Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
This is such an ignorant statement. Steam works great, and has for 20+ years. If you think it's 'horrible' please explain why you have a personal issue with it.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
It's evidence of a really immature business. I previously worked at <place bring in a lot of money from people using their site> specifically doing optimizations, and we were well under 1 second to do most things, but we could measure a 10ms improvement in dollar amount revenue gain through A/B testing. With the framework in place to claim dollar credit for microoptimizations we happily had many many engineers working to improve it. The fact that Valve has nothing of the sort after years is embarrassing and untold amounts of money has been left on the table.
I think that Valve's willingness NOT to chase money as you've described is, ironically, a huge factor in their incredible success. That's not to say that shorter loading times are bad, but AFAIK Valve is already among the US companies with the highest revenue per employee - if they are happy and their customers are happy, who is losing out?
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.
I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).
It's because no matter how 'good' the AI output is, "vibe coding" is strongly associated with "completely unreviewed and untested". LLMs have brought the skill floor straight through the ground and into the depths of hell, so people are doubly cautious with it because there's a very good chance with any vibe coded app that there's not a single person in the world that truly understands what it actually does just behind the scenes. It could be completely fine, or it could be breaking your system or uploading your sensitive data somewhere because the vibe coder provided flawed instructions or the LLM decided to make an unexpected 'optimization'. Wanna roll the dice and find out which one it is?
I'm reserving "vibe coding" in my head for "the programming style where you just prompt your way around without even looking at the code and only caring if your happy path works".
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
> People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation of sorts.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because the supporting other platforms was too laborious.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
I think in Steam's case it was more like a lack of competitive pressure, their publisher dashboard still packs HTML/CSS fixes for IE6/7/8 that's code they probably haven't touched in ~20 years and it's certainly not because they couldn't afford or lacked time to work on it!
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
I think these days it's easier to run Steam in Wine than it is to run Wine in the first place. If you're running a commercial packaging of Wine for gaming, both things are trivial.
(Successfully running Windows games is its own issue: I think "Steam Deck" compatibility badging is a pretty reliable tell for Linux gaming, but on a Mac, having the game be playable is a gamble on install and again with every patch.)
On the other hand, OpenAI has recently successfully ported the abysmal performance of ChatGPT/Codex on macOS to the web (at least in Firefox) with no end in sight…
Prioritization still matters. Agents will happily optimize your app for performance, but at least current ones seem like you need to explicitly tell them.
I really hope this comes true. I'd love Electron-free versions of Discord and Teams. I've been building a native Rust/GPUI desktop app, and the difference in startup and memory is huge.
Counter-intuitively (or intuitively if you’re inside the industry), slow Electron apps became the norm because of how much developers cost. Now that AI can step in with parallel expertise at scale, I suspect we’ll have all sorts of optimization races.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, is incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Valve have my trust just by being privately held company that can actually plan for decades ahead instead of try to appease major shareholders or black rock.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
Getting involved with epic games as a game developer feels like willingly feeding yourself into the mouth of an open shark. Yeah maybe they have a better cut, but I'm still not doing it
Valve rightly get a lot of flak for the gambling and high % cut, but you do get a functional useful service in return at least, that doesn't appear to be actively trying to screw you over
This is a strange comment when the biggest problem plaguing video games is microtransactions. I still don't get how Valve gets a pass on having some of the most psychotic and exploitative microtransactions in the world, but I'm supposed to be mad at Xbox for thinking about adding ads.
Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
Really depends on which game, and yes they forums are moderated by Steam staff, who at least understand the role correctly (internet janitor, not little personal fiefdom)
I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
I'd love to see governments decouple distribution and production in media - roughly, let any streaming service serve any tv/film, let any game service serve any game ... consumer's choice.
It would be under a 'most-favoured nation' type deal, after an initial launch period (exclusive distribution for 1 year, say) if my distribution service pays the same per-view amount then I can stream/distribute your media regardless of your deals. If a producer/creator makes a work available they are required to allow it on other registered channels (no setup cost beyond actual price of downloading the content).
Essentially make rights holders honour the idea that they'd make works S available if only people would pay.
Refuse to make a work available and you'd get a warning, then it enters the public domain. The copyright deal is "things enter the pubic domain after a limited monopoly to allow recompense", enforce it. So, if eg Netflix/Sony/BBC/etc stop offering their back catalogue then the works enter the public domain.
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I think the commenter was addressing your initial comment about fanboyism (or more charitably, being fans of) Steam.
People are fans of Steam (of Valve, actually) because Steam has been a boon for the gaming world and for Linux gaming in particular, in a way others (like Epic) haven't. I suscribe to this opinion. I'm just so glad gaming on Linux is mostly seamless now, I simply don't care anymore for which OS a game was built (within reason... but then again, Windows games are not guaranteed to always run on Windows either!).
> Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?
Because it doesn't matter, it's a nonsensical complaint to wait 10 whole seconds for your game program to start, in the wake of literally all the other shit it offers. Even if they sped it up, it still doesn't matter.
Epic launcher starting faster doesn't matter because they don't do anything that would make me want to open the epic launcher.
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory
I dont care about faster startup times for steam, as long as its under a minute.
If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it.
Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
It's funny how Steam has had like, what, 5 competitors in this space (Ubisoft whatever, Origin/EA whatever, Battle.net, GOG, Epic Games), and none have even got close to Steam marketshare or feature set.
Ubisoft and EA have more or less surrendered. Battle.net is distinct enough with a group of exclusives including WoW to keep going. GoG is kept alive by its one single USP, and its launcher isn't even relevant to that, so it's just there, not really doing anything. Epic is seemingly trying to compete against Steam, but seems blind to the reasons why people like Steam.
How many of Steam's competitors offered third party games? I don't have any interest in using a launcher from a publisher that only sells/launches its own games. I'd have to remember who made what, and deal with different TOS.
At least 4 of those. EA no longer offers any 3rd party games on its own store, but it did.[1] Ubisoft did once upon a time.[2] Not sure if they still do.
Battle.net is still limited to Activision-Blizzard, with a sprinkling of other Microsoft IP following the buyout. Although that might change soon?[3]
> Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you
I very very much doubt this. Tools are what sets us apart from other animals. We have dedicated bits of brain for it. The relation between humans and tools, having importance to us, is why we're special. That relation goes way back, with evolutionary pressure the whole way, when losing a tool meant you were in a very bad situation, probably dead, unless you replaced it.
People named ships, swords, etc, going way back in history. There are fables about dedications to tools. It's not some modern thing.
Few years ago he made exclusive deals with game producers so their game could only be purchased through Epic's store for one year. Number of these games were already listed on Steam with pre-purchase ability before the agreement. Steam did the right thing and fulfilled any refund request that was made via pre-purchase.
There were a few games I was looking forward to but was blind sided. Being a Linux only gamer, Epic launcher was pure trash. A year after the exclusive deal was over, I never bought any of the games. Those studios are effectively dead to me.
Its nice to see someone with this opinion. Im not a prolific user of the Epic Game Store, but when people go on about all the missing features its mostly a lot of cruft that I really don't want. Game ratings/reviews and the "join a game" friend functionality are the only things that I would miss, at a glance, and reviews are mostly covered elsewhere.
Increasingly, I wish Valve was less propriety. GOG is the correct business model. While they do great things for linux (steam input, proton), I wish these were far less tied to the application.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
For one it checks integrity of all resources for auto update & client repair purposes on each start. You could break/remove any file from install folder, it'll fix it.
That might sound silly, but likely really useful against bit rot / corruption due to unstable overclocks.
It's an AI meme site. They don't do real reporting. That's why their source of how long it takes to open Steam is a single out of context clip with no comparison to anything else
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
This website is just reddit at this point. No one reads the article, no one cares about what is actually true , everyone is just giving their own anecdotes about some random shit.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an LLM.
>I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
>One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
>And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
It is definitely very risky among gamers. Hence why all the serious game developers use AI, but very-very few are willing to publicly admit it. They have seen the insane and unhinged reactions of gamers (or role-playing as those).
Gamer community does like AI. Admitting it would cause an uproar among gamers, be socially risky among them. Hence gamedevs are keeping quiet about their extensive use of AI.
Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
I think there is some nuance to this. As a self-identified skilled engineer, most or what i -actually do- is not bottlenecked by writing code. However, there is a lot of stuff that I pre-LLM -didn’t do- because it was medium value and high effort. There is a class of work that is now zero effort to have an LLM generate, still medium value, and crucially low effort to validate.
I’m not sure this is a large class of work created in the long run, but since this efficiency is new, our backlogs are full of these tasks, and people are feeling immense efficiency gains from unlocking them.
They literally just shipped a massive update for a game they've been developing for several years (Deadlock) and are releasing more content for it this Friday
Do you think Deadlock will not devolve into a mixture of gambling and hvh like every Valve multiplayer game that’s been relevant in the last 10 years (except Dota because hvh in dota sounds complex, so it's just gambling there)?
Fortnite avoids this by having no gambling and by making hvh infeasible FYI
Every Valve game utilizing this is rated M. Control your children better instead of blaming others for being a bad parent. If you children have money to gamble and you let them play mature-rated games then you are doing it wrong.
I know a few very serious and well compensated programmers with decades of experience. These people work on prominent open source projects, climate modelling, linear programming, large org enginneering. Every single one of them uses LLMs heavily and swears by the increased productivity of using them.
Maybe that's true, I don't know. I make no claims of an unbiased sample. Merely a counterfactual to the parent comment's claim that they aren't useful.
> for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use
LLMs are very good at code analysis, and finding both security issues and optimization opportunities. Yes, even in code written by highly experienced human engineers. Failing to have an LLM look for places where your code could be optimized is, IMHO, indefensible. It's like shipping your binaries compiled at -O0 - deliberately choosing to waste your users' time and hardware resources because you couldn't be bothered to properly configure and run a tool.
I find the opposite. A good engineer would tell the agent the "know what they know they're doing" part. Let the AI take that direction and context, let it implement/test it 100x faster than a human can by hand, the engineer come back and confirm AI did the job about the same way as they would have wanted it to be done themselves.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
Not only that, a lot of "gamers" refuse to play games that are not on Steam (not only talking about stuff like EGS-exclusives but games that have their own launcher or just EXE's).
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] threadWhat’s the issue they have with South Africa?
How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
Ref: https://docs.steambrew.app/developers/environment
The actual move to CEF started in 2018 with the Steam Friends rework.
Imo it's just the only way to write software now. Opus 5.5 is better at coding than humans. Human code is slop.
I'm not saying you have to be grateful to the millions of people whose work the AI you use was trained on, but why shit on them...
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
But it also still writes awful code with poor maintainability if you don't keep a very close eye on it.
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because the supporting other platforms was too laborious.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
Are you on the beta branch? It doesn't look like its in stable yet (Settings --> Interface --> Client Beta Participation)
If you have steam configured so it shows the store page on startup, you have to add on the time it for that page to load.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
(Successfully running Windows games is its own issue: I think "Steam Deck" compatibility badging is a pretty reliable tell for Linux gaming, but on a Mac, having the game be playable is a gamble on install and again with every patch.)
Prioritization still matters. Agents will happily optimize your app for performance, but at least current ones seem like you need to explicitly tell them.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, is incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Proton is a great example.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
Valve rightly get a lot of flak for the gambling and high % cut, but you do get a functional useful service in return at least, that doesn't appear to be actively trying to screw you over
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
To pick a random game's forum: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1623940/discussions/ we find:
- bug reports, feedback to the devs, etc.
- asking for help in the game
- story discussion
- requests for games like this one
- concern troll (locked)
- begging for the game to be released on GOG
Seems above board to me. I've also seen plenty of trolling, incivility and unreasonable expectations from manchildren, but they tend to get locked.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
It would be under a 'most-favoured nation' type deal, after an initial launch period (exclusive distribution for 1 year, say) if my distribution service pays the same per-view amount then I can stream/distribute your media regardless of your deals. If a producer/creator makes a work available they are required to allow it on other registered channels (no setup cost beyond actual price of downloading the content).
Essentially make rights holders honour the idea that they'd make works S available if only people would pay.
Refuse to make a work available and you'd get a warning, then it enters the public domain. The copyright deal is "things enter the pubic domain after a limited monopoly to allow recompense", enforce it. So, if eg Netflix/Sony/BBC/etc stop offering their back catalogue then the works enter the public domain.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?
Either Epic is right, and this pushes Valve to improve Steam performance.
Or Epic is wrong, and then who cares? People will continue to not use the Epic store and continue to use Steam.
It just feels more "defensive" then "defending" if that framing makes sense.
People are fans of Steam (of Valve, actually) because Steam has been a boon for the gaming world and for Linux gaming in particular, in a way others (like Epic) haven't. I suscribe to this opinion. I'm just so glad gaming on Linux is mostly seamless now, I simply don't care anymore for which OS a game was built (within reason... but then again, Windows games are not guaranteed to always run on Windows either!).
Because it doesn't matter, it's a nonsensical complaint to wait 10 whole seconds for your game program to start, in the wake of literally all the other shit it offers. Even if they sped it up, it still doesn't matter.
Epic launcher starting faster doesn't matter because they don't do anything that would make me want to open the epic launcher.
Bonus points, this is the text from the post.
> How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing
They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory
If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it.
Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
Ubisoft and EA have more or less surrendered. Battle.net is distinct enough with a group of exclusives including WoW to keep going. GoG is kept alive by its one single USP, and its launcher isn't even relevant to that, so it's just there, not really doing anything. Epic is seemingly trying to compete against Steam, but seems blind to the reasons why people like Steam.
Battle.net is still limited to Activision-Blizzard, with a sprinkling of other Microsoft IP following the buyout. Although that might change soon?[3]
[1] https://www.ea.com/ea-pc-third-party-titles-2022
[2] https://gamesbeat.com/ubisoft-welcomes-third-party-games-on-...
[3] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/cd-projekt-red-and-bl...
I very very much doubt this. Tools are what sets us apart from other animals. We have dedicated bits of brain for it. The relation between humans and tools, having importance to us, is why we're special. That relation goes way back, with evolutionary pressure the whole way, when losing a tool meant you were in a very bad situation, probably dead, unless you replaced it.
People named ships, swords, etc, going way back in history. There are fables about dedications to tools. It's not some modern thing.
I personally have no respect for him.
Few years ago he made exclusive deals with game producers so their game could only be purchased through Epic's store for one year. Number of these games were already listed on Steam with pre-purchase ability before the agreement. Steam did the right thing and fulfilled any refund request that was made via pre-purchase.
There were a few games I was looking forward to but was blind sided. Being a Linux only gamer, Epic launcher was pure trash. A year after the exclusive deal was over, I never bought any of the games. Those studios are effectively dead to me.
I personally will never fund Tim Sweeney.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sweeney
Everything you don’t like, you can avoid.
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
That might sound silly, but likely really useful against bit rot / corruption due to unstable overclocks.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
>One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
>And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars
Our humans suddenly became 37% smarter, for no discernible reason. No, don't ask why.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
But what does it mean in this context?
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
Not anymore[0]. The Linux kernel has created a permission structure around using AI.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHHeohgxhw
Suppose to be DOESN'T like...
I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.
Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
This is backed up by LLM productivity studies.
I’m not sure this is a large class of work created in the long run, but since this efficiency is new, our backlogs are full of these tasks, and people are feeling immense efficiency gains from unlocking them.
Yeah, at promoting child gambling. Not sure about games
Fortnite avoids this by having no gambling and by making hvh infeasible FYI
LLMs are very good at code analysis, and finding both security issues and optimization opportunities. Yes, even in code written by highly experienced human engineers. Failing to have an LLM look for places where your code could be optimized is, IMHO, indefensible. It's like shipping your binaries compiled at -O0 - deliberately choosing to waste your users' time and hardware resources because you couldn't be bothered to properly configure and run a tool.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.