alt Hacker NewsEverything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.
The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
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That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].
I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
I always took the HL3 memes more as a good-faith joke. Like it's part of gaming culture more than a serious jab at them.
I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)
There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.
Honestly dreading the day Gabe has to pass on the torch. Under him valve is such a consumer focused company
They are merely trying to commoditize their complement https://gwern.net/complement
Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.
To be fair, without the HL3 memes, would Valve ever become as massive as they are now without them constantly teasing and playing into it?
(answer: probably, but I would like to believe that this is one of the greatest unintended marketing tactics of the 21st century).
Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"