Nuclear MonsterThere have been former and current employees at Valve talking about the working conditions and the ways they work for years.
People Make Games have posted this report to YouTube based on their interviews with 16 current and former employees of Valve and it’s very interesting to learn more about the working conditions at Valve.
Valve has a gambling problem with loot boxes and items for sale on Steam. People Make Games has done an excellent job covering here in part one of this two part series interviewing the people suffering from gambling addiction due to the situation, experts on the subject, and people who worked for Valve.
As PMG discusses in the video, Valve partnered with a gambling site for their DOTA 2 competition The International which strikes me as something that is easier for them to be comfortable with when professional sports like Baseball are including gambling, scam crypto sponsors, and odds during games.
It is disgusting to watch gambling pervade and ruin every facet of modern entertainment. Not everything needs to be for profit and make money. Not everything needs to exploit someone to raise up a rarified few who are profiting on being the middlemen in the gambling ecosystem of pain.
Lets take a look at a few of the demos from Steam Next Fest 2022 on NuclearMonster Live.
Here are the games I checked out:
Anger Foot
Melatonin
Ghost Song
Midnight Fight Express
Keep in mind that these games aren’t all complete, these are pre-release demo versions, and may be different when they come out.
Got any more demo recommendations? Let me know in the comments.
The people working on Valve’s Steam Deck had a lot of complicated hardware and software hurdles to overcome in order for it to just be a functional handheld gaming computer. My guess is that the biggest hurdle after everything else is probably Valve’s WINE-fork, Proton. Fortunately, Valve can continue to update Proton after the Steam Deck was released. Unfortunately, I don’t think they will undo the damage they’ve caused to the people who were porting games to Linux natively for two decades. Windows compatibility layers like Proton will also never provide perfectly accurate Windows operating system compatibility and it’s gotten to the point where Bungie is threatening to ban users who try to play Destiny 2 through Proton. That’s not entirely unreasonable from their perspective running a multiplayer game, but it stinks for Destiny 2 players.
Because the Steam Deck is “just a computer” Valve is now providing an incomplete set of drivers for Windows to run on the Steam Deck. Dual-booting SteamOS isn’t supported, neither is Windows 11 which requires TPM support, Valve says that both of those will work later on. The built-in speakers and microphone jack also won’t work for now, but Valve says that users can use Bluetooth or USB-C audio adaptors.. Valve is also calling this release unsupported “as-is,” and not offering any official support for the drivers but points users to this page to download the driver packages and this guide for restoring the Steam Deck back to SteamOS.
Destiny 2 runs on the Steam Deck when Windows is installed.
Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things.
You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work — your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life’s got other plans, and they all involve chairs.
Designed as a free playable short for Valve’s new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld’s controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds.
If Aperture Desk Job is a native Linux game, great, if it’s running in Proton this will be a bad harbinger for what’s to come in terms of Valve supporting Linux.