alt Hacker NewsWhy doesnt Stream require their binaries to be compiled to some bytecode and transpiled during the install ?
THen they wouldnt require any emulator for any new compiles.
Replies
That will open a can of worms. For one thing, Valve will be accused of trying to create a walled garden. Plus there's the whole problem of supporting the back-catalogue as others have said.
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Maybe the best that they could to is to offer to distribute recompiled versions of the emulated binaries, similar to how they distribute compiled shaders. But I don't know if that would work, especially legally.
I don't know, but assumed that Valve doesn't require studios to recompile their software or use any special tooling, it's basically just packaging of existing executables. This is also why they do Windows on Linux emulation.
Existing games will not be recompiled for the new bytecode target, and they want all of those games to work regardless.
Because even with their effective monopoly they don't have the power to bully developers into doing whatever suits Valve. And it would be disastrous for the industry if they did.
Several games in their library are actually just game updater/launcher binaries, which manage their associated game assets and binaries externally.
because there's no gaming-oriented toolchain for it
I hate that you're being downvoted for asking a perfectly reasonable question.
Guys, if you don't like the premise of the question, reply and say why, don't downvote.
I think it's a good question, and my guess for the answer is this - which is going to be the easier problem to solve?
"Hi guys if you want to publish on Steam you have to use this specific tooling and language that'll compile to native code on first run" and everyone just has to do it
or
"Hi guys we want to be able to publish everything so it runs on Arch Linux that we run on our Steamdeck, even if only Windows binaries are available, so given that Gaben is a billionaire what we'll do is just pay guys to make Wine not suck"
You choose.
> Why doesnt Stream require their binaries to be compiled to some bytecode and transpiled during the install ?
They still have to support the entire back-catalog. It's not reasonable to expect thousands of existing games to port to ARM