But.

I haven't bought it yet because it doesn't run on Linux. I don't want to reboot my dual-boot system anymore.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was an editorial (which I can't seem to find now) on Rock Paper Shotgun, about how we're having the golden age of gaming right now, and it's very true - though we'll have to wait for many of these kickstarters (Torment and Wasteland, to name to two most well-known ones) to come to fruition.

It's also neat to see that they don't necessarily go the nostalgia route. The last one I've backed, Sunless Sea [1], is going to be a mix of different concepts (roguelike, exploration, survival, trade) along with a mechanism for madness, and is not a follow-up to anything in particular.

I'll toast the future of gaming, happening right now.

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/failbetter/sunless-sea/

Thanks for pointing out Sunless Sea btw. I'm a big fan of FTL and this looks like a very interesting game in a similar vein.

You're welcome. You also get quality, funny, atmospheric writing for the same price.

But thinking about it, it would be interesting to have informal statistics about what kind of game gets funded on Kickstarter. I've seen adventure games, roleplaying games, one Diablo-like, a roguelike or two, and plenty of strategy/tactics games (marking a strong comeback of turn-by-turn play). On the other hand, there seems to be a dearth of manshooters/interactive torture games (apart from a tactical one I read about not so long ago) - either because the public is already well served by Medal of Duty XXIX or due to budget constraints. On average, the emphasis seems to be more on "thinking" games than clicky-clicky.

I mean Guns of Icarus is no AAA, but it's pretty fun. So is Awesomenauts (I wish it would allow local 2v2 splitscreen!). Not to mention my backlog of fairly fun timewasters. And upcoming Project Eternity and Torment games. I'm seriously pretty much set for games. And at this point odds are if AAA games came to Linux, I'd probably just skip them and wait for the next interesting Kickstarter or Humble Bundle.

If other people are like me (Linux or not, I suppose) the AAA game could be dead in short order.

I can relate to that. I also play on Windows with a dual-boot install, and since Steam came out on Linux I just boot up Windows way less for gaming. I end up playing much more the titles which are available on Linux rather than wanting to reboot to play other games.

In a sense, this proves one thing: convenience wins, again. And that's definitely a great sign for Steam, since many Linux users are probably feeling the same way we do.

If convenience wins, doesn't that mean the vast majority of people will just stick with Windows for gaming?

It's free in beer, and free as in speech. The developer experience is much better on Linux; doing something like running all your video assets through a converter in parallel is a one-line shell script on Linux [1], but a hundred-line Python script on Windows. Subjectively, on Linux filesystems seem to be faster and overall memory usage seems to be smaller.

Seriously, a long time hardcore unix guy doesn't see the benefits of Linux over Windows?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6363676

Nope. Linux barely even resembles unix at this point, as I mentioned. That one line shell script is also a one line shell script on windows, install cygwin or learn powershell. I find the developer experience on linux to be terrible, I do my development on openbsd running in virtualbox regardless of whether I am running windows or linux.

Having said that, I do still find Linux to be a much more stable and high performance platform. One of the reasons I dread dual-booting is that it takes about 5-10 minutes after booting for my Windows installation to be properly responsive to commands. I know I can re-format, but I don't feel I should have to. I've been running the same Arch install for longer than I have Win 7 and haven't had to resort to massively drastic tactics like that yet.

I guess it all comes down to lowering the barriers to entry. Ultimately the mass-market will use what is installed on their computer when they buy it. This gives the major manufacturers one more reason to try the Linux experiment and cut the Windows license costs. It's a pretty good reason too. Gaming was one of the very few things that couldn't be fixed easily through some other means like Wine or VMs.

If I want to switch playlists while gaming on Windows, I have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, click Task Manager, then click the web browser in the task bar on the bottom. Linux Mint with Cinnamon snaps me right there with an Alt-Tab.

I want gaming on Linux if only because it would light a fire under the manufacturers to fix their god damn drivers.

I use arch on my other machines, and naturally that is a whole other story I wouldn't even dare tell a less tech-savvy person.

1. A home entertainment box does more than play games these days. Windows is still 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.

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.

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.

Linux runs my media pc and my media server. Valve have already accomplished full platform support for most of their games, Humble indie bundles require full platform support for their games. Linux versions of most games, isn't some far away dream, it's here.

I'm not sure I fully comprehend your linux 'open-source' only argument. Have you seen ubuntu?

No, it's a Netflix subscription, so when they drop your kids' favourite shows you have fun explaining corporate politics as the reason they can't watch Bob the Builder any more.

> Linux versions of most games, isn't some far away dream, it's here.

Very little of my Steam library is available with Linux versions. Almost none, in fact. This would be the norm for most people, unless you're limiting yourself to games that run on Linux in the first place.

Mate, the 'future' you're suggesting here and the related straw man argument is one of your choosing. Netflix or some known current company isn't a future to a medium. I'll assume you're suggesting online streaming as a service as opposed to other potential digital medium schemes. Physical disks provide no advantages in this scenario either, what happens when (not if) this favourite disk becomes scratched and unreadable?

> Very little of my Steam library is available with Linux versions.

Very few of mine don't have Linux versions. This might not be the norm for most people of course, because it's linux that is gaining in the field of gaming platforms over windows. Sure, I can't play the same amount of AAA games as if I ran windows. With the Half-Life engine now running on Linux and many indie games having ports, I don't _need_ to run windows to game.

I'd love to throw in some data, but alas many a site related to numbers are classified as 'games' and blocked on this connection.

Wow, really? I have you know I still own DVDs from 1997! and they work just fine so you might want to dial down the "when not if" argument.

On the flipside, I do have some trouble finding streaming sites that offer their services for that long. Not to mention the fact that these services have recurring payments to use. So excuse me if I and many many others opt to buy our media to own and to be in control of it rather than trusting some company with offering it for god know how little time.

And here is the real kicker: If you own a disk, you have ways to digitize it yourself if you can't be arsed to put a disk in the drive. So it seems to me that I have the better end of the deal compared to someone who just streams everything. Not to mention the fact that not everybody has internet connections that lend itself to stream blu ray quality.

I have you know I still own a horse-drawn cart, and the wheels work just fine!

It really is more of a "Where we are going, we wont need wheels" situation. Sure there are some edge cases for physical media today, but they will slowly fade.

It's a thing that actually happened. I'm sorry facts don't accord with the world in your head, but there you are.

> Very few of mine don't have Linux versions. This might not be the norm for most people of course, because it's linux that is gaining in the field of gaming platforms over windows.

"You shouldn't want to do that" is rarely a compelling argument to customers.

Just like HD-DVD is the future? Netflix cannot obviously in the point in time be a future for most citizens on the internet. You may be screaming in an echo chamber if you're located in the US. Netflix certainly isn't a solution elsewhere.

That probably means you don't play any Indie games. Not sure who is the norm here. Indie Games have been booming in digital distribution, in case you did not notice.

I buy indie games that I already own to support the developers (some of which I know personally), heck, I just bought the Humble Bundle even though only of the games there I didn't have, but Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Skyrim/Bioshock/GTA are the games most of the players want, not Frozen Synapse or Hotline Miami.

I hope we see more games ported, but having worked in the industry for many years, going the extra lengths to support yet another OS which will most likely be just a small beep in the sales numbers isn't going to happen anytime soon. Heck, look at the franchises that started on the PC (CoD for example) and how the developers still focus more on the console versions then the PC ones.

Unfortunately, the games market as a whole leans more towards the big series, which are much less likely to be cross-platform beyond "several consoles and maybe a PC port."

I suppose this is as good a time to ask as any... Why has UltraViolet not taken off, in anyone's reasonable estimation?

Seems smart to me. I buy a UV film, everyone recognizes my purchase. I buy a film once. I own it. Do I have this wrong? I only own a few, mostly with other purchases, but it seems smart to me, and easy.

It give up so many freedoms I can't wish for ultraviolet to die more.

That said, I agree with you that the future is not with physical media - that's very obviously the case. But the future isn't here yet.

> Linux versions of most games, isn't some far away dream, it's here.

That's absurd. There are no AAA titles available on Linux. Newell's prediction might seem more realistic if Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc. jump on board. Maybe it will happen if a viable Linux-based console came around.

Which is absurd because the first thing I do with all my Blu-Rays is rip them losslessly to MKV files on my server.

Where I am its popular for whole villages to decide to lay fibre and they set up little trusts to do just that and they even get grants from the government. And they have really great speeds, but at some point their bundle of fibres meets a switch.

Other than the Valve games Linux will soon get Metro: Last Light and Football Manager 2014. Almost no AAA games so far, but it is to be expected that AAA producers are generally slower and more conservative.

From a technical standpoint, Wine is extended to make the game work, that version of Wine is bundled with the application, and a script is included to run it without further user involvement.

I don't get why people still insist this sort of port somehow doesn't count. If it runs at full speed, shows up as a "Linux game" under Steam, and the user literally can't tell the difference, what does it matter?

Eh, isn't that what Valve's Steambox is: a Linux based console?

Honestly, the only retailers that come immediately to mind selling DVD but not Blu-ray are gas stations and truck stops.

I still use DVD and am starting to have problems, because the new titles at our library are mostly Blueray.

I suggest turning these off(In my case, all of them were on by default, and some of them needed to be manually toggled on every start for a month before it magically decided to default correctly).

Now that the camera is much better, all of those compensation techniques are now making the image look fake. The lighting is too bright, the makeup too heavy.

The bluray argument is largely moot. Valve and the game industry at large could care less about it, with consoles as the exception. Gabe and his team only have to present a console with an advantage over existing consoles (modular build is a huge deal) with a distro that is stable. With the impressive bases already in existence, and OpenGL being a fullfledged match for Direct X it's a no-brainer that Valve has what it takes to pull this off.

Lastly I'd like to point out the Linux community is not uniformly against closed source. What makes our veins pop is stuff like hardware OEMs not releasing driver sources, making development and innovation a pain. Who cares if a game is closed source?

Not to mention that every game I've ever gotten from GoG has worked pretty smoothly (IE close to effortlessly) with Wine. I've only run into trouble with stuff like installing 3rd party infinity engine mods.

I think in some ways Linux is a better platform than Windows for retroclassic games.

People that are going to buy a steam box are people that would otherwise buy a ps/4 and/or a XBOX one. Nobody cares that the PS/4 is running BSD nobody is going to buy a PS4 because it runs BSD. Microsoft failed to understand this as well, "we have three OS's running on the X1", yeah that will sell a game system like cupcakes. Almost nobody is going to buy a game/entertainment system based on the OS. It boils down to cost, marketing, what your friends are getting, launch games and exclusives.

If the steam box is going to have similar h/w and price point as the PS4 and X1 and a couple of cool new games like HL3, it will have more games at launch than the PS4 and X1 combined (and as an extra bonus you can play your games on a PC running Windows or Linux). You want to play HL3 on a console? buy a Steam Box.

As for bu-ray support, if it turns out to be a main point of consideration they could make a player that support it. But looking at the PS3 vs X360 it wasn't a main seller for most people.

TL;DR it is not so much about all desktops running Linux but most of everything else

And of course since Android is Linux, combining the two would seem feasible...

I don't see the majority of players care about old games. I certainly do, and so does a non-trivial amount of people, but it's not really anyone's focus I think.

New Windows versions make (edit: in my experience) most old games unplayable, I've had much more success getting Windows 98/XP games running on Wine than on Windows 7, to my surprise (Baldur's Gate is a recent example).

If there's a market for legacy games, someone will step up and port them to or emulate them on modern operating systems. It's already happening, both commercial (gog.com etc.) and non-commercial (console emulators, DOSBox, Wine, ...)

That is simply not true, the vast majority of games work fine, and most of those that don't only need you to fiddle with the "compatibility" settings.

As for the reason why "old" games are important, it's because they offer a back-catalog, you open your store with a very large selection. Not so much the 10-15 years old, but rather the 2-5 years old games.

I realise that's just my experience, added a remark above. I've had very little luck getting even stuff that works fine on XP to run on 7. I'm not blaming Microsoft, I know they're going to great lengths for backwards compatibility. But I don't see old games running on new systems as a given, not on Windows, not on any other platform/OS.

> As for the reason why "old" games are important, it's because they offer a back-catalog, you open your store with a very large selection. Not so much the 10-15 years old, but rather the 2-5 years old games.

Maybe I'm old, but 2-5 years old games aren't "old" at all in my book. I'm thinking about >10 year old stuff. Don't recall any trouble getting <5 year old games running on 7, indeed.

Yes it is. Biased, self selected, very hard to exploit. But it's still data. If you know the biases and counter them (for instance by asking people directly), you could even gather something useful.

indeed.

> for instance by asking people directly..

a terrible way of accounting for bias. people are often unaware of the bias they impart on what they say.

What tends to happen is either there is a re-release to cash in on a previously successful game or compatibility tools (WINE/DOSBOX) become good enough over time.

The biggest hurdle is the lack of a killer reason to run a Linux gaming system over a Windows system or a console. AFAIK there is no big title in the works that will be in any way a Linux exclusive.

Here the open nature of Linux actually works against it to a degree, since the underlying stack is open source, dependencies can be (and are) ported to other platforms with less technical and legal issues then proprietary systems like DirectX.

I had a PS3 for years and I think I watched a bluray one or two times. The rest of my full-HD media experience was powered by the internet. Nobody building anything for the future should care about physical, DRM-encumbered formats. Those are clearly the past and will be gone sooner or later.

Using Linux in this regard seems like a good solution. Windows will tax you to hell and back for the privilege of rebooting your hardware all the time to apply software updates, while Linux is free and doesn't require such user-hostile nonsense.

Nothing (of value) is lost and the solution is future-proofed by not walking into licensing-traps.

On Steam now, there are 289 Linux capable games, versus 809 for OS X, and thousands more for Windows. So they have a lot of ground to make up

But if they indeed launch a "Steambox" with dedicated Linux support, that's a whole new story in terms of user base and market expansion.

When looking at the tech support forum for Europa Universalis 4 I noticed Mac users had much more performance problems than either Windows or Linux users.

I think this is a game changer for the console game development industry, and for the console market. In the end, however, it'll be a lot like Android: quiet success.

it's a snore-fest vs. dvds: http://www.digital-digest.com/blog/DVDGuy/wp-content/uploads...

whereas streaming passed purchased dvds... last year: http://www.screendigest.com/reports/2012222a/2012_03_online_...

and win8 runs your htpc? nice. other than you, i know no one who even has an htpc anymore (occasionally hooking their laptop to the tv doesn't count) and most of them (my non-geek friends) don't even know what that is.

everyone and their dog has a roku/apple tv/xbox/smart tv tho.

m3mnoch.

Try to make do with a 3MBit/s connection. Then, people might see that their beloved streaming will not surpass physical media until these kinds of connections are a thing of the past or only exist in the rural-est places of the world.

my country, however, does. as do all (well, most) of my friends' countries. that would be why i used "i know no one" as the qualifier for my comment. shrug

basically, i answered his anecdote with my own. (oh, the delicious irony!) sorry again if you missed the connotation there.

> Who cares about a market chart?

only people who value data over anecdote it appears.

or maybe i'm more of an austin-game-guy rather than a bay-area-groupthink guy?

or maybe it's because i've only recently bothered to comment? in fact, i think this one may push me over into a double-digit comment count!

shrug

most likely, tho, it's because i've been commenting like that forever and a day (in internet time). a quick google search nets me this example from about 8 years ago: http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/839/something-awful-3...

thanks for pointing it out tho. i'll try to remember going forward that, unlike the rest of the internet, there's a pretentious law here not to sign your posts.

                     <-- look!  no sig!

That's like say that Windows is still the only OS which supports Minidisk, PS/2 and 5 1/2 flopies.

It hardly matters going forward, and it probably does it more harm than good.

Liar! ;-) I use a PS/2 keyboard on one of my Linux boxes. Works flawlessly. Linux also supports Jaz and Zip disks/

Why does Netflix matter? I've never jumped on that bandwagon and I don't miss it. I watch one or two movies a year, and the free, legal content available on Hulu / Crunchyroll / Youtube / over-the-air TV is more than I can possibly consume!

And besides, can't you just ask Netflix to mail you a physical DVD if your OS isn't compatible with their streaming service? Or did they finally shut down / spin off that service like they wanted to a few years ago?

Or you could reboot to Windows...I'm assuming your PC came pre-installed with it, and these days Ubuntu is pretty good at preserving your bootloader provided you don't tell it to format your disk when you install.

That's... lovely. I'm not sure what it has to do with the price of rice in china, though. You don't miss something you've never had? That kind of goes without saying.

I watch considerably more than one or two movies a year, and netflix is a great way to watch them on a casual basis. I don't want to get CDs in the mail and I don't really have any interest in dual booting to windows (and no, most of my PCs don't come preinstalled with anything).

I'm really not even sure what the point of your post is, except to say that I should inconvenience myself greatly for no really good reason.

Until the patches are all in upstream it's basically an alpha capability. And having to use wine at all for it makes it second-class compared to using a normal windows install.

Much of the content I consume also requires software patching to watch comfortably anyway(anime for instance is often only ever released in Japan without English subtitles. Even if I could afford the discs, I wouldn't be able to consume the material comfortably until I've studied Japanese for a couple more years).

Currently I use a mish-mash of Apple TV and an older Sony box (which is actually pretty decent compared to apple except for itunes support) for the home theater, but I fully expect my future tv to actually have a netflix and what have you player on them. Gabe would do well to actually announce a tv that runs Steam, as the future probably is less and less a separate box.

Edit: Oops, forgot, I also have 100 Mbit ethernet, Bluray isn't in my future by a longshot. I expect more people will be on this plan soon.

Anybody who cares about blu-ray players will already have one anyway. They could also pick one up for very very cheap.

I honestly think that's all there is to this, because otherwise how is Windows 8 any more or less open than Windows 7?

The industry as a whole is moving into walled gardens right now, following Apple's lead. I'm very worried about that myself, so I'm cheering Valve on here.

It's true, having open platforms aligns with Valve's business goals. I fail to see the problem with that, it's a lucky coincidence.

Valve wants to build it on top of am open platform (Linux) because building a walled garden inside someone else's (MS's) walled garden is risky. But that doesn't make steam itself an open platform.

Steam is a more like a walled national park - the walls are there, but they give you a lot more room to run around.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24063613

At some point, open platforms might no longer align with their business goals. That's when they'll do nasty stuff, and that's when I'll whine about them. Currently, I'm cheering them on.

Valve will position their steambox to compete with consoles, which have the same issues with backwards compatibility which you mention.

Physical media will matter less and less in the future.

My HTPC is a raspberry pi running a variation of debian and XBMC. I also have a chromecast for watching netflix and youtube.

I currently do not have a gaming PC and would be massively interested in a steambox when they're released.

I don't know. This is all speculation, but I would grant Gabe the benefit of the doubt here. Over the next.. 5+ years, who knows what the entertainment world might be like?

Now it's ripped, you can play it through any decent media player - mplayer2, mplayer, VLC, etc. etc.

Yes, please. That would be awesome.

I am using gdb sometimes and it is just fine. Especially with the Python scripting support now. I used the Eclipse CDT gdb wrapper once and that, I agree, really sucks.

Yes. A thousand times yes.

> I used the Eclipse CDT gdb wrapper once and that, I agree, really sucks.

Just curious, how long ago was that? My opinion of Eclipse kind of ebbs and flows. I've used the GDB support a bunch for remote debugging of embedded systems (including, surprisingly, the Linux kernel).

In fairness, my gripe was always more with the IDE than its debugger support. CDT has always felt like the red-headed stepchild in comparison to Java support. The extra intelligence is nice, but it makes it so that you have to jump through lots of hoops to get it to be even remotely usable with a large codebase (again, the Linux kernel). Even on smaller codebases it can consume a buttload of memory and still be quite slow. But the debugger interface always seemed to "just work" for me.

This probably isn't good advice, but I really like VIM/pyClewn as a GDB frontend. Otherwise, there's always Eclipse, and 8 billion other IDEs.

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.

If you watch his presentation however, he does talk about a lot more than just the fact that the Windows/Mac app stores are all trying to take a cut. One of the key points he makes is that the largest proportion of innovation in the gaming scene is happening/originating on PC. Digital distribution, social gaming, free-to-play, community generated content and markets, etc. All these were primarily instigated on the PC, but are potentially in danger from closed, captive marketplaces.

Are people going to generate new hats for Team Fortress (to pick a simple example), when the approval process for content in the various app stores could hold it up for weeks or months? If another innovation such as Social Gaming (farmville, etc.) were to come along, but all the platforms were locked down as to what features they can enable for the users; would it ever take off as a business model?

So yeah, he's certainly doing it out of self-interest for Valve, but it's about far more than just the monetary cut they take. It's about the freedom to develop new and innovative ideas on an open platform without worrying about whether they'll pass the inspection of some opaque 3rd party authority.

PS: It's quite ironic to complain about a person making good logical business decisions on a forum dedicated to startup companies, where the majority of people are trying their damndest to make their own businesses work...

I'm all for this. If Microsoft wants to turn their OS into a consumer toy or a corporate tool, go ahead. I'd love to have an open-source OS that happened to be a first-class gaming platform as well, where if there's problems with performance, companies like Valve has a recourse: patch the OS.

See also: Android.

Be it altruistic or capitalist, Linux stands to benefit from the exposure and backing.

The vast majorty of current Linux titles are not on Linux because of Steam. Few titles (Crusader Kings comes to mind) actually ported their engine to run on opengl / posix / alsa or sdl just because Steam appeared there. Most of the last 2 years of Linux gaming boom has been due to Unity and the Humble Bundle. Unity was porting to Linux before Steam on Linux was announced, same with the Humble Bundle.

Having a platform is fine and everything, but here are two observations from seperate perspectives:

1. Why develop for a platform where you can only expect a few thousand sales, even on the de facto distribution platform that takes a cut of proceeds? 2. If there are no games on a platform, wouldn't you just want to release directly and let your potential customers come to you? If they are desperate, wouldn't cutting out the middle man be more profitable, since Steam isn't making Linux development easier, just marketing and sales processing? I think Steam is so important on the desktop PC because there are so many games on it. People don't go download Origin or seek out a developers site to buy a game, they just buy it on Steam. If you are on something like gnu/linux, you have no competition game-wise, you just have to make sure people know you exist. In almost any genre, you have minimum modern competition on the platform. So why give Valve whatever % they take?

I check Steam everyday looking for new Linux releases. I can't say the same for checking indie game blogs or wherever else I'm supposed to find the announcements of a Linux version. Even if I did, it's simple mathematics - do I check 30+ websites of various game publishers, news organisations and indie devs, or do I just check Steam?

They have a pretty powerful platform; I think the publicity benefits of being on Steam far outweigh the cut they take as a middleman.

Meh. I'm old enough to remember how Serverside Linux took off in corporate environments: Oracle ported its database. That was seen as a sign of approval, and soon Linux was everywhere. It was pretty rare to actually be running Oracle, but that was the tipping point.

A rising tide raises all ships.

How can you know this? Right now, being a Windows desktop centric company is a huge liability as consoles and mobile are eating the gaming world. Yeah, PC gamers will always be here, but not in vast numbers.

>he just wants to try to crush a competitor

He also wants to contemporize and have his own OS. If the Steam linux-based console came out with tons of game support, it might be a no brainer for PC gamers sick of building expensive systems and dealing with Windows centric hassles (DRM, shoddy updates, OEM crapware, goofy UI decisions, etc). I'd buy it and retire my desktop. As long as the games were keyboard/mouse-centric and complex, not lazy PS3/4 transfers.

Whether he's taken his sweet time coming around, he HAS come around. He now obviously cares about linux.

Some people like a sports team because of the way they play the game. Some like the same sports team because they're the local team. Others like them because of the color of their uniforms, or they find one of the players very attractive, or any number of reasons. Some started liking them only after they did well last season, others got team related tattoos 10 years ago.

They're all fans.

That's not why he cares, he cares because the MS App store is a threat to Steam lock in, and he wants his tasty 30%.

> Then you say that he doesn't care about Linux. / He now obviously cares about linux.

No he doesn't, he cares about being a pied piper leading people away from a potential loss of revenue for him. I know otherwise reasonable people who only buy games if they are on Steam, and who dump on Origin while simultaneously praising Steam. He wants to make sure that continues, and having Windows 8 centre around an app store that he doesn't make money from is upsetting to him.

There is not one thing that Windows 8 does that is "bad for gaming" from a consumer perspective compared to Windows 7, a platform he is fine with. Note that I have no intention of buying W8, but I have a distaste for BS, regardless of the source or the target.

> Some people like a sports team...

Sure, a rising tide raises all ships etc, I understand that. It's just disappointing it's coming, not from a love of what makes Linux great, but from a greedy app store owner who doesn't want another app store cramping his style.

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 advice for gamers was always "Well wine can do some games, but really you should dual boot if you want to game".

Well, of course. It's not hard to see the writing on the wall. Valve is looking for a platform where they can't be muscled out before they're muscled out of the one they're on. You can only compete with a vertical integrator for a long as they allow you compete. Doubly so with software platforms. If you look at the trajectory of Microsoft's platform control, there is zero reason Valve shouldn't be shitting their pants right now.

Couldn't really say that 10 years ago.

After watching that, it has solidified my belief that his only complaint about Windows 8 is that competition is coming.

What am I missing?

See Michael Abrash's discussion on VR latency: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-n...

And also this tweet:

  I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a
  pixel to the screen.  How f’d up is that?
    
    - John Carmack, Id Software

I think you're touching on the popular sentiment that Linux gaming would be a good thing for consumers. Therefor the news is interesting, as a disruption to current players if nothing else.

On other hand, I wish all best to Linux :)

Gabe now sees that Windows 8 is not a viable platform for games, and his future may well depend on making Linux work. Given that, I see no reason to doubt his resolve in the matter.

What does this mean? I am able to run every game on Windows 8 that I was able to run on Windows 7.

There are other reasons I could give, such as lackluster kernel performance developments, that would impede game development and performance. It's also not too much a stretch to say that if you want to be able to run games seriously on a PC, it'd be handy to have a minimalized OS in which to run it, without so much overhead for whatever else the PC might be doing.

Be honest, this is FUD. My own experience and every report I have read is that Windows 8 is faster than Windows 7 hands down. And how is Steam not a closed system? In the talk he complains it took 6 months to get an Apple Store update through. How long does it take to make changes to games on Steam? Can I put a game on Steam today? No? How long does it take?

This isn't about Open vs Closed. This is about Gabe In Control vs Gabe Not In Control.

It is, but currently relies on an specific level of openness in a platform to operate.

Microsoft and Apple are vertical integrators. They don't.

So when the parent said "it seems that Microsoft is fast headed to a closed platform" they were referring to specific aspect(s) of the openness of the platform (Windows). Not saying that Steam was a free-for-all.

Gabe is stating that for Valve and their digital distribution platform Steam, Windows 8 is a 'hostile' environment. They could potentially be blocked/forbidden from deploying steam on Win8 (or future version of windows) as the Windows App store could take it's place as well as any steam updates/game updates would have to go through Microsoft which would cause unnecessary delays/overhead.

Foolish on their part? Probably. However that seems to be the current situation anyway.

From what I have seen, the only competitor to Steam that is even a blip on the radar of gamers is Origin. If anything, Valve is pushing into territory that they think Origin cannot enter, not MS.

I'm not a "real" gamer anyway so none of it really matters to me anyway, I just find the notion of the future of "real" gaming being touch based low-powered "Surface-like" devices to be very silly. Whether the future of PC gaming is on Windows 8 or Linux, it will look very similar to how looks right now: beefy machines chewing up somewhere around half a kilowatt of power, controlled by keyboard/mice and game controllers.

The most change I consider plausible/viable is in display tech. Either high-dpi screens, or next-generation "Rift-like" displays could complement PC gaming. Input and power are here to stay though.

Also I find it bizarre that so many people seem so invested in being sure that Microsoft's App Store presents the largest threat to Steam. It doesn't currently, clearly, and I rather doubt it will in the future. Origin on the other hand does, but nobody here seems to be interested in them. Origin is a real and current threat, not some sort of hypothetical threat. Maybe there just aren't many EA shareholders/employees on HN...

Not yet, anyway. Do you think this situation would remain the same if it ever gained a significant market share? The real criticism here is that MS's strategy is a trojan horse.

Knowing what I've seen of Gabe the past few years, I'm inclined to believe it's a bit more of the latter than the former.

Sounds like he's jumping the gun. I don't see that future happening.

Gabe is worried about his cash cow becoming a second-class citizen on the platform.

He recognizes the struggles with Linux (and with gaming PCs on the TV) adoption for gaming and is working to clearly identify and fix them.

It sounds like he's moving away from Windows to address innovation and gaming PC adoption on the TV (and similar ideas). While Microsoft might not take away the Desktop, they certainly aren't making it easier to do custom things like booting to Steam or creating a controller based input/abstraction (that's simple for a non-techie gamer to setup and maintain).

And apparently notch can't afford a code signing certificate.

Unless I'm mistaken, (non-ARM) Windows works the same way, except Microsoft relies on third-party CAs to issue code-signing certificates (and, pedantically, NTFS calls extended attributes "alternative data streams").

Do you really think Microsoft wouldn't prefer that in the future they make it so most people choose the Windows store over anything else, by pushing it even more into their faces, like they did with Metro?

Many people asked for the Start Menu to be back in the desktop mode, and they didn't bring it back? Why would they do that, when it doesn't interfere at all with Metro mode to just have that in the desktop mode? Why else would they do that, if they didn't want to force Metro even more on you by turning it into a shortcut to Metro mode instead?

Desktop apps can do many more things than WinRT apps are allowed to do. There are thousands of business critical applications running on desktop that are likely rarely maintained. These two reasons alone should convince you that Microsoft would be stupid to remove the desktop.

The blend of Metro and desktop is not meant to kill the desktop. It's simply a bet on hybrid devices (like Surface, Yoga, etc.) becoming the norm in years to come.

If apps are going to have to be rewritten to run on mobile devices, why tie yourself down to the Metro platform when end users are wanting to run their LOB apps on their iPads anyway?

Also, you can immediately deploy the same app to tablets, laptops and desktops, which isn't the case with iPad apps.

>I see RT as likely to accelerate the adoption of platform agnostic web apps in enterprise.

I am specifically not advocating platform-specific applications.

Microsoft has essentially thrown away the reasons for enterprise developers to tie themselves down to the Microsoft platform. If that's the case, there's relatively little reason to tie themselves down to any single platform.

Even if he announces the "Steambox" tomorrow, without a truly open Linux solution with very broad drivers support it won't mean much to games developers. It'd just be one more platform they'd have to explicitly support, i.e. they'd have to make a Windows version, Mac version, PS version, Xbox version, and finally a Steambox version

It may have been a million years ago by tech standards, but I think that subcontext makes his statements about Linux even more interesting.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

1) A large proportion of the games that I own for Linux are developed using the Unity engine. This has many advantages for an indie developer (ease of use, cheap license), but is especially useful because it can cross-compile to Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/Xbox/PS. Even Blackberry! This is a godsend for indie developers trying to reach as large a market as possible.

So the challenge isn't necessarily to get developers to stop using DirectX, but to get the major engine developers (eg. Unreal) to ensure good cross-compilation support. They already have to a certain extent, because the PS3 is already using a form of OpenGL. All we really need is a little extra effort from them to make sure it's compatible with Linux. This would immediately add a large proportion of the current game releases to the Linux market.

2) Driver optimisation isn't as important as you might think. The average PC graphics card vastly overtook consoles in graphical power a very long time ago. Certainly within a year or two of the current generation of consoles. Even without optimised drivers, they are still far more powerful than the Xbox360 or PS3.

All in all, the obstacles are very surmountable. The biggest problem that I can see lies in convincing the big game engines, like Unreal, to bother with such a small market. But if Valve leads the way with the Source engine, they could start eating away at the likes of Unreal - simply by being the only AAA choice on Linux.

Overall, it is a huge pain in the ass. I oh-so-wish that graphics cards would "just work" like wireless cards now do.

But if you're on a desktop and get a well-supported card, you're right. It's not a big deal.

2) You take some of the graphic card company engineers and put them into a room with game engine engineers. Valve had some spectacular success with this technique lately [0]. Unfortunately, this is not viable for Indies or Free Software devs, but only AAA games need the high end anyways.

[0] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

You make something better.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17x0sh/john_carmack_a...

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.

Then then made it bigger by making it easier for outside devs to publish on steam. Over the course of a decade they worked to turn steam from something that everyone hated into something that nearly everyone loves. The turn around has been incredible; from a hindrance no one wanted to a platform no one wants to do with out.

I believe that Gabe is more interested in Linux because it is an "open platform" rather than it being "open source". Valve were quite happy working on Windows when it was an "open platform" that they could release games onto with out having to jump through hoops. As MS moves to force everything through their own app store, Valve are looking elsewhere.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

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.

The biggest PITA with multi-monitor Linux based systems is dealing with forced max power state (read: constant heat generation and fan noise).

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

[...]

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.

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.

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.

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."

--

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzn6E2m3otg&t=783

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steambox#Steam_Box

[3] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...

as a veteran of the "user-generated" game content industry, i can honestly say 5 years ago, i had that same vision. 5 years of blood, sweat, money and tears later, i can (also honestly) say -- that's not the case. and won't be.

for those of you who've never made (finished and shipped!) a game before, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. you have what would be called an mvp in ycombinator terms inside of a month. "i will crush the rest of this thing out 3 months and ship!" uh... no.

i'm here to tell you that is not the case. the whole "first 90%" vs. the "second 90%" thing is magnified 10-fold in games. it's a really long post for me to explain the myriad of gotchas involved from safely syncing game state between sleep-and-non-sleep-packets-suddenly-flood-in-but-omg-my-clock to btw-you-need-3-times-the-states-in-your-state-machine-oops to why-am-i-getting-3-fps-on-a-faster-device to all-of-the-above-times-multiplayer-exponentially. i plan on writing that post someday, but not now.

anyway.

the prototype flies off your finger tips and then the next 2 and a half years (please see the common thread of 3 years to make a game, from the movie indie gamer [highly recommended!] to that recent atomic brawl post) working through obscure bugs and corner cases because games have more complex interactions than non-games and gamers don't have a clue how to follow the damn happy path when they play.

so, yes. i said 1 month of fun, fast iterative prototype and 2 years of awful, in-the-weeds debugging where your strength of will to finish is tested daily. (insert rovio making 51 games before angry birds here) finishing a good game is goddamnhard. finishing a shitty game is a snap -- just ship your prototype!

what we found was that anyone who has the strength and perseverance to actually build and (more importantly) finish a game was already working in the game industry -- mostly because they possess a proven will to finish.

i guess what's i'm saying is lots of people can snap together sweet, use-with-care prototypes ugc-style. almost nobody -- and i really, really mean almost nobody, like 0.0001% of "i want to make a game" developers -- can actually finish and launch a game regardless of scope.

mind you -- i don't view indie games as ugc. if you ship (SHIP, not start) an indie game, you have what it takes to work in the non-indie game world. you just choose not to.

if you don't believe me, i challenge you to prove me wrong and just make a simple game this weekend and let your friends play it where you can watch, but not talk or help them at all. it will take approximately 12 seconds of them touching your game before you're completely "wtf -- how did that happen?!?!?" screwed.

m3mnoch.

Erm, if you take "content creation" to mean full, playable games then you're right. But...

I'm pretty sure Valve is referring to content at every level, from hats to in-game items to custom levels to mods.

His point stands, however, and you only have to look at the quality of many of the Steam Workshop addons produced by hobbyists. Yes, this includes plenty of high poly models and much more, easily comparable to anything produced professionally.

But what I was saying is that these guys are making single models of very high quality, not filling out an entire GTA V5. And especially not coding, acting, mocapping, producing, marketing etc a game. They're not even building somthing like bastion with a small team. They are many orders of magnitude between doing one model that sells well and building a full game. Especially one that does well.

Gabe has mentioned that there are customers that are making $500,000 a year via content production in the Steam Workshop. From his perspective (or anyone's, really), that's simply too compelling to not be a part of the narrative being discussed with regard to having full control (again, both technological and financial, in my opinion).

Clearly, they are seeing compelling experiences (and equally compelling cash) being delivered via user generated content, and it is in their best interest to foster and mature that space.

The source that I read (the quote, below, from Gabe) indicates people, which is of course plural. Also, it indicates $500,000 per year, not over three years:

"So now we're in this strange world where we have people who are using the Steam Workshop who are making $500,000 per year building items for other customers."

Exclusive interview: Valve's Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-intervi...

By way of example, it looks like Everquest Next is implementing a more advanced version of Minecraft's building-block technology, which would seem to provide the foundation for allowing players to create whole new worlds in separate servers, like Minecraft but with more sophisticated world building tools.

Any thoughts on whether that might take off?

for that, i would use second life as your measuring stick.

people will pay professional developers for toys to play with (eq next, for example), but enabling hobby developers to make money off their efforts using your platform? that's hard. and expensive. you wouldn't believe the support nightmare much less things like anti-money-laundering laws you have to deal with from country to country. it'll make you cry.

have you ever tried to push a platform update out underneath an already money-making-but-that's-my-livelihood audience? yeah, i wish whomever luck with that.

On the other hand, if you have "fun" tools for users to create content, they WILL create it. Like in Little Big Planet, ModNation Racers and others. It's amazingly hard to make a game, and amazingly harder to make a tool that is fun to use. And with this "fun tool" obviously you strip down all the publishing barriers (technical and legal) that "common game development" have.

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.

Can't help thinking there's a Linux kernel based OS by some internet company already out there that's selling on a few tablets. Obviously it can't be selling as many tablets as the continuing-to-dominate Windows so it must be an aberration. And there's another unix based OS out there doing even better, from some company in Cupertino I think. What are their names again?

Never mind, Windows will continue to dominate. On tablets. Right!

In the market of "Tablets on which you can game through Steam", the GP is speculating that Windows will continue to be the leader.

In that regard I do think Windows will dominate, and in the future Surface devices will probably replace laptops in their market.

Yes, a modern tablet device could never compare to an equally modern desktop PC in terms of power and capacity. They're in entirely different leagues. The sorts of games able to run on the latter could never run on the former, i.e. you won't be seeing a game like Beyond: Two Souls or Destiny on a tablet for many years to come, not without some serious stripping of features, content, and graphics performance.

Take WoW again as an example; I need a keyboard for my many (many) keybinds, a mouse for movement (because keyboard turners are just bad), and, really; an 8" monitor? Please. Tablets are simply a non-starter for complex (in terms of input and required reaction speed) games.

Tablet gaming is for my Mom and myself when I'm bored waiting at an airport. Sure, it's a huge market, but not all gamers are satisfied with Candy Crush.

As an aside, I would love for you to enlighten me as to how my first post could be improved.