GoG, epic, any other store really. Proton is made by valve but it works in whatever, and there are tools now to use proton (not wine, proton) outside of steam to get all the goodies you got on top. Heroic launcher does that for the games you get from the Amazon store, gog, epic, and any other exe you got. I even installed battle net, and once you open it everything you install from there works in that bubble and work, I played plenty HOTS games. I play modded D2 without much issues. You know why the steam market share in Linux is so high? Because they are the ones that put the work to make windows games work on Linux. Yes, wine existed before but they both adapted it for games and contributed to the overall wine project a ton. Also, iirc, steamdecks make up for 30% of the Linux machines from valve's yearly reports. The market is tremendously tiny yet.

What is their current market share on Linux?

Why is that even relevant? You said people can only get games on Steam and that's just not true

It's going to be more than an Xbox, but not too crazy. Probably $800 is my guess.

If they have no market share then that competition exists in theory only.

The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility. cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473

I'm not the target audience (beefy gaming pc) but I love the concept and what it'll do to further indie gaming. It'll probably also pull people from consoles to pc gaming. Valve can't stop winning.

You can launch any .exe through Steam using Proton... You don't even need to *buy* the games if that's your prerogative.

Just walk me through what prevents Valve from following Google’s footsteps in commoditising Linux only to lock it down like they are doing currently.

Linux and proton are open source, and their licenses allow literally anyone to fork it. GE-Proton already exists. How are they currently locking Linux down?

Same could be said about Android. - [Google will require developer verification for Android apps outside the Play Store](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/25/google-will-require-developer-verification-for-android-apps-outside-the-play-store/) - [Google is easing up on Android's new sideloading restrictions](https://www.androidauthority.com/android-power-users-install-unverified-apps-3615310/) (they will retry, long game)

The same cannot be said about Android. I think you need to educate yourself on what Linux and FOSS actually is.

I see AOSP was forgotten very quickly.

If they have no market share then that competition exists in theory only.

You're right, that's why there's countless mature Android distributions to choose from, and they're all free. Oh wait. I don't really know much about AOSP, but isn't the fact that it doesn't contain any of the proprietary Google stuff mean that the "sideloading" restrictions likely will not apply? How could it?

You're not seeing the forest for the trees. Just because other game distribution vectors lack market share does not mean there are no alternatives to Steam. People have options, but they overwhelmingly choose Steam based on the quality of their product and service. If others decide to improve those things or a particular game is better priced or contains more content on another service, the consumer is free to choose that distributor. Market share is completely irrelevant in this case.

So you don’t really know the story of Android, much of it very recent, but you’re going to argue that Valve is not following the same path. What a waste of time.

So you don’t really know the story of Android, much of it very recent, but you’re going to argue that Valve is not following the same path. What a waste of time.

Steam is a game distribution store, Steam machine and deck are console oriented machines. Linux as a whole has dominance in the server world, valve is touching the gaming side of desktop Linux. Desktop Linux is tiny compared to Windows. You are comparing it to a phone operating system in a world where they were two-ish, to a potential distro in a world where there are 12 or more, several of those widely used in servers. Be angry if you want but it's not the same.

It's just not even comparable in any way, regardless of how you try to shoehorn it into your analogy. Android was not a mature, stable OS with hundreds of distributions, for several decades, before Android phones came along.