Valve's Big Picture Could Be a Linux Game Console

Penurious Penguin writes that "a hopeful article at The Verge persuasively suggests that through Valve, Linux could soon become a formidable contender in the gaming arena, capable of holding its own against such giants as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii. With 50 million users, a growing Linux team, a caboodle of interesting experiments ('Steam Box' hardware baselines, etc.) and a strong conviction that more-open platforms are the way, Valve may actually see it through."

Comments

Hmmm

[systemidx]

"The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii are nearing their end. As powerful as they have been in the living room, gamers want more."

Quoted from TFA. Am I the only one who wants LESS? I don't really want my game system to do 9 million things. I just want it to play games.

Then again, when was the last time we were actually listened to? Draconian DRM, the removal of OtherOS, etc...

Re:Hmmm

[DewDude]

Don't forget; the Sega Dreamcast ran WindowsCE; and performed very well IMO. So, maybe the problem isn't the general purpose OS itself; but the fact it hasn't had any optimizations made to it. If you're that devoted to making an excellent Linux based platform; surely you'd be thinking about how to make the OS as unobtrusive as possible to performance. Linux powers most of the touchscreen bartop Megatouch branded video games. If you've ever seen a Fast and the Furious arcade game; it's some version of Windows (2000 or XP, I can't remember). I say if anyone had the ability to make a successful "home game console"; Valve would be the ones to do it, and do it well.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

0.5GB: game code, character models and textures
8.5GB: hats

Easy Robin. I kid because I love.

Re:Hmmm

[MBCook]

That's not entirely true. Windows CE code was available, but developers basically didn't use it much. cnet covered this at the time of launch, and in the end only around 50 games used it (out of over 700 created).

One of the Japanese launch titles, Sega Rally 2, used Windows CE, and it had a very inconsistent framerate. I believe the game was later re-released as a "native" game, which may have been the version released to the US. You can still fine some sites that mention some of the problems.

Re:Hmmm

[Mal-2]

There's no technical reason it can't handle 32 GB of flash -- it just couldn't do that at the $99 price point. Swapping flash is pretty trivial as user upgrades go, so I don't really see that holding it back. The capacity limit of SDHC being reached might pose an issue, if it's not made to accept SDXC. The hardware is the same, and the firmware can probably be hacked -- just like Rockbox did for the Sansa (mine is quite happy with a 16 GB micro-SDHC card when it was built to handle just a 2 GB micro-SD card), so I doubt THAT will be a significant issue either.

Naturally the Ouya will look to replace some settop-box functions, since even new TVs have a finite number of inputs. That doesn't mean it will be particularly optimized for them, or that it needs to be.

Re:Hmmm

[rtb61]

Android being the magic word missing in the article and what it likely is really all about. Building custom Linux distributions like Android and achieving an open market, where more downstream producers and manufacturers can gain greater control. People might complain about those phones and various other Android devices, that manufacturers release with their own branding layer and marketing identity on top but that really is a major advantage of Linux. Even software distribution companies can get in on the act and create an environment where they are not having to pay extortion to another party in order to do business.

It is all about shaking out those billions from M$ and releasing it to a whole bunch of companies, manufacturers, software producers and net entities in order to improve their bottom line and give them greater control. So for Valve, it's not so much a game console but being able to distribute games across a 'ALL' available platforms, phone, tablet, smartbook, PC and Big Screen Display. For the end user buy one game and use it across all your platforms via Steam or the other game distributors will become very desirable and avoiding a pointless 30% M$ extortion fee for nothing, even after having to pay for their bloody software, will mean more money for actual hardware and software creators.

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

I have a quite-definite-omnibox. It's called a desktop PC. And we have come full circle, except I never left. Nor did I pay for all the steps on that circle.

Re:Hmmm

[Hognoxious]

I could see the kernel being used, but the OS would probably consist of new libraries for sound, input, storage, networking etc.

I'd give a long rebuttal of your points but I don't have time: I'm working on an awesome replacement for those round things under my car.

Re:Hmmm

[BitZtream]

Your console DOES need multitasking. Why should every developer reimplement threads? Theres nothing that stops it from being a single process.

Do you really want developers to be forced to deal with keeping the audio buffers for music full inbetween frames or would you rather actually get something accomplished because they can just fire off a play function that creates a thread to play the music and to deal with sounds without having to update each particular sound bit every frame?

Do you really think its a good idea to have developers doing partial loads per frame so they can stream data in and have open worlds with no load times?

You want an OS that was designed to run real time animation on it. Not a phone that lets developers access game like features.

Android devices are shit because you're doing too much with it, not because it has a multitasking kernel. That and Android's GUI subsystem remains shitty even at v4.1, but thats another discussion entirely and one thats easy to overcome if you have a single process or few process environment. Turn off the radios if text messages bother you. Its not a console, its a fucking phone. Stop being all pissed off because its doing what it was intended to do and you want it to do all those things perfectly at the same time when it simply doesn't have the CPU power. Hell games generally try to exploit full CPU power from the git go anyway, so no shit its going to slow down when background tasks start doing things.

What you perceive as one thing at a time hasn't been one thing at a time since the Atari 2600. Developers aren't going to write code for hardware that makes them do EVERYTHING themselves ... well, some might, but the first thing they'll do is write a little OS to give them sanity and code reuse, then they'll start making the other bits and in the end, if they last long enough to pull it off, they'll have written an OS for it and a game on top of that. And then they won't share that OS with anyone else, meaning every bug they find and squash, every neat innovative way to accomplish something mundane, every cool trick to make the game easier to write ... will only be in their games, and someone else will have to reinvent the wheel .... again ... with a whole new set of bugs and shitty problems.

You're currently modded +5 insightful when your post is pretty much exactly the opposite of such.

Theres no reason a Linux kernel with a few or one processes can not accomplish proper game play. Ubuntu isn't going to cut it, as soon as cron fires off the nightly accounting/cleanup/security check scripts, it'll be hosed. And that will just be an example of using the wrong tool for the job.

An old dream

[CmdrEdem]

For years I dreamed about a Linux distro with all the fat out but the bare minimum to run games, so we can get all the power from the hardware. I really hope this can become real but I`m well aware of the hurdles they will face to get to that.

Re:Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

You are completely missing who is doing this.

Valve's major money maker is Steam, already the largest digital games publisher/marketplace. They already have DRM in place that many people on the PC platform find to be a fair compromise of ability and annoyance. The game developers you want Valve to sell to have already bought into Steam!

Re:Piracy

[symbolset]

Look, Microsoft is pushing all software through their own store if they can beginning with Windows 8. Steam is a software store that would compete with that store, on Microsoft's Windows platform. Gabe Newell used to work at Microsoft. He knows this means they intend to eliminate the Steam software sales store in Windows, and they are as eminently able to do that as they have been to sabotage all other software that competes with their offerings on Windows. The Goose has fled and Valve needs a new goose. Hence the console plan. An own-brand console gives Valve a platform that cannot be made to sabotage their content.

A lot of casuals are just going tablet and phone, really.

It could be worse. Retail box software vendors are just out of luck. No more sales for you.