as buying. Only in US law allows absurd contracts like this where end users end not owning games they paid for.
It works for as long as it is advantageous for the company and not for the user. That is the problem. For now Steam DRM is mostly harmless, but that can change tomorrow, or next month, or next year, at their own discretion. And this change would affect everything you already paid for.
Bottom line is, no DRM is acceptable. Accepting DRM is signing a blank check and giving control over your property to someone else.
Well, Cubemen is a very nice tower defense game and should be fun for kids.
There is also a Linux version of Team Fortress 2, which you might be interested about.
No. European court allowed resale of a license (if it doesn't have a time limit), but that doesn't mean that it equated buying the license itself with purchasing a tangible item. It's intuitively understood that you cannot own a "copy" of a sequence of bytes. You can own a right to use the said sequence (e.g. execute it on your processor). Can't you see how intellectual property is different from physical one?
Coding etudes
Oh I can, but you own the permanent right to use the copy of this data stream in most countries, which for all practical purpose is the same, and cannot be revoked at will by the seller. You can resell this right if you so wish and do basically anything else you could with a physical good.
Law is not wrong here. How else are you going to compensate the authors? It takes more and more effort to create a game (which boils down to producing a meaningful and long enough sequence of 1s and 0s :-) ) and we need to find a sustainable way to do it or we won't get quality games at all.
This is not limited to games, creating just about every intellectual property (software, movies, music, etc) requires more investment with time.
Coding etudes
Well, Steam used to be like this, but they changed their ToS last summer to make it clear that you aren't buying a permanent license. So if you never paid for such a license in the first place, they cannot take it away from you.
There's an open question about all the games licensed from Steam before that, though.
Coding etudes
Except for, y'know, the games. Steam could never get mainstream, popular games without providing content providers DRM.
Games are profitable enough as it is, and there is no proof that DRM does anything to improve this profitability. Even if piracy is rampant enough people buy to pay the costs. GOG, for example, is doing very well selling stuff that has been pirated on exhaustion, so is Humble Bundle and many other no DRM initiatives. Furthermore DRM does not stop, prevents or even hinders piracy. It just diminishes paying user rights and creates annoyances for them.
It can be argued that server sided DRM has nothing to do with preventing piracy at all, but with having control.
A reminder for all that although Ubuntu is the only one on the list, you can run it on other platforms.
Valve has native binaries for Gentoo, SUSE, Fedora, and Arch
You can read more here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
On a personal note, while extremely happy that linux is finally gaining gaming ground, it sorrows me that they decided to put emphasis on Ubuntu, given its current questionable vision
I'm a game developer who happens to work in Poland and I track CD Projekt (GOG parent) stock close enough. GOG did bring them profit (a bit less than 1 mln USD for 1H2012), Wiedzmin (Witcher) for 360 got them even more (about 5 mln USD) but they are losing money on traditional retail market, their primary source of income up to now (source in Polish). Also, compare those numbers, which may be good for Poland, to 40 mln USD needed to create a modern AAA game.
Also, DRM is essential to delay piracy for the first month of game release. Games only really sell in the first few weeks after launch, if you didn't know - after that, people move on to something else and the "long tail" of sales begins (see just about any game's charts: [1], [2], [3]). So the games need to make up for that large upfront investment in first 4 to 6 weeks, if they don't break even, they are dead. Alan Wake, L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3 - all those arguably known and high profile titles are commercial failures. Most current triple A games flop or barely make even, but unless explicitly asked, publishers rarely admit it. However, if you work in gamedev you probably saw the closures of Grin, Pandemic, 38 Studios, and in general, it starts to happen too frequently.
So no, it's not just about "having control". There would be no need in control if existing model provided a sustainable way to earn money. Truth is, nowadays interactive entertainment market is a gamble.
Coding etudes
A lot of those games on GoG are running on DosBox or ScummVM so you can run them on Linux just as well. Not that GoG makes any specific effort to actually list these or have any proper Linux support however.
I take it you never used Lotus Notes then...
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
DRM is not essential to delay piracy, because it simply cannot accomplish it. Most AAA games are cracked and available to download even before release. Still many AAA manage to profit a lot. Especially those that are most pirated in their first weeks.
You, and nobody else up to this day, succeeded in correlating piracy with loss of income, maybe because there is no correlation at all.
Furthermore I couldn't care less about AAA games at all. AAA games come from big companies, usually follow trends and add very little innovation to the market. It can be argued that we would be much better without those companies and their games.
And all markets are gambles. You always take the risks when you enter a market. If you can't take the risk don't do it.
That is a libertarian view I can't agree with, Some abusive practices must be prevented by laws. Licensing virtual goods for undetermined time at the discretion of the seller simply shouldn't be allowed, as it is not here and in a lot of other places. Copyright in its current implementation is bad enough as it is, this kind of abuse just makes it much worse.
Will Valves servers be around in 30 years? Perhaps? Is it guaranteed? Nope.
True, but it's not like that will be very different with all other modern games. Games these days, even when single player, are filled with online integration and frequently need patches after the release to work properly. None of that will work in 30 years or even 5 years. My disc copy of Bioshock for example is unusable because the patch servers are down, without the patch servers however the game can't be installed, the installation will abort and the game will uninstall itself. That's not even DRM, that's simply shitty installer design, but the effects are pretty much the same. Even worse is the situation for a game like Little Big Planet, without the level sharing community the game will run into serious issues. I have even seen indie games proclaiming to be DRM-free that won't work unless you log into their servers.
When it comes to game archival, regular good old DRM is really a minor issue, some cracker will disable it in a day anyway. The whole online integration is a far bigger problem, as you never get your fingers on the server code to begin with and without that you have nothing to crack or archive.
It's about control. You give up control over your own games and your own computer and hand it to a third party.
That's however not much different then using apt-get on Ubuntu. If Ubuntu decides to remove some software from their repositories, you are still fucked. It might all be DRM-free and Open Source, but you still need a lot of knowledge and work to get it back into working order, which isn't really a whole lot different from DRM, which oftentimes is rather easy to get rid of as well.
The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there.
I notice that Steam DRM is there. Each Steam game I have takes a good fifteen-twenty seconds before it even shows its first splash screen. My non-Steam games show their first splash screen almost instantly.
(Even with Steam in offline mode, they still took longer to start. I got fed up with offline mode though because I'd always be turning it offline to play a game, then back online to look at the steam store, then offline again, then online again, ...)
I see your point. It all boils down which market you want to implement - integrating over time, developers will get the same money, but in different ways. If you outlaw certain licensing models or even whole property rights altogether, software market will look like one currently seen in countries with a weak law enforcement, i.e. a lot of low-quality cheap/free products which suck your money gradually, by nagging you with ads or asking to pay on each step (in the first case you become a product yourself). If law system is strong enough to support advanced licensing models, it opens up possibilities for upfront payments, so you don't have to pay each time you click.
However, it looks like the world is sliding into "el cheapo" approach and micropayments will become ubiquitous.
Coding etudes
I don't know if I can really pinpoint why I don't consider Steam to be the kick to the dick that almost all other DRM is.
Easy, because Steam drastically improves your experience. PC gaming has always been a mess, requiring discs in the drive even so the game is already installed, hour long install and extraction routines, typing in long CD-keys, long hunts and installs for the latest patches and all that mess. With Steam it's click & play. It's essentially the apt-get of gaming. And even when Steam fails for some reason, the support forum is only a click away and often already has the workaround you need.
Of course Steam still has it's problems, the complete lack of any kind of game sharing, is probably the biggest one caused by the DRM. But compared to other services its still lightyears ahead. Most of the others still haven't even figured out how to do game downloads correctly, instead of actually downloading the game, they download an installer, once that is downloaded you can't play, you first have to go through a lengthy install procedure, once that is done, you still can't play, you have to download numerous patches in succession and install each of them seperatly by clicking through dozens of dialogs. Then an hour or two after you downloaded the game you might be able to play it and if not, well, they won't give you an easily accessible support forum.
Can't agree. I use a lot of open source software myself (even as I write these words, in Kubuntu) and it reminds me of Soviet cars: you always have problems where others don't and you need to know the guts of the car in order to drive it. But I won't argue about that. I'm rather sympathetic to "open source" (but not exactly Free Software) myself (more evidence can be found in my blog), it's just that I don't believe that solid development practices can arise where there's no monetary feedback - and FOSS seems to be hard to monetize. Again, let market decide - currently it looks like FOSS is on decline (together with "unlocked" hardware platforms like PC, where freedom to run random binaries is about to be sacrificed to gods of Security), but maybe - and hopefully - the situation will change.
Coding etudes
My point is that it's largely a legal issue, not a practical one. Working around DRM is often easy, while completely DRM-free stuff can give you a lot of trouble. The only difference is the legality.
Valve MUST make Linux a viable gamming plataform, or they are out of the game.
That said, they get the same result whatever market share Linux gets. The reason they must run on Linux is not because everybody will sudenly switch, it is because they can use it to threaten Microsoft in the case MS extends their PC monopoly into the game distribution market.
The Mac simply doesn't enable such kind of "deal".
Rethinking email
This posts smells of someone who doesn't want to pay for video games, so they instead attack others who DO wish to pay for their video games.
Not everyone subscribes to Richard Stallman's point of view of "free software is good, everything else is evil." There IS a time and place for non-free software. Verbally abusing me on Slashdot while posting as an Anonymous Coward will not change that fact.
Also, your use of Astroturfing is flawed. The definition is as follows (Wikipedia):
Astroturfing refers to political, advertising or public relations campaigns that are designed to mask the sponsors of the message to give the appearance of coming from a disinterested, grassroots participant. Astroturfing is intended to give the statements the credibility of an independent entity by withholding information about the source's financial connection.
The only financial connection I have with Valve is I spend money to buy video games that utilize their service. Otherwise, I'd consider myself an independent entity.
By the way, any idiot can put in dollar $ing$ in$tead of $'$! Just an FYI.
While Steam is not all nice, they do promise to release the games to their customers if ever they should go under.
Valve does not own the rights to the majority of games on their service. They cannot promise to release anything other than Valve published titles. There are a lot of third party games that use Steamworks DRM.
How happy would Rockstar be if Valve released a cracked version of Max Payne 3 just because they were going out of business?
It's about control. You give up control over your own games and your own computer and hand it to a third party.
That's however not much different then using apt-get on Ubuntu. If Ubuntu decides to remove some software from their repositories, you are still fucked. It might all be DRM-free and Open Source, but you still need a lot of knowledge and work to get it back into working order, which isn't really a whole lot different from DRM, which oftentimes is rather easy to get rid of as well.
Needing knowledge and work is not the same as DRM, which is illegal to remove in many very important jurisdictions. And the very point of Ubuntu is to reduce the work done by the user. The very point of DRM is to place restrictions in the path of the user.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why would this ever be a problem? This is something that should be transparent to applications.
What happened to this great multi-monitor support in Macs and Windows that's supposed to make Linux look so shameful?
Step 1: Install Windows XP on system with nVidia card and multiple outputs
Step 2: Install Office 97 Pro
Step 3: Put any Office application on the second display, and click on a pull-down menu.
Step 4: Laugh and laugh as the menu appears with the proper X and Y offset, but on the wrong display
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"