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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Explain. I get the reference, so not that.
Valve is a capitalist company, aiming for profit.
They were heavily involved into establishing DRM in the video gaming world.
They were among the first to establish "FreeToPlay", Lootboxes and whaling, a predatory business tactic.
They accepted right wing extremist games in the past.
They have a kind of monopolist web store for PC games.
They are known to use the embrace and suffocate tactic against community projects in the past (DotA, once a community driven project is now a trademark of Valve).
The linux gaming scene is flourishing, but this comes at the price of dependency. And not all this dependencies can be resolved at the will of the community; many of the users that came over in the last time are probably unable to start a binary without help.
I think you have a lot of valid arguments for why Valve isn't a pure champion for all things good. But, that also wasn't the question.
I've used proton more often than not with games purchased through GoG. Their contributions to wine and the layer on top is excellent. Sam Latinga is a Valve employee and creator of libSDL, which is also another significant and foundational contribution to FOSS.
A company can do a lot of good without having to be exclusively good. And as for Linux gaming, it wouldn't be where it is without Valve.
Wine and SDL were around before Valve was involved. It is unclear if and how good they can prevail if Valve decides that they aren't interested anymore. Structures that are lost might be hard to regenerate.
Half on the way to a glorified console for most of its users? The Linux gaming scene is now a reduced mirror of the gaming scene for Windows and the consoles; imo it was to be more interesting before. There was a higher and more vocal interest in smaller and more experimental productions. Nowadays it is the same as everywhere else.
Companies do profit, not good. The Linux Gaming scene was once quite sensitive to privacy, self control, and independence. Lemmy is a dedicated left site. But some of the folks here are cheerleading to a monopolist corp like there is no tomorrow. I'm from Germany - if I hear people worrying about what will happen when the benevolent dictator dies (see above in this thread) I get the creeps.