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Steam is a ticking time bomb (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 2 months ago by corbin@infosec.pub to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] randy@lemmy.ca 155 points 2 months ago

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode.... Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don't disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author's key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn't investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn't too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve's attention. So who is being "anti-consumer" in this example, Valve or Apple?

[-] corbin@infosec.pub 7 points 2 months ago

It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn't want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.

[-] verdare@beehaw.org 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.

It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-bit libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.

That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.

[-] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 months ago

It's not just 32 on 64 bit, new Macs use ARM64 processors so x86/x86_64 code is effectively obsolete on Mac. I would love to see Valve pour resources into a cross platform x86 on ARM64 emulation layer though, it would benefit Linux as well.

[-] verdare@beehaw.org 3 points 2 months ago

The ARM translation may be less of a problem on macOS because of Rosetta. That said, integrating something like Box64 would absolutely benefit both Mac and Linux.