If Steam comes out with a cloud gaming service, it will absolutely wipe the floor with Stadia. The big issue with Stadia is that it only works as a replacement for PC gaming outright. Being able...
If Steam comes out with a cloud gaming service, it will absolutely wipe the floor with Stadia.
The big issue with Stadia is that it only works as a replacement for PC gaming outright. Being able to take your games on the go is nice, but being forced to play inferior versions of your games at home makes it a non-starter, since Stadia offers no way to download and run your games on local hardware.
Steam could position their service as a value-add. For $10 a month, play your existing Steam library on your phone or thin&light laptop by streaming from the cloud. There is no need to choose between the streaming and local versions of a game. Microsoft's xCloud is similarly positioned to be a much more compelling service than Stadia.
For anybody unaware, if you have a gaming rig at home and broadband, they already have this feature for free. Just enable remote play in steam, install on phone and/or laptop, and enjoy gaming on...
play your existing Steam library on your phone or thin&light laptop by streaming from the cloud.
For anybody unaware, if you have a gaming rig at home and broadband, they already have this feature for free. Just enable remote play in steam, install on phone and/or laptop, and enjoy gaming on the go. It's how I play all my games now... headless gaming rig in basement, streaming to whatever device I'm on.
I will say that if your upstream bandwidth is cripplingly slow or laggy, a cloud service might make sense for remote play. But for several months that's how I played MTG:Arena on my phone.
Yeah, I regularly play my Steam games on my iPad these days using the Steam Link app. The controls can be a bit wonky for some games using touchscreen (though you can pair a XB1 controller on...
Yeah, I regularly play my Steam games on my iPad these days using the Steam Link app. The controls can be a bit wonky for some games using touchscreen (though you can pair a XB1 controller on iOS/iPadOS 13+ now, which helps), and the latency is noticeable, but for slower paced games like P&C adventures, CCGs, turn based strategy, etc. it's pretty great.
Valve has the tech, the existing customer buy-in, and presumably the agreements to pull off a Steam Cloud service and make it the hottest thing around, and if it has a hook-in to GeForce Now, all...
Valve has the tech, the existing customer buy-in, and presumably the agreements to pull off a Steam Cloud service and make it the hottest thing around, and if it has a hook-in to GeForce Now, all the better.
This is somewhat off-topic since it's only briefly mentioned in the article, but I figured I'd ask since I know we have a lot of knowledgeable people here (for which I'm continually grateful). Can...
This is somewhat off-topic since it's only briefly mentioned in the article, but I figured I'd ask since I know we have a lot of knowledgeable people here (for which I'm continually grateful).
Can someone explain to me (or point me to a good resource) on exactly what the "Steam Linux Runtime" is and does? I read the explanation they linked and still don't feel like I have a good handle on it. I think I'm missing a lot of background info, as I don't really get what a "runtime" necessarily even means or what a "container" really does.
All I know is that I have the choice to run a game through it when I'm selecting which version of Proton to use, but I don't know how that's different from just running it on my machine directly (which already has Linux on it). Should I be using that choice on Linux native games, or no?
If anyone could ELI5 this for me, I'd really appreciate it.
The pinned topics in the 'Steam for Linux' community do a better job of explaining things than this post IMO: https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206447625383/ And I would...
The pinned topics in the 'Steam for Linux' community do a better job of explaining things than this post IMO:
There has been a lot of news and discussion over the weekend on the topic of Steam on Linux and officially supported and recommended distributions. For those not in the loop, last week the Ubuntu project announced their intent to change how they're approaching 32-bit library support for future Ubuntu versions. Following that announcement, we made a statement that Ubuntu 19.10 wouldn't be officially supported or recommended to our users going forward. As the Ubuntu project indicated, they let us know of their intent and walked us through the details earlier this month, which was much appreciated. We don't think it is unreasonable that they would want to take steps that are in the best interests of the project. That being said, we don't think it's an especially positive move for Steam and gaming-oriented customers who rely on this support.
To provide some background, support for 32-bit libraries is required in order to run not only the Steam client, but also the thousands of games available on Steam that only support 32-bit environments. Enabling the Steam client to run in pure 64-bit environments, while feasible, would leave the vast majority of the current Steam library inaccessible to such users without an additional compatibility layer. Ensuring that all games a user owns remain fully playable wherever possible is a core principle of Steam, and we don't believe any solution that arbitrarily splits a user's library would be acceptable.
To that effect, Steam already bundles a lot of the dependencies needed by 32-bit games, but it currently relies on some key components being available on the host system: a 32-bit glibc, ELF loader, Mesa and NVIDIA graphics driver libraries, to name a few. We've been investigating ways to avoid these system dependencies for a while now, by looking into light containerization and other approaches. The announced change by Ubuntu would have required us to fully complete such a system in the 19.10 release time frame, as it would be required there to maintain functionality without requiring users to reinstall Steam through another method. A significant portion of our Linux users are on the latest version of Ubuntu and upgrade as new versions become available. Requiring such a fundamental change in Steam's runtime environment in that time frame would have been very risky for these users, and would likely not have resulted in a seamless experience.
And I would assume this latest news is their response to the 32bit support problem, which point two in the runtime feature announcement suggests is the case:
The Steam client for Linux now supports using namespaces (a.k.a containers) to run game titles.
...
This new feature offers several advantages:
Titles are better isolated from the host system, improving a host of potential problems and enabling new features such as home isolation.
This feature improves Valve's ability to support older titles on newer distributions moving forward.
For developers, making sure your title runs in the container environment ensures better compatibility across multiple distributions, reducing your QA load.
For developers, Steam will be able to support newer runtimes via containers, which will include newer compilers and libraries.
So it looks like Steam is now adding in a compatibility and security layer so that, amongst other things, older 32 bit games can still run on distros like Ubuntu that intend to drop 32 bit library support.
Thank you! Let me make sure I'm getting this right (and if I'm wrong, please tell me!). Here's how I currently understand it: Steam games need to access certain resources in the operating system...
Thank you!
Let me make sure I'm getting this right (and if I'm wrong, please tell me!). Here's how I currently understand it:
Steam games need to access certain resources in the operating system so that they can run. Ubuntu announced that they will be removing some of these resources, so the Steam Linux Runtime is a way of packaging those resources "in-house" so that the game can still run even if the OS lacks the resources it needs. The benefits of doing this are that the game has less access to OS components (making it safer to run), and developers have more of a single target to program towards rather than trying to make their game work across all distros.
AFAIK, that is essentially correct, yes. But depending on the implementation of the container system, there may also be some virtualization going on too.... which looks to be the case:...
AFAIK, that is essentially correct, yes. But depending on the implementation of the container system, there may also be some virtualization going on too.... which looks to be the case:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1638675549018366706/ Steam Linux Runtime is like Docker for Steam Games. They run in sandboxed environments that won't mess around with your...
Steam Linux Runtime is like Docker for Steam Games. They run in sandboxed environments that won't mess around with your main system. Proton is a compatibility layer with Windows dependencies that would run inside the SLR. If a game is your lunch, SLR is a lunchbox, Proton is a ziploc bag for a sandwich, and a Linux build is a prepackaged snack.
If Steam comes out with a cloud gaming service, it will absolutely wipe the floor with Stadia.
The big issue with Stadia is that it only works as a replacement for PC gaming outright. Being able to take your games on the go is nice, but being forced to play inferior versions of your games at home makes it a non-starter, since Stadia offers no way to download and run your games on local hardware.
Steam could position their service as a value-add. For $10 a month, play your existing Steam library on your phone or thin&light laptop by streaming from the cloud. There is no need to choose between the streaming and local versions of a game. Microsoft's xCloud is similarly positioned to be a much more compelling service than Stadia.
For anybody unaware, if you have a gaming rig at home and broadband, they already have this feature for free. Just enable remote play in steam, install on phone and/or laptop, and enjoy gaming on the go. It's how I play all my games now... headless gaming rig in basement, streaming to whatever device I'm on.
I will say that if your upstream bandwidth is cripplingly slow or laggy, a cloud service might make sense for remote play. But for several months that's how I played MTG:Arena on my phone.
Yeah, I regularly play my Steam games on my iPad these days using the Steam Link app. The controls can be a bit wonky for some games using touchscreen (though you can pair a XB1 controller on iOS/iPadOS 13+ now, which helps), and the latency is noticeable, but for slower paced games like P&C adventures, CCGs, turn based strategy, etc. it's pretty great.
Valve has the tech, the existing customer buy-in, and presumably the agreements to pull off a Steam Cloud service and make it the hottest thing around, and if it has a hook-in to GeForce Now, all the better.
This is somewhat off-topic since it's only briefly mentioned in the article, but I figured I'd ask since I know we have a lot of knowledgeable people here (for which I'm continually grateful).
Can someone explain to me (or point me to a good resource) on exactly what the "Steam Linux Runtime" is and does? I read the explanation they linked and still don't feel like I have a good handle on it. I think I'm missing a lot of background info, as I don't really get what a "runtime" necessarily even means or what a "container" really does.
All I know is that I have the choice to run a game through it when I'm selecting which version of Proton to use, but I don't know how that's different from just running it on my machine directly (which already has Linux on it). Should I be using that choice on Linux native games, or no?
If anyone could ELI5 this for me, I'd really appreciate it.
The pinned topics in the 'Steam for Linux' community do a better job of explaining things than this post IMO:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206447625383/
And I would assume this latest news is their response to the 32bit support problem, which point two in the runtime feature announcement suggests is the case:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1638675549018366706/
So it looks like Steam is now adding in a compatibility and security layer so that, amongst other things, older 32 bit games can still run on distros like Ubuntu that intend to drop 32 bit library support.
Thank you!
Let me make sure I'm getting this right (and if I'm wrong, please tell me!). Here's how I currently understand it:
Steam games need to access certain resources in the operating system so that they can run. Ubuntu announced that they will be removing some of these resources, so the Steam Linux Runtime is a way of packaging those resources "in-house" so that the game can still run even if the OS lacks the resources it needs. The benefits of doing this are that the game has less access to OS components (making it safer to run), and developers have more of a single target to program towards rather than trying to make their game work across all distros.
Am I close?
AFAIK, that is essentially correct, yes. But depending on the implementation of the container system, there may also be some virtualization going on too.... which looks to be the case:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1638675549018366706/
Steam Linux Runtime is like Docker for Steam Games. They run in sandboxed environments that won't mess around with your main system. Proton is a compatibility layer with Windows dependencies that would run inside the SLR. If a game is your lunch, SLR is a lunchbox, Proton is a ziploc bag for a sandwich, and a Linux build is a prepackaged snack.