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Steam Deck compatibility developers are now tackling non-Steam games
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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How come Valve can’t distribute these libraries but Proton-GE can?
Valve is making money on Proton (if indirectly), so they would very quickly get sued for it. It's not that the copyright owners would want to stop them from distributing the library - just that they'd want a cut of Valve's massive revenues. A community project, on the other hand, isn't likely to be able to provide any revenue. So since it's just redistributing runtimes that are already available for free and the only likely result is the project getting taken down, it's not really worth doing.
There are licenses that allow distribution for free for personal use, but don't allow distribution without a contract if it's connected to you selling content in any way.
Ah ok, this makes sense.
Everyone else responding here is essentially making the point that Proton-GE is piracy which I didn't think would be the case.
One of them has a lot of money to be sued for patent infringement. There's no money to extract from a random guy releasing free stuff on GitHub.
It's not worth going after individuals, and I'm sure codec companies secretly loves it when their format is super popular by end users even if unlicensed (MP3, MPEG 4, HEVC), because more companies want to implement it and those have to pony up the big bucks. If they started going after end users, open formats would very quickly rise and dominate, they don't want that.
Might be a licensing thing? So you're practically pirating those libraries?
That's my best guess.
I'm not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that Valve is a big company with a lot of eyes on them. If they distribute proprietary software, they could get in hot water. Proton GE however is basically just a guy, so the risk of Microsoft actually caring, let alone taking action, is much smaller.