this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.
Epic makes tons of money off licensing Unreal to developers and have since before their store was a thing.
Proton makes direct zero profit, though it does make Steam the best store for anyone on Linux.
Not sure why “direct profit” is important.
Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.
Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.
To quote an old comment of mine:
Direct profit is the main driving factor for decision making by C-suite types. EGS is a great example of this: it has the very bare bones of what constitutes an online store, you can see products and make purchases. Almost everything else is half assed and tacked on. It’s frankly amazing that a system like Steam exists when they could (and still could) enshittify really badly.
Link to my other comment.
I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.
Apple directly makes money off iOS apps and in most of the world you can only buy via their store. On the other hand, I can and do buy games from GoG and run them just fine on my Steam deck and can still benefit from proton.
The only reason I buy most of my games from Steam is they make things even easier than buying from GoG.
Epic doesn’t do a single thing that doesn’t directly result in profits. Features are only added off they can derive income from them. Lawsuits are filed so they can take a larger percentage of profits. Even his twitter posts are mainly about him getting a larger cut, when he isn’t defending AI child porn.
Valve is very old school in their ‘keep improving your offering and it will work out’ way. Usually companies like that get bought out and their name run into the ground. It sadly happens in all industries, from Samsonite luggage to BioWare games and even service companies.
None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.
Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?
Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.
The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.
It's very simple. Steam is not at all hostile to the user. It in fact has a bunch of qol features like the workshop or overlay, and don't get me started on the controller configurator. Steam is good software outside of the store. Epic is literally just the store. It's not complicated.
I find it very hostile compared to, for example, GOG which lets me download games DRM free and run them without running an app.
Steam is a battery hog and is designed to entice you to keep it running all the time. I hate leaving it running which means I don’t have access to most of my library.
What are you on about? DRM is up to the developer, and while steam does use some resources it's not enough to impact performance. And no, it's a launcher, you use it when playing steam games or non steam games with steam overlay and controller support. See steam has this whole overlay system with a shit load of features from note taking to community walkthroughs, robust multiplayer support through the friends system, a whole ass chat client, and did I mention the incredibly robust controller support with exceptional customization features? I literally have to run three or four different pieces of software just to do what steam can do out of the box. As for the DRM free bit I think you're thinking of gog's offline installers. Their licensing language is the same as steams. But yes gog makes an offline installer available for all their games, they're the only game in town that does though so they're more exception than rule. I dunno why you have a hate boner for steam but it's literally the only launcher with features that I use outside of open launcher -> open game. Hell it even has a frame limiter. I can use rewasd and ds4windows with rtss and still need to run another launcher, or I can just run steam which can do all that stuff itself. What aren't you getting about the fact that steam does a shit load of things beyond letting you buy and launch a game, and all those things are why people like steam?
It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded.
When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.
As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.
But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.
Why do you need to leave it running? Why would you have it running if you're not playing a steam game or using its overlay and controller features? You're inventing problems that don't exist because you seem to not understand how to use the software. You open it when you want to play a game. If it starts updating stuff, you pause it or cancel it. Why would you blame steam for developers pushing updates in the first place? Turn off updates, boom problem solved. Like yeah, gog is better in their DRM stance but galaxy is not great software, and updates are important for modern games that ship largely broken and unoptimized, and the gog offline installers do not make updating easy. You're holding a fork and complaining that it makes for a shitty knife, like yeah bud, you're using it wrong.
Sorry if I took it the wrong way. I can see some common ground in Steam vs others and Apple vs others since both focused on the user experience against really poor competition in that area, though Apple has a helluva stronger walled garden.
I do think fanboying a for profit company is silly, but a lot of this is also driven by hate for Epic's CEO. Epic's just another business that wants to make money and that alone isn't the reason people keep backing Steam on these threads. People shit on them because their CEO is an asshole who spends a lot of time bitching about other storefronts while their own still sucks 7 years after release despite the company raking in billions. Guy tries to act like he's some underdog despite Unreal engine having a greater stranglehold over game development.