sp3tr4l
@sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 weeks ago:
Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.
Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.
They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…
… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.
And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 weeks ago:
… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.
I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 weeks ago:
… What?
It… it goes into the company.
theverge.com/…/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-p…
They run an absurdly profitable business.
They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.
That’s after wages.
Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.
The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 weeks ago:
Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?
Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?
… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?
… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 weeks ago:
When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…
Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.
Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.
Valve’s position allows them to do this.
Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.
As a certain wise old man once said:
“These things, they take time.”
- Comment on When the Steam Deck was still just an idea, Valve says some staff were like, "I just want that for me" and "the point wasn't even to make a product out of it" 4 weeks ago:
Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…
This actually is basically how Valve works.
They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.
They are a private company, not public.
That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’
(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and the the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)
(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)
…
They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.
Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, not rushing anything.
A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.
People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.
- Comment on Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck 2 months ago:
Thats … amazing.
Reminds me of when someone figured out that a huge part of the reason Halo Infinite takes so long to load and go between various menu screens was something like the game redownloading hundreds or thousands of the same exact image, in very high resolutions… basically instead of just pointing multiple instances of the image being used to a single file and directory, for some reason each distinct usage of this same image had its own unique directory…
Its the kind of oopsie daisy you expect from a first time modder, not some of the most expensive dev teams in the world.
Also along those lines, kind of: BF2042 has had and still does have a fundamental flaw with the engine level code for fucking mouse movement interpolation.
They never fixed it. They admitted it exists in their bug logs, but they never managed to fix one of the most fundamental parts of a shooter game, how aiming itself works.
- Comment on Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck 2 months ago:
I do not, could you explain it?
It’s been… about half a decade since I last played GTO.
- Comment on Grand Theft Auto Online Reportedly Broken On Steam Deck 2 months ago:
Its broken in the sense that it doesn’t work, but it isn’t broken in the sense of oops we accidentally broke something.
They added BattleEye anti-cheat to online, without bothering to support linux.
Even though BattleEye can and does support Proton compatibility, and has for years, the developers of the game have to request or opt-in to this functionality.
But uh, Rockstar didn’t, because they don’t give a shit about linux players.
- Comment on Robot dogs armed with AI-targeting rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation 6 months ago:
Please, give them a mouth with toxin injecting teeth, and I’ll get my flamethrower and play Guy Montag.
- Comment on Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck? 6 months ago:
I will have to look into nix more. I remember when it came out, thought it might be neat if it caught on and got developed and supported well, maybe that’s the case these days?
And yeah I would want to keep SteamOS as yeah the whole steam deck control interface, as far as I know, only works on SteamOS, it’d be good for testing and I do like playing games on the thing.
I’ve got the Terabyte OLED version, so I could probably dual boot on that alone fairly fine, but having an SD and an external drive would probably be good ideas too.
- Comment on Why install other Linux ISOs on Steam Deck? 6 months ago:
Assuming you meant read only (How would a write only OS or software work lol), you can actually disable the read only nature of the OS and install your own packages.
That being said, yeah, it is a bit of a mess as all of that can be wiped out or thrown into dependency conflict hell following an SteamOS update.
That being said: As someone who is using my SteamOS as my main PC was fucking stolen…
I am both trying to get into game dev and also just far more used to Debian and Debian based OSs.
Trying to get a game engine other than Godot to work on Arch has been an insanity inducing experience, and I’ve found Godot 4 to be insufficient.
Unreal and Unity and 03DE work on debian. They release debian variants.
Sure, there are AUR repos or whatever, but theyre based on many alternative libs that cause things to bug out, and they don’t even actually list all the dependencies, you just have to spend hours and hours googling errors when you try to build, figure out what you are missing, then find the Arch version of that lib, or the AUR version, in which case oh fun more unfully listed dependencies and compatibility errors.
So… yeah basically an actual reason to install another linux OS on the Deck would be if you wanted to do software dev in Linux and don’t want to deal with the tangled rats nest of basically everything that actually works on a debian distro either resulting in you having to rely on slapdash AUR bullshit, or massively space wasting containerized packages.