this is exactly why big companies need to invest way more time in risky, it-would-be-cool-if, projects<p>most studios would have avoided even trying to work on a linux port to their games often citing that there arent enough users to justify the engineering time. yet the unintended consequence of this [allegedly bad business decision] was that they found sizable optimizations to even their flagship Windows version as a by-product of linux optimizations. this in turn brings the system requirements down for the game on Windows, more people can play it, and more profits. all because of the effort used to port to Linux.<p>cool stuff valve.