Comment by fidotron a day ago
> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.
Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.
It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion.
When your competition is EA... it's not hard.
I have a super high opinion of Valve. Sure, they have loot crates. But sensible people don't buy them. I guess you could blame them for having it in the first place. That's fair I guess. But I've never for a second considered buying any of that junk.
I just buy single player offline games with no IAP, and Steam is amazing. It's a million miles ahead of the competitors, and it's really surprising that EA/Ubi etc.. try to compete but don't get the reason they're losing. They screw customers and then act surprised that customers hate them.
The problem with loot crates, and the reason why they're being slowly regulated against in several places, is that "sensible people don't buy them" has never stopped people to lose their life to gambling.
And loot boxes in Valve games never bothered me, because if you want a particular skin you can just buy it off the market. I can't remember being angry at Valve for having loot boxes.
All other games require you to keep opening loot boxes to get what you want.
> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.
Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail.
But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
I truly believe that Valve has two fundamental things working in their favor:
Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.
Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.
Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)
Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!
So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.
Yes everybody is trying to find rational reasons but to me like in recent politics a lot has to do with irrational tribalism.
I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.
Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?
[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/17/gabe-newell-leviathan-superya...
It isn't tribalism, at least not from my side. There's a tangible, noticeable, immediate difference between buying a piece of hardware from Valve and buying a piece of hardware from Google or Apple. I really resented Valve after the Steam box debacle that left me with a $1,200 paperweight, but since then, they've done enormous amounts of work to regain my trust through tangible increases in the quality of the gaming experience, including not having to use Windows to game anymore, and providing me with open hardware that I can install whatever I want on, including using their hardware as my own personal PC when e.g. traveling.
Its weird to me that people choose what companies to buy from on the basis of whether or not the CEO owns a yacht or how rich he is. That is not the operative criteria when I choose what products to buy, but rather how well that product suits my needs and how much I trust the relationship with the company that produced it.
Valve is just miles ahead of every other manufacturer in this regard.
It's amazing that an always-on DRM company can become the "good guy" by staying the same level of asshole they've always been, while every other company became much worse assholes.
Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.
DRM is optional on Steam, many games don't have it (or roll their own). In many cases of Steam DRM, activation is only one-time, after that, granted the hardware doesn't change significantly, the player can be offline indefinitely.
I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".
Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.
My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.
It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
Steam isn't always-on DRM. For instance Valve's own games don't have any.
Their worst failure is allowing games with Denuvo on their store.
On a personal level I just don't give a shit about the loot crates or cosmetic stuff because I don't buy them, they hold no interest for me, and they typically don't impact gameplay.
I acknowledge that there's a legitimate ethical concern there the same way there is for, say, Magic the Gathering or other card games. But much like MtG, I can't bring myself to be all that upset about it.
You don't become a billionaire by having your hands clean. But what set them appart to other companies is that they go out of their way not to be hostile to their users.
Loot boxes done well are not user hostile, players pay because they like them, and sure, it uses all the tricks from the gambling industry to get as most money as they can, but player don't feel scammed or considering it an obstacle to their goals. It is just an additional feature they may or may not use. Compare to say, locking part of the game behind a paid DLC, players don't like that, they feel forced. Same end goal, that is to make their money your money, but the latter is considered hostile.
And ads, Steam is full of ads, from recommendations to the store page showing up right as you launch steam. But they won't put a popup between you and your game. They show you the ads you want to see... And you buy games you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
And Steam has DRM, that's weak DRM, but effective at what it does, and importantly, if you bought the games legally, you won't even notice, contrary to some other company intrusive practices.
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for.
The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.
For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.
I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.
> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat.
I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To be sure, formal procedures can also be window-dressing: it's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I'm just skeptical of ascribing too much benefit to lack of structure.
My understanding is that the emergence of informal hierarchy can actualy be the feature; The problem being addressed being the rigdity of formal hierarchies in a changing environment. As long as informal hierarchies emerge and die according to circumstances, that can be a win.
The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.
Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.
With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).
The tyranny of structurelessness
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
This isn't about valve specifically
Thank you for the references; Is there any article/blog describing that secret sauce from the insde for the curious outsider that you would recommand?
I've always been interrested in organisations, but not so much by the theory that I've always found too dry.
I think you are correct here. If you want to look at the decline of the US ... this is perhaps a good place to start. Short term capital extraction little long term strategic planning. Maybe Cisco is a good example.. lets move all of our switch hardware production to China and still charge the consumer 3500$ per switch. Equals short term gain, makes lots of millinaires... and then just a few years later.. now Huawei makes excellent switches that are mostly on par with Cisco at a better price point.
yeah this is essentially everything and all this other discussion of corporate structure is irrelevant
In reality, Valve is doing all this work on GNU+Linux because they've been afraid of Microsoft ever since Windows 8 and the introduction of the Windows Store. For now, Microsoft is remaining open and isn't restricting installations to its own store; we even see that with the full-screen gaming version of Windows for handhelds, they display games from other stores, including Steam. But Microsoft also has a history of abusing its dominant position and monopoly to push its own products (Internet Explorer, Edge, OneDrive, etc.). Gaben made the only possible decision to protect Valve from that: having their own OS.
Does it really matter if they take these consumer friendly actions because they know it will get them good press and dedicated consumers? The end result is the same.
Like you touched on, for whatever reason, most large enough companies haven't seemed to figure out this obvious truth. I tend to believe it's because it's harder than it looks, once a company reaches a certain size. Now sure, they are by no means perfect, but I'd like to at least give them credit for being far better than any of the competition, no matter the rational behind it.
I dont really know what has happened, but many forces have had to improve Linux kernel incrementally. 15 years ago, linux was terrible at suspend-to-ram, wifi drivers a nightmare. Power efficiency was lagging far behind on most architectures. Everyone from intel, to amd, router vendors, server datacenters and android manufacturers have gradually improved these parts over years and years and now, there seems to be enough vested interest that linux compatibility is not a third afterthought, but having good linux support early means you can launch on a android phone, in the datacenter, or build for a custom SoC.
No one is hiding anything. No one is pretending to be something they're not. Life is not a Saturday morning cartoon. There are no good guys vs bad guys. There are just businesses trying to earn more profits.
Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve responded by investing in open source OS stuff. Their goal is to commoditize Windows, so that Microsoft doesn't wrest control of video game sales away from them. Commoditize your complement is a strategy as old as the software industry itself.
We've known all this for years, it's been discussed publicly and no one is hiding it. It always annoys me when people think we're in Lord of the Rings and one company is Sauron or another is Gandalf. It's all just business. To everyone who makes decisions, it all boils down to numbers on a spreadsheet. They want their number to go up.
What you SHOULD care about is competition. Valve would never have invested in all these OSS technologies if Microsoft hadn't tried to compete with them. They wouldn't be consumer friendly and they wouldn't make investments if they thought they could sit on their ass. They would just coast and enshittify (like Microsoft has in the OS space with its Windows monopoly).
We don't need good guy companies, we need strong pro-competition laws and strong enforcers of those laws. You can vote accordingly at the ballot box, and you can also vote accordingly with your wallet, buy stuff from the little guys.
It is also doesn't even have to be about more profits. In Valve's case, I do think they like profit or they would lower their commission. But what Valve most needs to do is maintain market share. If they lose market share, they become as relevant to the market as GOG. Steam's market share is the only thing that allows them to dictate pricing in their favor, and that is the only thing stopping Microsoft from owning PC gaming.
The discourse is not valve good others bad, rather it is consumer/product focused good and next-quarter/short-term-profit focused bad.
With the context that a lot of modern enshittification, outsourcing, layoffs, anti-consumer practises follow from these short term approaches
They did the thing. Let’s judge their actions (which they have plenty of good and bad)
To modulate your cynical take somewhat, it's remarkable to me that all the devices are completely open. You can install anything you want on them, which makes them more than a storefront. It makes them a device that works for the user, which, to your final point, does create loyalty in people like me.
Other CEOs are not owner-CEOs. They may be founder-CEOs, but at the end of the day those aren't really more powerful than a CEO hired off the street by owners. For publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
The other difference (and I think a more important one) is that they take a longer term view of the business, rather than next year's bonus and options vesting. A hired CEO will probably not still be there in a few years time.
> or publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
That threat is limited because the other shareholders do not want to reduce the value of their investment either. Look at what a firm of Musk has on Tesla with something like a 15% stake.
Valve is private right? One of the reasons they are not pure evil is because they have the luxury of not needing to chase the magic dragon of inf growth. They can focus on product. Bet your ass if they were public u would see the slimiest shit coming out to eek every possible percent so bonuses are made.
I wish more companies were private for profit but not inf growth.
It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.
So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.
It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.
It's different definitions of "easy."
With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.
On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.
Software is easier than hardware in general but companies generally pay their hardware guys 25-50% less than their software counterparts
People repeat this line a lot but I don’t think it’s true. Companies like Intel, AMD, Arm, Broadcom, etc. afaik all pay their software folks of equivalent YoE or level roughly the same as their hardware folks. To the extent there’s any difference, it’s much less than 25%.
OTOH, there’s a small slice of (mainly) software companies like Google and Meta, along with Unicorn private companies, that skew the average software engineer salary high. Then there’s a long tail of “old school” hardware companies like TI, Motorola, Atmel, Microchip, and tons of smaller less well known companies that all pay much lower than Google. But they pay their software people poorly as well.
So if you just look at “average software engineer salary” vs “average hardware engineer salary” it appears that SW people are making 50% more than HW people, but it’s not at the same companies.
I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware.
Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.
In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.
I have hope for Veryl though.
Come to think of it, for them it is basically customer support.
Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying.
And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.
But - doesn’t open sourcing it kinda make it someone else’s chore?
Obviously it has to “work” at sale but ongoing maintenance could be shared with the community.
They're stuck in the building model of making semi-custom SoCs for enormous corporations and releasing/developing drivers for them in extreme NDA environments.
It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate devices.
Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own themselves.
I also just love that in open source you can call something “Turnip” because you’re not marketing it to anyone.
There isn't a single mention of AI in the article.
Glad too see that while Qualcomm tries to keep things closed shut tightly, Valve and their contractors are trying to do the opposite.
Every major company open sources software that is not part of its core competitive advantages. It’s part of “commoditizing your complements”
I think this is the wrong way around. There might be an economic incentive to keeping something closed source, for example having licensed other closed source code. And remaining in control without oversight also might be an incentive. But the incentive to making something open source is that someone might improve your work, making your product better. It is somewhat arrogant to assume that nobody else out there could possibly improve this code or add value. Just like it is arrogant to assume that your competitors don't already know your 'secrets' and haven't reverse engineered anything they found interesting.
> I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
Often when people run into problems with a GPU they blame "the drivers". How confident are you that the problems you ran into originated from the drivers, and not from other sources, such as the hardware itself? Just because an issue goes away with a driver update it doesn't mean that the problem originated in the driver -- most of the time what happens is that they found a hardware bug and implemented yet another software workaround.
I am not throwing the HW folks under the bus, either. The hardware is immensely complex and it's not that they can release a new revision every month.
One of the main responsibilities of GPU drivers is working around the bugs that are found after hardware is released. That, and getting all the blame.
I suppose from the outside I cant meaningfully distinguish from hardware or software bugs except in a few cases. Doesn't change the outcome for us either, it's not like we can rely on driver updates to be shipped on Android. Many extensions are broken like extended dynamic state to the point of being unusable. We've hit plenty of issues in the driver shader compiler too, even in Vulkan 1.0 features like relaxed precision.
We've hit a ton of bugs on the adreno 830, with even basic stuff like barriers being broken.
The problem isn't exclusive to Qualcomm fwiw, we've run into plenty of bugs in ARM's driver. Apple's too
Android has entire API for handling driver failures:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...
Hardware can have issues, but firmware and drivers usually work around those issues. When firmware and drivers crash, you get "masterpieces" like the one above.
Qualcomm is by a lot of accounts on HN a law firm with a side hustle of selling chips.
> Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront.
Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community.
Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing right by the consumer. I'm not sure if there's more to the secret source, her sauce, because we've yet to see another CEO pull their head out of their arse far enough to see how lucrative this approach can be: consumerism is fickle, fanaticism is loyal.