> I fear for what happens when Gabe Newell retires and the MBA cancer fully infects Valve.
They are making SteamOS compatible with other hardware, if you want to build a steam machine of your own. Also their contributions to Wine and Fex will enable other Linux gaming platforms that are not SteamOS to have the same compatibility layer.
Proton is already good enough that you don’t need SteamOS. I’m not that much of a gamer so my numbers are hardly representative, but about 90% of video games I tried ran with zero issues through Heroic Launcher and GE-Proton. The ability to install SteamOS on your own hardware is nice, but largely irrelevant. It was Valve’s previous work on Proton which was important.
The bigger fear is of course Valve itself. They have many, many levers they could turn to squeeze their audience. This is of course a terrible long-term decision—Valve being a good steward is why PC gamers largely don’t even bother to learn what other online storefronts offer—but long-term planning is irrelevant if you’re a CEO who’s looking for a new yacht and to lateral away after 3 years of record profits.
@edit: admittedly there is something to be said about the "I don’t _want_ a PC experience, I just want to play the games on my couch" crowd. Being able to set up SteamOS on your own hardware _is_ nice, I just don’t think it’s relevant to any post-Gaben enshittification.
It's less about platforms and more about games themselves. Games on Steam has to follow certain rules that are mostly consumer-friendly. And the fear is that some of these rules will be relaxed to increase Steam's revenue, and as a result the store will be flooded with ad-ridden gatcha-slop that is completely saturated mobile.
I love the idea. How do you stay competitive with the search results of, let's say, DDG? have you considered enabling an API for subscribers? Or selling an enterprise tier subsctription that comes with API?
For all the bad rap that AI gets in game development, stories like this should be heard more. I occasionally get tendinitis and I can't code for the entire day like when I was young. I get some relief dictating to the AI when I need to rest my hands. I can imagine it's a much bigger help for someone who is struggling with worse.
Awesome game! Small suggestion, for each paragraph that is in your description, you can add a small gif-style webm video. It's kind of expected now for Steam games, and specially because it's such a unique game it would make an easier introduction to the concept. Looking forward to play it :D
Thanks! If you mean something like the Kindle.. No that's not on our future plans. Our current roadmap is
- make desktop versions stable
- create the mobile app
- add more community features (something like goodreads but also integrated in the books you read on the app)
I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint.
At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers.
But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers.
Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?
Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informed, was to replace Tier-2 with a chatbot, so the only time a human has to get involved was the most complicated problems. SO MUCH MONEY SAVED AMIRIGHT?!?
So I asked, in the middle of this giant kickoff meeting, "if you get rid of tier 1 & 2 reps, how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps who know enough about how things work to handle these most-complicated problems?". After an extended silence we got "we have a plan for that but we can't go into it just now". Sure you do.
Do you need to do tier 1 and 2 work before tier 3?
If they are structurally different, and there’s a way to train people directly into tier 3, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to automate t1 and t2 as from my experience the vast majority of the tickets are either simple or repeated workflows. Taking the idea to the limit, you’d automate all tiers, and have the ai escalate to the individual teams within the company for any truly meaningful edge cases
I feel sort of the same about SWE, which is much more complex, but juniors can ostensibly grow into seniors with AI
Where are the feedback loops for customer issues that haven't arisen before, or happen very infrequently. The existence of a tier 3 is for problems that aren't an everyday occurrence. Further, these are often all or partially 'people problems', not 'technology problems'.
> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.
I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.
A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.
I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.
Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.
I love this idea! I totally see it in the classroom or being played by someone who's trying to learn how to make an OS (which is on my personal bucket list)
What I didn't like, is the tutorial is separate from the game. It would be awesome imo, if there's a tutorial stage where the game is explained hands-on (maybe pausing the game with explainers, until I start to get how to play) Otherwise I have to memorise the instructions before trying the game.
They are making SteamOS compatible with other hardware, if you want to build a steam machine of your own. Also their contributions to Wine and Fex will enable other Linux gaming platforms that are not SteamOS to have the same compatibility layer.