Valve Continues to Clone Competing Products and Services - The UpStream

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Valve introduced their Discord clone into the Steam ecosystem. Discord shot back by introducing their own game store last week. This week, it would appear that Valve is not finished challenging their competitors with new services, either to directly compete or drive customers away from those companies.

Twitch and Mixer

When it comes to videogame streaming, there is no doubt that Amazon's Twitch service owns the market. Microsoft's Mixer is in the mix too, with YouTube and Facebook trying to capture some of the love, as well. This week, it was accidentally revealed that Valve might be interested in getting into the streaming space when they purchased a new domain and accidentally published Steam.TV to the world.

The service looked nearly identical to Twitch or Mixer, even using a purple accent color, mimicking Twitch's branding. While the site is no longer available to the public, while it was it featured a broadcast of The International 2018. There was the ability to log in with a Steam account and create group chats. What there was no was an ability to stream your own game feed. Valve released a statement saying,

We are working on updating Steam Broadcasting for the Main Event of The International, Dota 2's annual tournament. What people saw was a test feed that was inadvertently made public.

Obviously, this was not just a "test feed" but a nearly fully functional Twitch clone. When the service will be debuted fully is anyone's guess, but it wouldn't be a surprise to see it premiere tomorrow to coincide with the finals of The International 2018.

Windows

If there's one thing Valve dislikes more than competitors, it's Windows. There's no telling exactly what went wrong in CEO Gabe Newell's brain, but about the time that Windows 8 was released, Gabe started a campaign against gaming on Windows. Following the campaign, Valve announced SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system to power their new Steam Machines. The biggest failure of SteamOS? The lack of games available on Steam for Linux.

Continuing their campaign to get people to stop using Windows, it looks like Valve is working on bringing Windows games to Linux. Uncovered by a Reddit user, the company has code for a feature called Steam Play, which is a wrapper to bring more games to Linux without having to be ported or rewritten from scratch. A competing project, called WINE, describes the process on their websites,

Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods.

That concept is okay when it comes to simple programs, but even more complicated software is questionable. Games, being some of the most complicated software available, is even less likely to work correctly. There are whole websites dedicated to curating games that work on WINE (hint, it's not a lot). The idea that Valve thinks they've got a plan to run more games through a similar system is ambitious at best, and insane at worst.

Valve seems to know this, as the SteamOS software shows hidden settings and warnings, including a warning that games "may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games." We don't know when, or if, this feature will release, either. Based on the fact that settings are beginning to appear within the OS, though, it might become available soon.