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Why Valve Wants To Port Games To Linux: Because Windows 8 Is a Catastrophe
An anonymous reader writes "Gabe Newell wants to support Linux because he think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in PC space. He wants to move away from a closed ecosystem of Microsoft Windows 8. He recently made a rare appearance at Casual Connect, an annual videogame conference in Seattle. From the allthingsd article: 'The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don't realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior. We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It's a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that's true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.' Some Linux users think that this is a win-win situation for Linux users as it will brings good game titles on the Linux system that haven't been there and it will protect steam business model from both Apple and Microsoft."
Windows 8 is a catastrophe only for those who use it with a keyboard and mouse. For the rest of us, it is the greatest desktop operating system.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Most of the games on Steam will be DirectX, not OpenGL.
No sig today...
Look no further than iOS and Android. No matter what the fanbois of each platform say, games invariably are among the top downloads.
Speculation has it that one of the reasons Valve is bringing Steam to Linux is that they are developing a "Steambox" PC-based game console that would run Linux and Steam. Valve has also been confirmed to be working on a version of Steam that plays well with TV screens and gamepad controllers so Steambox would be a natural extension of that. Though I forget whether there were any rumors on Steambox itself though or whether people just saw the rumors of Linux support and gamepad/TV support and put two and two together...
If they are serious about this, they need to get Dell or HP to start building gaming oriented linux desktops and notebooks. Linux will never gain traction as long as the users have to actively decide to install it.
So the summary is implying that several years ago when Linux Steam work began, somehow Valve knew that Windows 8 would be bad even before Microsoft had done much with it beyond initial planning? TFA actually presents a much more balanced picture: Gabe Newell had an interview, and spoke about many things including wearable computers, open platforms, and Linux support. As usual, the Slashdot submitter posted the most inflammatory piece, and the editors like it that way. TFA only even mentions Windows once, in the quote TFS copied!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
In my opinion, the biggest hurdle that Valve will face won't be porting Steam itself over to Linux, but porting the library of games over.
While I don't know what the actual facts and figures are, I think that it's a fairly safe bet that most of the games on there will have been coded around Microsoft's DirectX graphics API, making the games themselves Windows-only. Yes, they can be rewritten to use OpenGL instead, but this would require substantial effort -- Valve would have the resources to do this with their own titles, but some of the other publishers on Steam may be of the opinion that it's not worth the effort.
This is as close to a perfect example as one can get as to why vendor lock-in is a bad thing. Arguably, the DirectX lock-in is probably why gaming on OS X hasn't really taken off either.
Still, this move by Valve could well be the snowball that sets off the avalanche...
I don't think it's possible to understate how much of a monumental task this is. Not just for Valve, but for everyone with an interest in the Linux world.
If Valve wants this to succeed, they'll need to do more than just port their games and Steam to the platform. They'll need to really get the likes of AMD and nVidia on board to get better driver support, they'll need to convince the big publishers that it's worth taking the time to port their games and find some way to make WINE and its equivalents run at nearly native speed for the ones that can't be easily ported for whatever reason.
Then you have to deal with all the old DRM schemes that still exist and throw a fit even on newer versions of Windows, never mind a completely different OS. SecuROM rootkits? Yeah, good luck with that.
Still, for all the issues, all the potential pitfalls I really do wish Valve the best of luck with this as it can only be a good thing for everyone. Well, everyone except Microsoft maybe.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Even if games was a major factor in holding Linux back, just making Steam available is not going to fix that.
Steam was launched for Mac two years ago, but other than Valve's own games the only top game that has been made available is Civilization V. Some indie games, sure, and Blizzard's games are available outside Steam, but all the other games are just as absent as they were before Steam was ported.
I think this is a Microsoft strategy to take control more and become a PC OEM theselves like Apple. I think they're success will be limited. If I were a PC OEM, I would be real concerned by The Surface and Xbox.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
The only think I ever really have issues opening are horrific kill it with fire power-point presentations so its not a feature i really miss
for the first time, or at all, BECAUSE of games? I know I did. I know that they taught me lots of things - especially even just programming very rudimentary games on the apple deuce in 7th and 8th grade. That gave me a huge appreciation for computers, what they can do, and what a good product looks like. My text based zork type games were very easy to write, however the pixelized boxing game (that I was creating with the wrong process) took many many lines of code and required mass critical thinking.
And I can relate this to what was supposed to be a huge blockbuster, although I don't know if their programmers are just new, inexperienced, or just don't know what a good game is - or, they were told to dumb it down as the company wanted an incoming stream of income like they had with their graphical chat room (WoW).
Steam has a lot of OpenGl ports for OSX.
I just posted this on my blog...
Steam on Linux is a strategic move for Valve. They have enjoyed success on the Windows and Mac platforms for years and now they have recently announced that the penguin crowd will get to enjoy the games (no, not the Olymic ones).
Why am I even bothering to point this out? Windows 8 is lurking, that's why.. and Gabe Newell, the boss at Valve, knows it. Speaking at the recent Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Gabe expressed his concerns and criticisms of Windows 8 and in particularly the new Windows Store.
Why?
Because in order to make the Windows Store a success, Microsoft needs to block the competition, just like Apple does with its App/Mac stores. As Steam is an online store itself for gamers, this is where its going to hurt Valve as potentially, no more Steam on Windows.
Microsoft could very well only have games that link to its own XBox system. This makes sense as a business and to up-sell to existing Windows customers.
Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft for 13 years before he started up Valve, and its here where they have recently embraced the penguins as a "hedging strategy" to further gain customers. He is worried that potentially losing the Windows customer base will cause lasting damage to their own customer base. I'm sure he thought that when he said "Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space."
Now think about this...
Steam has an average of 4 million users connected at any given time.
Windows has an average desktop market share of, say 80%. That's 3 million gamers.
Now suddenly, Steam is no longer available on Windows, but it is on Linux.
Will those gamers switch? Or even try?
Some will move to a console, some to a Mac. But some, lets say a optimistic 30% or 1 million of those start using Linux, just for Steam? That's a lot.
The Year Of the Linux Desktop? No seriously... stop laughing, it may happen.
Hell, ATI/AMD has been trying to make working OpenGL drivers for longer than that!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Because in order to stay modern they are going to have to make Steam compatible and integrate it well with Windows 8 because that is what a huge chunk of PC users are going to use simply because the OEM slapped it on there.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In an era where Apple can patent a fucking rectangle with rounded corners, you can bet pretty much EVERYTHING is patented these days. It's almost guaranteed that the second you achieve any success at all on a given product, reversed engineered or not, you *will* be sued (probably by multiple companies).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I have wondered for years why game-makers haven't already started working on writing games for Linux so that they can sell games that boot directly to the game on any system.
To me it seems so obvious. Now you don't have to worry about which version of what a user has on their computer and the user doesn't need to install the game.
Why hasn't this already been done?
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Steam is an appstore, Windows 8 too.
Yep, it's a catastrophe. For Steam.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Did you miss the bit where they are porting L4D2 over already?
And there are dozens of games on Steam that have a Linux port. Almost anything offered in a humble bundle, for a start, not to mention the DosBox games, Quake series, etc.
They just don't have a client on Linux so you can play them through Steam yet.
Yes Microsoft will have their own app store, but Steam has many people locked in right now...
Which is why they have to act as quickly as possible, while they still have an advantage. Both Apple and MS are emphasizing their first-party store experiences. Over time Steam risks becoming irrelevant. Steam needs to encourage more Linux adoption, as the last desktop platform with seemingly no interest in baked in commercial digital distribution mechanisms quite like Steam.
Additionally, steam stands to gain significant perceived value the more platforms they support. If hypothetically in the future a title purchased once for the user works for their Windows PC, their Linux SteamBox, and their Android tablet, that is significant value that MS nor Apple will ever provide, which helps to keep Windows platform users loyal in a world with more and more diverse OS platforms in their day to day life.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Better than the /, summaries that have nothing to do with TFA.
Slashcomma.org, I love that site!
Clicked pie.
To be fair, the windows client isn't all that hot either. It takes several seconds to switch between tabs, pressing the forward and back buttons takes a while to work (apparently its internal browser has no cache), skips pages, etc. The downloads screen is completely unresponsive, there isn't even visual feedback that you've clicked the pause or resume buttons, you just click then wait for it to decide if it's going to start or stop.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Direct3D and OpenGL are basically identical these days. OpenGL is more flexible, but to be honest that flexibility just ends up shooting yourself in the foot. Most GL developers simply create GL wrapper classes that are either based on the D3D classes, or they've grouped relevent items from the GL spec (and ended up with exactly the same result, although they'd have taken much longer to get there). OpenGL doesn't really have an equivalent for D3D FX files, so that ends up being a mammoth chunk of work you could do without. Mind you, if you're also targetting console, you'll be writing your own form of FX in all likelyhood.
Joypads aren't too much of an issue. The AV components of DirectX would be a little bit more involved, but not impossible (OpenAL / fmod / whatever). The biggest problems you're likely to encounter is if people have built their code with heavy dependencies on things like X files, Pix, FX files, game server components, etc. Again, it's not impossible to roll your own (or use a middleware component), it's just a massive ball ache, and a bit of a time sink.....
Two possibilities:
Wine has an implementation of DirectX 9 (and a lot of other Windows APIs). It can either be used as an emulator (use it to run windows .EXE files), or you can compile code against it to produce unix native binaries (Write code using microsoft APIs, but get a Linux ELF as an output).
The Gallium3D driver infrastructure (as used by most opensource drivers on Linux - the official Intel, the AMD-helped, and reverse engineered for Nvidia hardware) is modular. There is a 3D DirectX 10/11 front end written for it.
This could be a starting points for providing DirectX APIs for games on Steam.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You are behind the times, and should really be firing your complaints at Nvidia. For the last couple of years I've used ATI cards for GL development exclusively. Unlike Nvidia cards they actually implement the GL spec to the letter. With Nvidia cards you can pretty much call any old combination of GL functions, and something will appear on screen. They never fail! This is a problem because you never find out errors in your GL code until after you've shipped the product. With ATI, if you pass an invalid arg, or call a method at the wrong time, they will generate the correct error. This sadly leads to a situation where a developer uses an NVidia card for development, ships, and then it won't run on ATI or Intel cards. The upshot is that people incorrectly assume that ATI drivers suck. They don't. Nvidia drivers are the ones that suck!
Why would Valve care if the drivers are Open Source?
Because they find them easier to work with. To quote a recent blog post by one of Intel's open source GPU driver developers: "The funny thing is Valve guys say the same thing about drivers. There were a couple times where we felt like they were trying to convince us that open source drivers are a good idea. We had to remind them that they were preaching to the choir. :) Their problem with closed drivers (on all platforms) is that it's such a blackbox that they have to play guess-and-check games. There's no way for them to know how changing a particular setting will affect the performance. If performance gets worse, they have no way to know why. If they can see where time is going in the driver, they can make much more educated guesses."
Yep, Microsoft want to turn the PC into an Xbox, where everything is bought through their channels.
They want to squeeze Valve out of their own market, and Win 8 is the first step in this strategy.
Watch out for the next versions of Direct X etc. being Metro only, and traditional desktop apps crippled in terms of what they can access by comparison.
At that point the only way to get the best performance will be through being a Metro app, bought on the store, giving Metro apps a competitive edge. Microsoft would be unlikely to approve Steam as a Metro app in much the same way Apple would reject any app which acts as an alt app store.
If all the locking down isn't ringing alarm bells with people they need to remove their heads from the sand. I think Gabe has realised this, and knows they need to build on an alt platform, or risk getting wiped out, the same way the rest of the games industry is currently hell-bent on wiping real physical stores.
If you're successful in marketing a software product built on a proprietary platform, you can expect the proprietor of that platform to attempt a takeover of your market, at some point. If you build on an open platform and are successful, you'll quite possibly have competition sooner, but it will likely be fair competition.
At least Valve is teaming up with Intel to help Intel create working opensource drivers for Intel IGP, which is getting decently powerful. I would be willing to use an IvyBridge or faster Intel IGP to make a Linux "gaming" box.
I guess I missed where Steam won't work on Windows 8 like it does on Windows 7. Please link.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
He's right in many more ways than one. Hedging his bets against a future in which Microsoft is his biggest rival is only one reason for doing this. The other big reason is simply to expand the gaming market, and to lead it.
It's no secret that the Linux world is full of endearing geeks and nerds who love to play video games --- there could hardly be a bigger truism! And yet they are totally under-served on their favorite platform, and frequently have to run a Windows box for the sole reason of being able to play their games. That presents an obvious business opportunity.
By supplying Linux gamers with good games on their favorite platform, not only is he expanding his customer base to a whole new audience of Linux-only gamers, but is also making it possible for Linux gamers to avoid running a Windows box at all. And that can remove one of his rivals from the competition entirely. It would be a move of genius.
What's more, if Linux gaming takes off bigtime (his company certainly has every opportunity to make that happen), then he will be the leader in a new gaming frontier, and everyone else will be playing catchup. That is worth a gamble all by itself, and it's not even a high-risk venture.
I think Gabe's business nose can sense a big opportunity here, a huge and almost unexploited market that he can make his own, while at the same time safeguarding his future against Microsoft.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
With Nvidia cards you can pretty much call any old combination of GL functions, and something will appear on screen. They never fail! This is a problem because you never find out errors in your GL code until after you've shipped the product. This sadly leads to a situation where a developer uses an NVidia card for development, ships, and then it won't run on ATI or Intel cards. The upshot is that people incorrectly assume that ATI drivers suck. They don't. Nvidia drivers are the ones that suck!
So you're saying Nvidia is the IE6 of video cards?
Sure, the ABIs aren't stable (that kernel modules use), but the kernel APIs that usermode applications use generally are - To the point that you can run ancient compilations of Linux applications still on modern kernels.
Eh? Which graphical APIs? OpenGL? Those don't really change outside of supported extensions provided by drivers (usually proprietary) which is usually close to their Windows versions.
Not really that messy, getting an OpenGL context is pretty identical to Windows and doesn't require extra effort.
Code portability for OpenGL on Windows and Linux isn't hard (although OS X is a whole other story) and there isn't really any more gotchas when using the proprietary drivers on Linux than there are Windows, which is what the games require on Windows too (since they generally refuse to work with drivers provided by Windows out of the box or perform extremely poorly, just the same).
Sound wise, ALSA is pretty much the standard for sound, it's not much harder to write applications that handle the sound system just as well as any regular Windows APIs.
Disclaimer: I develop an intensive OpenGL application that runs on multiple platforms and my Linux binaries are built to run on multiple distributions.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
to even install software (on Linux) requires fairly comprehensive computer knowledge.
Laughable. Consider installing a utility, or a Tetris clone or whatever.
Linux (Ubuntu):
1/ Open software center
2/ Search for application by name or function (or browse categories if preferred)
3/ Click to download and install.
Windows:
1/ Open browser
2/ Search for application and decide which one to consider
3/ Search for information about chosen application to find out if it's really malware. Repeat 2,3 until satisfied.
4/ Search for information about download sites to find out if they host malware versions of non-malware applications. Repeat until satisfied.
5/ Download installer.
6/ Run installer.
You picked the one function where Linux is so clearly easier to use than Windows that only a troll, shill or idiot would deny it.
Watch out for the next versions of Direct X etc. being Metro only, and traditional desktop apps crippled in terms of what they can access by comparison.
At that point the only way to get the best performance will be through being a Metro app, bought on the store, giving Metro apps a competitive edge. Microsoft would be unlikely to approve Steam as a Metro app in much the same way Apple would reject any app which acts as an alt app store.
At which point the Justice department steps in and kicks MS's balls into mid-jowl. Microsoft just got burned for this in Europe, and was almost broken up by Justice in the 90s. Maybe they want to test the line -- see what they can get away with today -- but the answer is probably "not much."
They could be booting a LiveCD image in the background while they're displaying all of the AMD, ATI, Nvidia, Intel, Dolby Digital, SquareEnix, LucaArts, EA, and other development and production house, etc. full screen ads that come up when you launch any major title these days. I doubt anyone would notice the additional delay of loading an entire operating system.
You are behind the times, and should really be firing your complaints at Nvidia.
Discussions on graphics card performance show both suck in different areas.
They never fail! This is a problem because you never find out errors in your GL code until after you've shipped the product.
Or new drivers are released which break things like in Rage.
The upshot is that people incorrectly assume that ATI drivers suck. They don't. Nvidia drivers are the ones that suck!
Perhaps you missed the recent article stating AMD/ATI video drivers are incompatible with system-wide ASLR. 'Always On' DEP combined with 'Always On' ASLR are effective exploit mitigations. However, most people don't know about 'Always On' ASLR since Microsoft had to hide it from EMET with an 'EnableUnsafeSettings' registry key — because AMD/ATI video drivers will cause a BSOD on boot if 'Always On' ASLR is enabled.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
You forgot step 7 for Windows. Click ok for administration mode and next, next, next, and finally make sure to hook off those extraordinary browser bars.