Friday, December 6th 2024
Valve Prepares for SteamOS Expansion, Issues Guidelines for "Powered by SteamOS" Branding
Valve's headquarters is cooking something big, as the company has unveiled new branding guidelines for "Powered by SteamOS" as it prepares to expand SteamOS support for third-party handhelds and PCs. The branding guidelines include various cases. First in line is for games, which can carry a "Steam" logotype, showing that the game is available and runs on Steam. Next up is the "Steam Included" logo, which officially certifies that a hardware product comes with the Steam client pre-installed. To display this logo, manufacturers must comply with Valve's Steam Client Distribution Agreement and integrate the Steam client in its approved form—either as a bootloader or fully compiled software. What we are most interested in is the "Powered by SteamOS" logo, which certifies that a hardware device runs SteamOS as its primary operating system and launches directly into SteamOS when powered on, requiring hardware manufacturers and partners to use the official Steam system image either provided directly by Valve or developed in close partnership with Valve.
The "Steam Compatible" logo certifies that a third-party input peripheral has been reviewed by Valve and meets their established compatibility criteria for use with Steam on PCs, with manufacturers receiving licensing rights after Valve's verification of the device's implementation. Finally, the "Steam Play Here" logo identifies brick-and-mortar establishments with access to Steam games through the Steam PC Café Server, including commercial PC cafés, university computer labs, libraries, and trade shows, allowing these locations to promote their Steam gaming capabilities through window displays and interior signage, with all participating venues required to operate under the official Steam PC Café system guidelines.
All of these branding guidelines are coming in at an interesting time, when Valve is trying to keep its Steam Machine dream alive. Recent SteamOS 3.6.19 update notably included expanded support for competitors' hardware, such as additional ROG Ally keys and various third-party controllers like the ASUS ROG Raikiri Pro and Machenike G5 Pro. This will allow more hardware makers to join SteamOS handheld PCs and drive more developers to the SteamOS platform for games and optimizations. We can't wait to see what comes out next, so stay tuned as we follow the adventure.
Sources:
Steam, via Tom's Hardware
The "Steam Compatible" logo certifies that a third-party input peripheral has been reviewed by Valve and meets their established compatibility criteria for use with Steam on PCs, with manufacturers receiving licensing rights after Valve's verification of the device's implementation. Finally, the "Steam Play Here" logo identifies brick-and-mortar establishments with access to Steam games through the Steam PC Café Server, including commercial PC cafés, university computer labs, libraries, and trade shows, allowing these locations to promote their Steam gaming capabilities through window displays and interior signage, with all participating venues required to operate under the official Steam PC Café system guidelines.
37 Comments on Valve Prepares for SteamOS Expansion, Issues Guidelines for "Powered by SteamOS" Branding
Now, I'm on Linux because Windows has become utter garbage and Linux gaming support is improving day by day.
SteamOS ran Debian.
Then they worked on Proton, which is a translation layer so developers dont need to port to Linux, just make sure their Windows games are compatible with Proton.
Then the SteamDeck came with SteamOS 3, based on Arch and running Proton on top.
The rest is history as they say.
Check ProtonDB to see how compatible your favorite game is with Linux+Proton.
There is no SteamOS 3 for general public, just for the SteamDeck.
There are distros that tries to cover this, HoloISO, ChimeraOS and Bazzite.
The rumor for the delay for an official SteamOS is Ngreedia hate for open spurce drivers. They only release closed binary blobs, which Linux distros needs to enable separately because of the GPL.
So given that 80+% of gaming PCs are infected with Ngreedia s hardware, Valve has been hesitant to release their version, since everyone will not dare pointing fingers at Ngreedia and instead will blame Valve when they cant run SteamOS.
AMD doesn’t have that “problem “ because they embraced open source openly and the needed drivers are already part of the Linux kernel.
What changed? I don’t know.
Maybe Ngreedia is releasing full open source drivers and told Valve or maybe Valve grew a pair, told Dear Leader Jensen to kick sand and will place big warnings all over that only AMD and intel gpus are compatible.
Either way, this is exciting.
Valve gets it. Everyone else is stuck in an old paradigm that they themselves are rapidly killing off. Content used to sell, yes. But these days, content is like fast food. It doesn't really matter where you get your burger, its a burger. What matters more is how and where you can play said content. The only reason people still buy consoles is for couch gaming and ultra low barrier of entry. Not the games. Valve is now rapidly moving its handheld and its OS into that same ultra low barrier of entry space.
And its entirely a market mechanic that you don't like it - you apparently did so in the past, because you bought consoles for it. Now you don't, so you're not buying the consoles and Sony/MS/Nintendo lose sales. As a result, probably, at least in part, they are porting more and more games ever faster to ever more platforms.
If you ask me, the market's working as it should. Demand has diversified, so the offerings did too.
It was like "if you buy this inexpensive console, you'll be able to play hundreds of great games". Nowadays, it's more like "if you don't buy our super expensive tech marvel, you won't be able to play this shitty game".
Today a lot of that (they're all unique selling points) has been unified. And because the games are also more universally available... I don't understand the sales pitch for consoles either anymore. There's just barely anything left. In that new dynamic I totally get what you're saying, 'why even bother making platform exclusives, its just annoying'. Just concede that too, there's no turning back anyway lol.
ProtonDB needs to be stricter on it's ratings. I've seen people recommend a game, even though it requires tweaks and only ran at 14fps, even though it runs at triple digit fps on Windows. Platinum rated doesn't mean it will just work. Rimworld is native and rated Platinum, yet it requires a mod to fix the freezing when you click and drag the mouse on some menus, like the colonist and animal zones. A few users reported it on there, it should be rated Gold, not Platinum.
There are exceptions. For example, APB Reloaded. It's an older 3rd person shooter that runs on DX9. I was getting double the fps on Linux compared to Windows, and it only required loading an area once for the shaders to compile. It rarely receives updates that affect shaders. Sadly though, the devs changed anti-cheats for the 3rd or 4th time, and the latest patch requires the kernel level driver to load.