Re: How would packaging Steam-proton games be received?

[Ryan Prior <ryanprior@hey.com>]

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I don't know in depth how Proton works internally, but I think it
includes non free DLLs, including DRM support, to improve compatibility
with Windows games. If my understanding is correct, shipping Proton and
games that depend on it as part of Guix would be a tacit endorsement of
proprietary software that exercises unjust control over users. The GNU
project, as a matter of policy, does not recommend non free software
components, or free components like DRM that are exclusively useful for
restraining user freedoms, so that may be a dead end.

I like your energy in this thread though and agree that it would be
great if we could help gamers break out of the ugly Steam ecosystem.
Itch is an independent game distributor and they also publish all their
client code as free software: https://github.com/itchio

Bringing Itch to Guix might be an interesting project, if we could find
a way to modify the client so that it does not recommend any games that
are not free software. There's a healthy and growing list of such games
here: https://itch.io/games/tag-open-source

We might have to build our own game discovery portal to replace the
upstream itch.io storefront, but that would be a really nice thing to
have in general.

Itch has its own tools for game developers to build their game and ship
updates to their users. For example, they designed their own protocol
for shipping new game builds using minimal resources:
https://github.com/itchio/wharf

It would be beneficial if Guix could learn some of Itch's tricks, to
support fast moving projects that want to ship frequent updates to
users.

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