Android is, at its core, an open source mobile operating system. What Google has done with it is monopolize all of the software for the platform. There are competitors (read: GrapheneOS, F-Droid) which are also based on the Android Operating System but outcompeted by Googles market position
iOS shouldn’t even be in this conversation, not open source & completely walled garden
“Whataboutism seems to be an admission of truth these days” HUH? At what point did I engage in whataboutism, i simply pointed to other companies that have set standards for gaming accessibility in the market.
Valve:
Has Steam, the largest videogame platform on PC. You claim it’s a monopoly but it’s not because it has direct competitors in Epic Games (Fortnite is not a small game), Riot Games (League and Valorant are not small games), Battle.net (WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch are not small games), etc
Developed the proton translation layer (which you yourself made this post for), and released it open source so anyone can use it. I myself leverage Proton for Linux gaming on a daily basis (I do NOT run SteamOS)
Released SteamOS, which is a fork of Arch Linux, as a means of helping gamers break away from the real monopoly of Microsoft/Windows
Is not creating a walled garden the likes of which we have seen in every xbox, playstation, and nintendo console. If Epic, Riot, Blizzard, etc wanted to release a launcher for Linux (and subsequently SteamOS) they could. They just choose not to, because they feel it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do that.
Except they wouldn’t be? SteamOS is just fancy Linux, so they wouldn’t be directly gaining market share & I don’t see how them releasing a game only on one (free and open source) platform is suddenly wrong? In a world where virtually every PC game already does that, just for Windows
Have you forgotten about Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony (actual monopolies: controls hardware, software, marketplace, etc)
Perhaps, but on the other side of that coin: Because valve doesn’t have legal obligations to make money snd increase shareholder value, they put a lot of money elsewhere. The products they create are awesome (literally the best launcher on PC, Tim Sweeney is probably upset because his is ass) and invest heavily in things better for gamers:
Why are you against them advocating for the industry, promoting jobs, and recognizing the significance of the videogame market?
pushing politics onto the industry
Is this just your insecurity talking because they want to promote gender diversity in the job market?
promote equality in the video games sector to ensure gender balance and equal pay
Definitely, and I’ll never try and make the argument against that. However what they did was definitely a significant improvement on these pre-existing translation layers.
Linux gaming can be clearly defined as pre-proton and post-proton because it was such a huge improvement to the experience (one-click installs, large number of support in games, gaming via proton counting as a Linux sale in publisher metrics, etc)
And I’m speaking from personal experience, before proton I had a hard time getting pretty much every game I tried to play working on Linux (and tbf a large part of this is probably me fumbling the installation but I’m not an untechnical person either, so I’m sure this was the experience for many)