Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, said today that Linux is the future of gaming despite the minuscule share of the market it has today.
That seems hard to believe, given that Newell acknowledged Linux gaming generally accounts for less than one percent of the market by any measure including players, player minutes, and revenue. But Valve is going to do its best to make sure Linux becomes the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms.
“Half-Life 3 – SteamBox/Linux exclusive”. There, chicken and egg problem solved.
Gabe is a loose cannon; this can mean heaven or hell.
Because we will start building a gaming console based on Linux!
some how that does not seem like a winning strategy for Valve.
I guess similar things could nave been written about Google and Android
Edited 2013-09-16 23:17 UTC
No, not really. The Mobile computing market was nothing but growing with huge market penetration potential….Consoles are not that.
The PS4 is based on FreeBSD and x86. I really don’t see why Linux couldn’t succeed against that kind of competition.
Developer support. If there are no games being created for your system it does not matter what it’s running.
Playstation and Xbox are huge brands that have loads and loads of studios creating games for them. You’re being overly optimistic if you think Valve has that much pull in the industry.
Have you been following the news? Ever since Valve released Steam for Linux there’s suddenly been quite a lot of news about games being ported over and many games that are still being in development will be getting a Linux-port, too.
I’d say that goes to show exactly how well Valve has lodged themselves in all areas of gaming and how much pull they actually have.
Not just that, Valve also involves itself in the low-level stuff – developing a debugger, cooperating closely with game makers and graphics chip makers on drivers, and so on.
They’re serious about this.
I wanna know what the actual numbers are of titles sold on Linux, because outside of Valve’s back catalog and indie games … I seen very little evidence of this shift occuring.
Yes, some smaller and indie titles are getting linux ports. Have any big developers/publishers mentioned anything about supporting linux? (not being snarky, that’s a genuine question).
Does Europa Universalis IV count?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/236850/
I don’t really follow mainstream gaming anymore.
It’s not really what one could consider an “AAA” title (not saying it’s bad, but it’s a niche title by a smaller studio). By big I mean the likes of EA, Ubisoft, SquareEnix, etc.
I can’t remember too many names out of the top of my head, I have pretty shoddy memory, but the biggest game that I can think of right now would be Star Citizen. It’s gotten $19 million in funding, so it definitely can be categorized as an AAA. Another big game that’s getting a port is Metro: Last Light.
Just stumbled across this:
So it would seem The Witcher 3 — which, incidentally, is considered AAA nowadays — will also quite likely find its way to the Steambox and Linux.
Edited 2013-09-18 03:31 UTC
All right then, it’s a start (i’m a star citizen backer myself but it somehow slipped me that they’re going linux too).
Honestly, I hope they gain enough momentum to make more publishers consider linux ports (proper ports, not some directx-on-opengl translation hackjobs) and this doesn’t turn into another “year of desktop linux” but for games.
mod, if you can analyze this article:
http://www.pcgamesn.com/valves-masterplan-linux-steambox-big-pictur…
You will know that Gabe Newel a point. It’s the gaming on the living room is their target. They have the steam box(in dev) for the living room. Linux’s current market share is not a problem, people will buy a STEAM box because games written on it will run everywhere, not only on the steam box. While MS and Sony’s console are locked down black boxes. Again, Linux desktop’s market share is not a problem. It’s the Linux-powered steam box that will conquer the living room.
You’re not expected to build one yourself, you’re expected to buy a Steambox. It’s called selling a product.
Even the largest revolutions are at first nothing but a small thought inside an individual’s mind.
Edited 2013-09-16 22:43 UTC
Valve selling a consumer product isn’t a rallying cry for the masses.
Some repackaged Ubuntu with off the shelf hardware found on Newegg.
I am prepared for a good belly chuckle.
I’ve never understood why Valve didn’t coop with the Ouya people. They have a nice platform already built.
Valve has a nice platform yeah. Ouya has a cheap micro console.
ronaldst asked….
If you really believe this, then I find myself speculating as to whether you even own a OUYA or not. Granted as many faults as the OUYA has (has had?) perhaps with the wiser headship of Valve many of those could have been ironed over as far far too many of the issues would have been quite easy to fix if only someone with a brain had been available to set the drunken idiots currently in charge of the ship to rights.
I guess we’ll never really know.
–bornagainpenguin
Somehow I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a cue from Google and created their own Linux based ‘Steam’ OS that was as different from GNU/Linux as Android is.
Edited 2013-09-16 23:36 UTC
Except that the big difference with Android is that they use their own quirky libc and graphics stack, which complicates the process of running Dalvik apps on regular Linux or glibc+X11 apps on Android.
Dalvik itself isn’t fundamentally different from what happened with the ABI and VM Sun cooked up for Java apps in their attempt to achieve “write once, run anywhere”.
Given all the games already ported and released for the glibc+X11 stack via Steam for Linux, it wouldn’t be very smart to expect developers to release yet MORE builds of their games.
Edited 2013-09-17 00:11 UTC
I think it was because glibc maintainers are difficult to work with being one of the primary reasons.
That wouldn’t surprise me.
They could do something like ChromeOS, which is a build of Gentoo with lots of Google sauce on top.
It’s really more important for them to be as vanilla as possible so they can capture users of other distros. I like running Fedora, and I’m not particularly inclined to run Ubuntu. I would check out Steam if there was a client for it.*
*(I haven’t actually looked into this. There might be a package for this somewhere.)
It’s important to know that they are working the Linux Steam client at day one on top of Ubuntu 12.04. It makes sense, rather than using Gentoo. You may argue along the lines of technical superiority or whatsoever, but business is business, even if you have computer scientists at your disposal, it makes sense to use a linux distro with a commercial backup. The point is your scientists needs to focus on the job(Steam), and not to be distracted by customizing the OS(unless of course for dev tools) which is a total waste of time.
I totally agree with that. Outsource what isn’t a core competency.
It makes sense to make Ubuntu the first target. It’s easy to install the proprietary drivers, it targets the desktop, and it has market share/mindshare.
You missed my point. Android is the Linux kernel plus the Android userland (Android/Linux), and it diverges quite a bit from a normal GNU/Linux distro because of that.
ChromeOS is much closer to a regular GNU/Linux distro. It’s been customized by Google which makes it a specialty distro, but it’s still pretty generic. SteamOS being ChromeOS like could mean a heavily customized version of Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Arch, or whatever Valve decides to use.
Furthermore, it doesn’t behoove them to get too crazy with the customization, like using Android/Linux for the Steambox, because it would cut them off from the larger GNU/Linux pool. There are people who simply aren’t going to run Ubuntu. Valve doesn’t have to support every distro under the sun, but they can make some decisions that would make it easy for people to port if the Steam client if they want to.
Ok. The Steambox must be a customized version of Linux, but it needs to be compatible with the rest of Linux distribution by using the whole GNU/Linux userland. So an existing user can still install Steam and be done with it, or he just can buy the Steambox if he is not a Linux user. And I think this user is the target of Valve so they need not to worry about the number of Linux desktop users. Valve do not need to market the Steam brand and say “Hey, install Linux so you can play our games.” Instead, they will say to existing Linux users: “Install our Steam client so you can play games.” And they will say this to Windows and MacOSx users: “Buy our Steambox.” Without bothering them of this Linux thingy.
Regards,
Edited 2013-09-19 00:31 UTC
With the statement: “”Half-Life 3 – SteamBox/Linux exclusive”. There, chicken and egg problem solved.” Don’t know where Thom found that quote, but his addition summarily nails it.
Under Gabe Valve has the economic might, Gamer play-share, the ‘good guy’ charisma & stigma, and Gamer ennui with Windows to easily pull this off any number of ways.
The flip-side is this could just as easily become a fascist monopoly that surpasses anything like it that came before.
A little full-context exploration reveals the enormous leverage Valve can bring to bare here; which is truly epic in scale and could be virtually impossible to compete with once even modestly established…
Edited 2013-09-17 01:13 UTC
As it is now, some people use Linux as their main desktop, and boot into Windows just to play games. If Linux started getting exclusive games, those of us who use high-end apps on Windows with no FOSS equivalents would end up doing the opposite… using Windows as a workstation, and booting into Linux to play games
That describes my situation right now. It’s actually a very good thing for my productivity, since rebooting is such a chore and it severely limits how much time I would waste playing games otherwise.
Anything that brings a little competition to the desktop world is good. The Microsoft monopoly has led to a complete stagnation, the PC world is virtually standstill for a decade now.
If you look 13 years in the past, you will see: my TV evolved from 29″ CRT, to a 50″ Plasma, then to a 45″ LCD LED, and now i have a 3D capable LCD. Now, the desktop computer remains mostly unchanged. My phone changed from a Ericsson brick with a single line monochrome LCD display to a Razr HD. My console evolved from a Nintendo 64 to a soon to be PS4.
No matter how you look at Windows 7/8, it still has almost the same Win95 feeling/experience, and this leaded us to a stagnation in the very concept of desktop hardware: we are still interacting with it as we did 25 year ago, with a keyboard and a mouse on a plain 2D desktop.
Even crap monitor resolutions of 13 years ago like 1280×1024 are still popular, and almost all new desktop computers shipped at 2013 will never leverage their full processing power because there is simple nothing new to do on it: all new fun is on tablets, and desktops officially became just a electronic typewriter for common users
Touch is finally trying to take off for desktops, but as a result of the fast evolving tabled/smartphone market, not due a evolutionary drive on the desktop marked. Same for high density displays, SSDs, smooth GUI animations, focus on new user experiences, among other things.
The sole thing that has led to evolution on the desktop is the game niche and their enormous drive for new GPUs/CPUs.
The PC world currently is so boring that today it became just a small part of all news reported here at OSNews, and elsewhere.
While I agree the PC world has experienced stagnation, I disagree with you on how that stagnation expresses itself.
As implemented in TVs, “3D-capable” is a headache-inducing gimmick. (Though I’ve got high hopes for the Oculus Rift.)
Windows 7/8 is the same core experience as Windows 95 for the same reason that cars have “stagnated” at a steering wheel, predictably-placed pedals, mirrors, shift, etc. …because it works (the problem lies in the details, not the concept) well enough and people have decided that the productivity afforded by familiarity is more important than trying to squeeze more productivity out of a radical redesign.
“Crap monitor resolutions” like 1280×1024 are still popular for two reasons… one which is practicality and one which is stagnation:
First, practicality: What will you DO with a bigger monitor resolution? For a lot of people, 1280×1024 is enough and there’s no reason to replace a perfectly good monitor just to have something shiny and new.
Second, stagnation: For a lot of people, the benefit of a bigger desktop is multi-tasking but, aside from Aero Snap, OS vendors haven’t put much work into streamlining window management on larger desktops.
That, combined with how pretty much any computer can drive two monitors these days, leads to the paradoxical situation where some people (myself included) actually prefer to have two 1280×1024 monitors rather than one bigger one because it essentially doubles the number of Snap/Maximize zones available.
(Also, while this is more a niche complaint, do you have any idea how difficult it is to find non-widescreen LCDs these days?)
As for new PCs never leveraging their processing power, what “new fun” do tablets have that PCs don’t? Aside from “retinal” displays (which aren’t limited to tablets), the only innovation I see is the march toward lower and lower power CPUs… and you can always do that on a desktop too if you want. (My current PC has a 65W TDP dual-core Athlon and I’ll probably go to something 48W next time I replace it.)
Sure, there are various computer vision innovations and ideas like augmented reality, but those are more smartphone things since waving a tablet around in front of your face is almost as awkward and ridiculous-looking as doing so with a lightweight laptop.
Ok, Touch. What good does touch on the desktop do? (Aside from tiring out your arms if the screen is on the desk or giving you a kink in your neck and/or a hunch if it’s on your lap?) Put smudgy fingerprints on your screen?
As for glitzy animations… there’s a reason that everyone in my family (two artists, a programmer, and a gamer with an engineer’s mind) either runs Linux with an LXDE desktop or runs Windows 7 with Aero turned off… it’s a waste of resources that could be better directed at making the system more responsive.
While I agree there is some stagnation, as evidenced by how long it took for the XBox 360 controller’s Windows drivers to finally give indie platformer devs a “standard” gamepad to develop against, most of what you complain about isn’t stagnation… it’s just the signs of a form factor that’s matured and is selective about which so-called innovations it embraces.
I get the feeling you’ve got the “the OS itself should be a toy and anyone who doesn’t agree is blind” mindset I grew out of. Yes, I still love to tinker around with OSes… but there’s a time for that and, when I’m on the clock, I don’t want change for change’s sake.
(That’s why I try to avoid things like GMail. Their UIs keep changing and popping up “Hey! Try our fun new feature!” dialogs when I just want to get things done. It’s also why I work on Linux. If I pick a “get things done” distro like Debian and install a “get things done” desktop like LXDE or Fluxbox, I don’t have to retrain my skills every second upgrade.)
Edited 2013-09-17 04:49 UTC
P.S. Two other things I’d suggest if you really think touch is such an innovation:
http://www.osnews.com/story/23371/The_CLI_Reincarnate_the_Gesture_I…
https://www.leapmotion.com/
(The latter being an example of a design with potential to be more ergonomic and smudge-free than an actual touch screen)
I can sum up your post in one sentence:
“I don’t like change!”
FTFY
Do you really think I’d be an OSNews reader if I didn’t like new things?
(I will admit that I’ve spent my life fighting my tendency to lash out at change I didn’t have a say in… but my reactions to being yanked around by others and to exploring new things of my own volition are polar opposites.)
The PC has found a comfortable niche and it’s travelled quite far down the curve of diminishing returns. Hence, the most useful improvements aren’t very flashy anymore.
Edited 2013-09-17 17:25 UTC
Your talk of “snap/mazimize zones” suggests you are very windows centric, an os that has always been poor at multitasking and was largely designed to run a single app maximized at once…
A larger screen has always been beneficial for the typical unix based window manager… And even old versions of X11 would compute the DPI of the screen and scale things appropriately, at least programs that were properly written…
I want a higher resolution screen to provide more detail at the same physical size, and i want a physically larger screen for multitasking…
I also never really liked multiple screens, having multiple virtual screens (10+) is much easier as you dont have to keep tilting your head and lack of virtual screens is again something that virtually every platform except windows has had for years.
I’ve run Linux exclusively for the last nine years and I’d been running a dual-head WinXP system for two or three years prior (originally with two mismatched 1024×768 CRTs before I bought a pair of identical 1280×1024 LCDs).
I use a combination of four virtual desktops (A.K.A. workspaces) and dual monitors for two reasons:
First, even with buttons 4 and 5 on my mouse set to switch desktops, it’s often still easier to turn my head.
Second, it means I can do something like assembling a DVD+R in K3b on one monitor while watching TV on the other (or I can keep typing while I glance at my reference material. Virtual desktops force-change window focus, after all.)
I refer to Snap/Maximize zones because those are terms everyone is likely to understand.
Yes, higher DPI would be nice… but not at the prices I’d have to pay for GPU, CPU, and monitor hardware to support higher DPI while maintaining the performance, versatility, and responsibeness I’m used to for the tasks I perform. (And on a system where I refuse to allow programs to change the monitor resolutions willy-nilly)
Yes, larger monitors at the same DPI would be a nice way to show more apps… but I’ve yet to find time to either dive feet-first into tiling WMs and lose a week or two of productivity or write a ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua which’ll let me start from Openbox’s behaviour and then work my way toward tiling.
It’s the whole “tiling WMs are arcane and mainstream WMs seem to have little interest in tiling” part that’s the big problem.
Next time I can justify an upgrade, I’ll probably go for a pair of 24″ 1920×1200 displays. (If I’m going to get something capable of 1600×1200, I might as well also make it capable of playing back 1080p video without rescaling.)
What I’d really like to see is an Oculus Rift at high enough resolution that I could make the monitors themselves virtual and dynamically alter their number and positions.
Edited 2013-09-17 22:02 UTC
Agreed.
My cpu evolved from a .8Ghz single core to a 3Ghz quad core. My harddrive evolved in to a super fast ssd. My simple gpu evoled into a multipurpose number cruncher.
Even your once special console evolved into a microATX pc
Even though the consoles tried to change games until they would be better played on a gamepad the mouse could not be beaten and the gamepad stayed an accessory to the pc.
that are still higher than what consoles do
I have never heard of Crysis 3
like infinity blade and…[q], and desktops officially became just a electronic typewriter for common users
I could not agree with your comment more. While it’s not going anywhere soon, anything to reduce our reliance in society on Microsoft is a good thing. We should never lock such an important part of technological development(computers) to one company. Especially not one who squanders its success as much as Microsoft has.
Good guy? I percieve him as a stupid guy.
Dunno the exact quote in english, but translated from my language it goes like “hating one subject makes you stupid on that subject”.
Or knowledgeable.
So, hating racism, for example, makes me stupid? Or hating bigotry? Or hating lying? Or hating unfairness? Or, well, there are BAJILLION different things out there that are perfectly fine to be hated and frowned upon and it doesn’t actually necessarily make someone stupid even in that subject.
Hating means you start talking from your heart, feelings, etc and not ice cold facts. With most people as mr Gabe demonstrated.
Edited 2013-09-17 08:33 UTC
I think it was quite obvious he wasn’t referring to those extremes and was talking more about wilful ignorance on a subject.
Edited 2013-09-17 16:42 UTC
As you clearly demonstrated by calling someone “stupid.”
Just a quick note. The PS Vita is an android platform. the newly announced $99 PS VitaTV is an android gaming platform too. Food for thought…
No, the neither vita or vita tv is android. It is not even a linux flavour. It is 100% a proprietary OS. It could be based on FreeBSD (like the PS3 is rumored too, and the PS4 is basically almost confirmed too). But it would be a modified version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Vita_system_software
Where have you heard such a silly rumour?
I wish I could mark usernames because you are not only lying you are stating it as if it is a well known fact.
Everything you say is suspect.
Steam is just talking about Linux because it’s the only OS that is not going to have a closed ecosystem for apps in the future. Now that Microsoft has a store, it kind of makes Steam irrelevant.
De nieuwer Intel chips allow for more mobile devices to use Intel chips:
http://anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3…
They can run Windows or Linux/BSD. Intel is very much involved with Linux. For example open source Linux GPU drivers.
We’ll see lots of new dual-purpose Intel-based mobile devices enter the market.
I have yet to see one. So far its all demos.
Wow, Gabe is planning to crank up the vendeta with Microsoft (which started when MS locked Steam out of the Win8 app store and by extension from Metro). This can only be a positive thing for us customers, but honestly I don’t believe Gabe will succed in overthrowing Windows from the top spot in desktop and laptops or even as a gaming platform.
The linux desktop is in a bit of turmoil lately with the Wayland-Mir spat, and the inertia Windows has is massive.
You don’t understand what’s going on. Gabe isn’g worried of the thing you mentioned. He will be using Steambox to market Steam regardless of what desktop you are using. The current Steam linux client is their tool to go forward with a Steambox. You known, Steambox is not a PS4/XBox-type locked down console, it is a P.C. with a Linux under the hood, but users need not to worry about that, they want to play games. And whatever they played on the Steambox will also run on their Win/MAC OSX desktops, with the same quality since they are all the same version. They will develop their games on a P.C. and target their binaries on a P.C., unlike locked down consoles. So Linux desktop market share is not their problem.
Please, Gaben, pleeeease. HL3 exclusive for a year for Linux and Steambox.
My guess is they wouldn’t do exclusive, but maybe some kind of bundled deal with their BOX, or exclusive content.
As you can see from the Mac version of Steam, and the Mac versions of most of the Valve catalogue, the hard part is getting other companies to port their games.
And even then, if they do it with Wine/Cider, you’re going to get ports with sub-par performance (The Witcher runs a lot smoother via BootCamp than natively on Mac, for example) or half-assed ones that have sub-par performance and lag behind the Windows version when it comes to fixes and improvements (Dragon Age: Origins for example).
When they did come out, the Mac ports were usually 6-12 months after the Windows version appeared. Usually they didn’t come out though.
This isn’t a problem that’ll be limited to the Mac because of video drivers or what have you, the Linux ports are going to be using exactly the same technologies (usually Cider). Most companies aren’t willing to put resources towards native ports.
I’d love to see gaming take off on Mac and Linux (and hopefully FreeBSD via hackery, as that’s my favourite desktop UNIX), but we’ve been fighting this battle for decades now. Apple certainly isn’t interested in making gaming a “focus” for OS X, since that’s what they’ve got iOS for. Maybe Valve can bring enough focus and press attention to Linux gaming to make this happen.
Even if you believe that Windows ecosystem is slowing down. It isn’t a closed platform at least not for developers.
The most successful platforms for games outside of flash and facebook games has always been consoles.
Which are the opposite of open. They are very locked down. Traditionally you have had to buy expensive dev versions of the consoles to work on … developing a game on any version of Windows has never required you buying specialist hardware that can be half of a regular developers salary for the year.
Gabe remarks are marketing.
Edited 2013-09-17 21:17 UTC
So linux is going to dominate gaming now huh? Surely you’ll understand that I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that day to come. I know a lot of linux devs and I bet every one of them could write a different essay on why it’s not going to happen.
What I’d understand from Gabe’s standpoint is:
Steambox. The Linux Steam client is their first attempt to make it happen, and they will market Steambox as a better alternative to locked-down console gaming. For Steambox is a generic P.C., powered by Linux, so it makes sense for him to claim that Linux is the future for them and the rest of the gaming community, since it provides them the openness to develop w/o the walled-garden approach of Win/OSX. Game developers will only need to target a Linux-based generic computer for their binaries, instead of having to target different architectures: X86, Arm, Console etc.
Windows already has a user base that numbers in the hundreds of millions. Most games that appear on Windows & consoles are cross-compiled and don’t need significant reworking of any kind. And let’s not forget that gamers care about one thing only — games. Sales don’t lie, people want GTA, Halo, Forza, CoD, Gran Turismo, etc etc.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of Steambox, if anything, but it will take a lot more than the possibility of Half-Life 3 to be more than a speck in the presence of giants.
I would buy a linux console especially if it was easy to upgrade hardware before xbox1 or PS4. I don’t know why people think that linux users are cheapskates when so many users just get pirated copies windows. I’ve been running linux since windows millennium because its a better OS.
An upgradeable linux console already exists in the form of a pc running linux, with games installed on it — the basic jist of what a Steam Box is. Creating a small form-factor pre-built pc with linux pre-installed on it isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Even when/if the Steam Box moves from vaporware to something you can actually buy, it’s got an unimaginable mountain to climb to become any kind of serious competition to Xbox/Playstation. The Steam Box seems to be little more than sticking a pc behind your tv and replacing the keyboard/mouse with a gaming controller.