I agree. I think this point really hit home for me when Rome Total War 2 came out. This has been one of my favourite game franchises ever since the original Shogun TW.<p>But.<p>I haven't bought it yet because it doesn't run on Linux. I don't want to reboot my dual-boot system anymore.<p>Now, I just want to take a sec to point out that I'm not saying this from a snobbish boycotting point of view. But from a purely practical one. I've been toying with the Steam Linux beta since release and whilst I've had a lot of indie games in my catalogue (thanks Humble Bundle!), I've had hardly any AAA games except some old Valve titles - which I'd finished playing years ago.<p>But recently there have been a couple of great Linux versions of strategy games that have come out (Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4), and when I weigh up the decision between rebooting to Windows to play something, or just stay in Linux and play one of those. I always stay. And that's in spite of a potentially great game like Rome TW2.<p>Then when you add in some great looking upcoming games on Kickstarter, like Wasteland, Project Eternity, Torment Numenera, etc... Also, a huge victory (for a UK fan) of Football Manager 2014 upcoming for Linux. The future is looking very bright.<p>All of this adds up to one thing, I don't have a need to reboot anymore. I used to get forced into using Windows just for gaming, now I actually have a choice.<p>NB. On a side note, the catalogue for Linux isn't looking too bad either. I just checked my account and I have 310 games, of which 76 will run in Linux. Not too shabby anymore.
Newell has the ulterior motive of killing Microsoft's app store, which he clearly sees as a direct threat to Steam. If it takes off, indeed it will be! I remain unconvinced that Linux has passed the tipping point and is on it's way to becoming the home entertainment OS of the future though. I use it on my work laptop and love it, but Win8 runs my HTPC.<p>1. A home entertainment box does more than play games these days. Windows is <i>still</i> the only OS with acceptable bluray support. OSX is as out in the cold as Linux on this score even though Apple is a member of the bluray consortium! Some may be tempted to scoff at physical media, but it's still alive and well, especially with the audio/video-phile crowd.<p>2. If games have to be rewritten to operate on Linux, most existing games never will. Most games, once their sales have ceased bringing in cash, are abandoned and never updated again. Legacy gaming support is important. A lot of people have beloved games that are years or decades old that they still occasionally play. If switching to Linux means they have to abandon those, they won't.<p>If Newell is serious about his Steam boxes succeeding, he needs to support work that will let older games run on Linux without modification and he needs to support development of a bluray support package for Linux, plus any future formats. No open source software will ever legally support bluray. I like open source and I'm sure some fanatics will be tempted to blast me for calling for more closed-source software on Linux, but that's precisely what Newell is doing. He's bringing closed source, non-free software to Linux. If you want to see Steam on Linux succeed, you're demanding something free, open-source software has yet to deliver.
'"When we talk to developers and say, 'if you can pick one thing for Valve to work on the tools side to make Linux a better development target,' they always say we should build a debugger," he said.'<p>Yes, please. That would be awesome.
While it's super cool that maybe I'll be able to run linux at home and still play games some time in the future, it's kind of sad that the only reason he cares is because he's worried about a MS app store potentially being a competitor to steam, and yet people are fervently praising him for it.<p>He doesn't really care about linux, he doesn't really think Windows is a bad platform for gaming, he just wants to try to crush a competitor. If he did care he would have done something years ago. Id has managed to release the vast majority of their games on linux, and it didn't take a potential fiscal threat to make them do it.
I'm skeptical because Linux has been called the future of gaming for at least 15 years. During its heyday in the 1990s, id Software released a Linux port of every Quake game, and that still wasn't enough to cause a major shift in adoption, and that was at a time when PC users on average were more technically inclined.<p>I also can't help but note that Gabe only began this public crusade when Microsoft released an app store that competed with Valve's app store. So I'm interested to see what happens, but I'm skeptical.
The presentation: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg#t=13" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg#t=13</a>
I wish Gabe Newell promoted Linux with same passion before MS launched App Store and his business was threatened. I find it hard to believe anything he says.<p>On other hand, I wish all best to Linux :)
I sort of got bored of the presentation 15 minutes in (and was only half paying attention, truth be told) but it seems to me that Gabe is operating under the (gigantic) assumption that Microsoft would remove the Desktop and move Windows into a 100% closed environment.<p>Sounds like he's jumping the gun. I don't see that future happening.
Title is misleading, Gabe isn't promising any new hardware. Valve is poised to release "more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see".
I think people forget that Gabe started his career at Microsoft, and spent over a decade there.<p>It may have been a million years ago by tech standards, but I think that subcontext makes his statements about Linux even more interesting.
As someone who games on a PS3, steam via OSX and ios I'm not convinced there will ever be or needs to be a "winner". Some games are better close to the screen with a mouse. Some are better more relaxed on the couch and some are better on a tablet. I could picture getting a small gaming box running Linux if most of my steam library transferred over and anything new was offered in Linux. Professionally, I'm in print production and design, so Linux is unlikely to ever be my sole OS.<p>I'm finding with the new batch of consoles and micro consoles there has been surprisingly little talk of cheating prevention. I was once almost completely a PC gamer but cheating in just about every multiplayer game I played pushed me to consoles. Even today most of the games I play on console that have PC versions are hacked quickly. There is cheating on consoles but at a much, much lower rate. If Linux via Steam can do something significant about cheating that would be a huge plus.<p>As far as digital download services, Steam has value to me working on different OS's. All the games in my steam library work on windows. This has proved a godsend when visiting the in laws on the other side of the country for a week at a time. Ios has proven quite good at having apps last through many generations of hardware. Many apps I bought on the original iphone work on all modern ios devices. I have given up on buying digital versions on PS3 as they seem like a dead end. At least with the disk there is a good chance sometime down the line an emulator will come out for what ever computer I will be running in the future...
One thing game devs, from my experience playing games on linux steam, need to work on with linux is how to deal with multimonitor setups.<p>Every game I have in steam that runs on linux attempts to spread itself out across all my displays, which is especially busted when I have a vertical monitor. Entire sections of the screen are just cut off completely as the height of my virtual display is higher than 2 of my 3 monitors.<p>Now, I use intel's video support and not nvidia, so I'm using randr to set up my monitors and not nvidia's proprietary stuff. I wonder if that's the issue.
This is great news. More developer support, and more hardware support to be able to create a Steam box just as easily as a home theatre box (w/ something like XBMC) would be fantastic.<p>Heck, I think even desktop gamers would simply be happy to be able to use Linux full-time, with the control and performance that comes with it.
I really like the idea of gaming on Linux, but I feel like there are still has a lot of unanswered questions. How do you stop developers from using Direct X? How do you convince graphics card companies to optimize their drivers for linux?
Is Gabe specifically suggesting creating native Linux games? It wasn't too long ago when John Carmack commented that "The conventional wisdom is that native Linux games are not a good market". So then does Steam carry enough weight to challenge conventional wisdom?<p>1: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_asks_why_wine_isnt_good_enough/c89sfto" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_a...</a>
Question is, if Windows becomes a closed ecosystem or flops altogether, would PC gamers elect to move to Linux? Even if they do, there's going to be a significant loss of numbers along the way, and it's already a smaller market than consoles. I can see a future where most game companies (barring maybe Valve, Blizzard, and a few others) cut their losses and decide to focus solely on consoles and iOS/Android. That would be a sad future indeed.
It feels like cognitive dissonance when the maker of Steam, that is full of DRM and, of course, closed source, talks about the successes of open source.<p>I mean, I have nothing against proprietary source (the difference between open source games quality and proprietary games quality is giant), but Valve made their living on proprietary code and now they are preaching the opposite.
FYI (only tangentially related to the presentation), here are the latest hardware survey results for Steam users.<p><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey</a><p>You'll notice Windows 7 is still #1 (not surprising) but Windows 8 and 8.1 are the fastest growing, with almost 15% of Steam users running Win8 64bit.
One issue that needs to be addressed is driver support, particularly around multi-monitor setups. Nvidia apparently now has at least partial support for Optimus laptops as of driver 319+ (currently 325).<p>The biggest PITA with multi-monitor Linux based systems is dealing with forced max power state (read: constant heat generation and fan noise).<p>Optimus should allow Intel graphics chip to drive say, your laptop display and one external monitor via VGA, and then the Nvidia chip drives an external via HDMI and Display Port.<p>On Fedora 18 so can't yet upgrade to Nvidia driver >= 319. When I initially connected 2 external monitors to my laptop, the laptop GPU fan kicked on _every single minute_ click-whirrrr, click-whirrr, click-whirrrr, total madness.<p>Was forced to mod the VBIOS, undervolting the Nvidia chip and slightly reducing GPU fan speed, a risky though rewarding operation. Now the laptop stays quiet since the GPU is constantly in adaptive/power saving state.<p>Hardware undervolting is obviously a no-op for gamers; hopefully with Optimus the multi-monitor heat generation situation will improve to the point where users don't have to risk bricking their graphics card in order to have a sane Linux work environment when not gaming.
This piece from Gabe's talk [1] is interesting:<p>"But the one entity we wouldn't ever want to compete with is our own users, right? They have already out-stripped us spectacularly. You can't compete with them once you give them the tools that allow them to participate in the creation of the experiences that they find are valuable. And it's not by a little bit; it's like an order of magnitude more productive already, and we're only a couple of years into thinking about how to do that.<p>[...]<p>The point is that the connected groups of users are going to be way more successful if they're properly enabled and supported than any of the individual game developers are going to be.<p>But, there's this huge tension between, if that's the direction that gaming is going, or if that's the direction content creation is going, these other systems actually put a tremendous number of road-blocks in the way of doing that.<p>It takes Valve several months to get through certification process for a single update. I mean, it took us 6 months to get one update through the Apple Store to ship an iPad update. We have a lot of resources and have a huge commercial motivation. No individual user, if they're the sort of center of gravity for content production, is going to have the wherewithal or the stubbornness to get through that.<p>That's just one example of the many ways that the closed systems appear to us to be antithetical to our user-centric model of content production, going forward."<p>--<p>Like you, I'm just trying to "read the tea leaves" here, but the future is user-generated content. Valve needs to leverage that by offering a hardware platform [2] that will allow them to be in complete and full control, both technologically and financially. A hardware platform that they can update as needed, that will give users more control to generate content; free from the concerns of pushing an update through Apple or Microsoft. In turn, their goal will be to leverage content creation by connecting users in a unified economy, again, that they control. They engaged Yanis Varoufakis [3], who is a renowned academic economist, no doubt to assist in that endeavor.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg&t=783" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg&t=783</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steambox#Steam_Box" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steambox#Steam_Box</a><p>[3] <a href="http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...</a>
I think he's completely off base to be honest, I think in the coming years Surface like devices will replace the traditional desktop, and unless Linux moves quickly, there's no way that space will be anything but Windows dominated.<p>With Windows 8.1 out soon, which improves Windows 8 massively, I see it continuing to dominate into the future where desktops become increasingly marginalised.
I applaud more Linux everywhere and am quite happy about Steam on Linux but it is a little odd to see Valve talk about the virtues of openness while shipping DRMed games (I understand why they do it and don't even mind all that much it's just odd).<p>I'm mostly a retrogamer anyways so I tend to wait/hope the games I like hit GOG
I just ordered parts for a gaming machine the other day, and it'll be running Linux. A surprising number of games run on it directly now, and Wine works for the ones I care about that don't. There's now absolutely nothing I want to do that requires Windows - even two years ago that wasn't at all the case.
This statement feels like so last century. Isn't the future of the gaming is in the <i>browser</i>? Operating software wars feels meaningless and ridiculous these days.
Gabe is scared of Valve being like Netscape when Internet Explorer came out. If he'd really care about linux, he would have started this years ago.