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Gabe Newell Talks Linux As the Future of Games at LinuxCon NA
Slashdot's Timothy Lord is attending LinuxCon in New Orleans this week and writes in with the following.
"Valve
co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell says in no uncertain terms
what the brain trust at Valve thinks: When it comes to actual users,
'Linux is currently insignificant by any metric' (by any metric that
matters to game companies, at least, like number of players, minutes
played, and — all important — revenue). On these
fronts, Linux players are 'typically under 1 percent' of what game
companies see. But that's not the upshot. The takeaway is just about the
opposite, says Newell: 'The future of gaming is on Linux.' Newell
expounded on the present and future of games on Linux in a keynote
address at LinuxCon
North America, which kicked off today in New Orleans. He
described ways Valve is working to improve the landscape for games on
Linux, and hinted at new hardware developments from the company in the
near future." Keep reading for the rest of Tim's report.
Since
Valve's 1996 founding, the company has come out with a rash of
well-known games including Half-life,
Counterstrike, and Portal, for
personal computers as well as the console market. In that time,
though, Valve, like the rest of the computer world, has gone through
structural changes driven by the falling costs of both computers and
bandwidth. These, says Newell, have increased the relative value of
design and game quality in general, but also marketing and —
crucially — distribution paths. That has ramifications
throughout the games industry, including the emergence and growth of
online delivery for games and updates. (Valve’s own system, Steam, is
up to 50 million users by itself; the console infrastructure is even
bigger: Sony
claimed that many users three years ago). The changes in
relative costs have also spurred free to play models and large-scale
e-sports. (Large scale is no joke: According to Newell, "At the last
tournament we held, we had over a million people watching it
simultaneously.")
Newell describes a trend toward end-users being involved, though, not just as spectators, but as content creators. He describes this in fairly sweeping terms: “Games will becomes nodes in a linked economy, where the majority of digital goods and services are user generated.” That sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps, but it’s grounded in numbers. “The Team Fortress community creates 10 times the amount of content [that developers do],” says Newell. While he says Valve has always been happy to compete with other game studios (“we’re a little bit cocky”), “the one entity we wouldn’t ever want to compete with is our own users; they’ve already outstripped us dramatically. It’s not by a little bit; it’s an order of magnitude already.” Broad-based distributed development like that is what open source has been whipping up in the world of software for decades.
Creating games or games content, though, isn’t for the faint of heart: centralized online app stores (Apple’s in particular) “put an enormous number of roadblocks in front of doing that,” including developer approval as well as vetting individual apps and updates to them. In that context, he says, few users have the stubbornness or wherewithal to get through that. A more streamlined system for taking advantage of eater player/developers is needed.
“Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help making Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” To that end, Valve makes for a case study in how Linux has been creeping in: the company shipped the first dedicated games server running Linux in 1999. Now, most games servers run Linux (now several hundred thousand — and “probably a million”).
Those game servers are dishing up prodigious loads of data: “Near as we can tell, we’re generating something like 2 to 3 percent of worldwide mobile and land-based IP traffic, and that tends to startle people who don’t realize what a large sea change is going on. Even ignoring game servers, we’ve delivered over an exabyte of data year to date.” (Internally, he says, there’s approximately 20TB of content in a Linux-based version control system. This, says Newell, is true for companies like Bungie, too.)
Impressive as those data-shoveling numbers are, they don’t exactly shout desktop (or living room) success. But steps that Valve (along with other companies) has taken make it easier to swallow the claim. “Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help make Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” The first major move, says Newell, was to get a game — a real, graphics-intensive game — going on Linux. The process, though, revealed a “sweater thread” of issues, revealing flaws in in all parts of the stack: faulty drivers, gaps between Linux distributions’ included software, pitfalls in the user experience, and flaws in the company’s Steam tools.
In the course of resolving problems in each of those layers, “The good thing is that if we get a game like Left for Dead running, we’ve probably worked through issues for lots of developers. We’ve definitely solved problems for the Call of Duty team, or Tour of Duty, or whatever. The games aren’t that different; the key thing is to get changes all the way through for users. In February, we shipped [the Linux] Steam client; today -- at least when I got on the plane -- Valve has 198 games running on Linux.“
The bug-fixing and code-developing isn’t just a sporadic effort; the company has “several guys on SDL,” started by current Valve employee Sam Lantinga, and is co-developing a new Linux debugger, in addition to the work they’ve done on the LLVM debugger.
Making Linux a better platform for games is necessary, but may not be sufficient in itself, though. Platforms tend to cluster not just by operating system, but by context: platform, mobile, and console games don’t always play nicely: “As a user, I shoudn’t have to buy new games, or have new friends, or whatever, just because I’m sitting on a couch.” With Linux certainly a more-than-viable software platform for games, but still in the chicken-and-egg world of low user and revenue numbers that discourage spending developer time on Linux end users, Newell says the next step is necessary work on the hardware side of the equation, to smooth the open-source path between the developer and back-end data handling side of the games business to actual end-users.
“One of the things we had to do, is we're staging out the different pieces we think are necessary for staging to make Linux the future of gaming,” said Newell. “Our next step, having done these other pieces, is on the hardware side. There are thermal issues and sound issues, but also a lot of input issues.” He closed with this tease: “Our next step on this is to release some stuff we’ve done on the hardware side. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there, and what are the hardware opportunities we see for getting Linux into the living room."
Newell describes a trend toward end-users being involved, though, not just as spectators, but as content creators. He describes this in fairly sweeping terms: “Games will becomes nodes in a linked economy, where the majority of digital goods and services are user generated.” That sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps, but it’s grounded in numbers. “The Team Fortress community creates 10 times the amount of content [that developers do],” says Newell. While he says Valve has always been happy to compete with other game studios (“we’re a little bit cocky”), “the one entity we wouldn’t ever want to compete with is our own users; they’ve already outstripped us dramatically. It’s not by a little bit; it’s an order of magnitude already.” Broad-based distributed development like that is what open source has been whipping up in the world of software for decades.
Creating games or games content, though, isn’t for the faint of heart: centralized online app stores (Apple’s in particular) “put an enormous number of roadblocks in front of doing that,” including developer approval as well as vetting individual apps and updates to them. In that context, he says, few users have the stubbornness or wherewithal to get through that. A more streamlined system for taking advantage of eater player/developers is needed.
“Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help making Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” To that end, Valve makes for a case study in how Linux has been creeping in: the company shipped the first dedicated games server running Linux in 1999. Now, most games servers run Linux (now several hundred thousand — and “probably a million”).
Those game servers are dishing up prodigious loads of data: “Near as we can tell, we’re generating something like 2 to 3 percent of worldwide mobile and land-based IP traffic, and that tends to startle people who don’t realize what a large sea change is going on. Even ignoring game servers, we’ve delivered over an exabyte of data year to date.” (Internally, he says, there’s approximately 20TB of content in a Linux-based version control system. This, says Newell, is true for companies like Bungie, too.)
Impressive as those data-shoveling numbers are, they don’t exactly shout desktop (or living room) success. But steps that Valve (along with other companies) has taken make it easier to swallow the claim. “Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help make Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” The first major move, says Newell, was to get a game — a real, graphics-intensive game — going on Linux. The process, though, revealed a “sweater thread” of issues, revealing flaws in in all parts of the stack: faulty drivers, gaps between Linux distributions’ included software, pitfalls in the user experience, and flaws in the company’s Steam tools.
In the course of resolving problems in each of those layers, “The good thing is that if we get a game like Left for Dead running, we’ve probably worked through issues for lots of developers. We’ve definitely solved problems for the Call of Duty team, or Tour of Duty, or whatever. The games aren’t that different; the key thing is to get changes all the way through for users. In February, we shipped [the Linux] Steam client; today -- at least when I got on the plane -- Valve has 198 games running on Linux.“
The bug-fixing and code-developing isn’t just a sporadic effort; the company has “several guys on SDL,” started by current Valve employee Sam Lantinga, and is co-developing a new Linux debugger, in addition to the work they’ve done on the LLVM debugger.
Making Linux a better platform for games is necessary, but may not be sufficient in itself, though. Platforms tend to cluster not just by operating system, but by context: platform, mobile, and console games don’t always play nicely: “As a user, I shoudn’t have to buy new games, or have new friends, or whatever, just because I’m sitting on a couch.” With Linux certainly a more-than-viable software platform for games, but still in the chicken-and-egg world of low user and revenue numbers that discourage spending developer time on Linux end users, Newell says the next step is necessary work on the hardware side of the equation, to smooth the open-source path between the developer and back-end data handling side of the games business to actual end-users.
“One of the things we had to do, is we're staging out the different pieces we think are necessary for staging to make Linux the future of gaming,” said Newell. “Our next step, having done these other pieces, is on the hardware side. There are thermal issues and sound issues, but also a lot of input issues.” He closed with this tease: “Our next step on this is to release some stuff we’ve done on the hardware side. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there, and what are the hardware opportunities we see for getting Linux into the living room."
One thing(among others) that drove people to stay with Windows for their home PCs has been that games have used windows as a target platform. Microsoft decided their games division should push their consoles as hard as possible, even directing partners to target the consoles above windows.
Valve recognized early that Microsoft was a competitor and couldn't be the only provider for environment. A push to linux on steam is going to drive abandonment of windows. Microsoft has damaged their headline product to push a broken model of black-box entertainment.
1. The check is in the mail.
2. Linux is the future of gaming.
3. I won't cum in your mouth.
Wouldn't the Year of the Linux Desktop have to occur before the Year of Linux Gaming?
just saying is all.....
Part A has essentially happened. Everything by valve that's not way-too-old-to-port has been linuxified.
Part B isn't going to happen because they want developers to target whatever audience they feel like.
1) Switch to the Wayland graphics stack -- games don't need X11 and all its complexities
2) Provide a Direct3D-compatible state tracker so devs don't have to mess with OpenGL
3) Linux really, really needs a Visual Studio. The reason why Visual Debugger is so great is largely because of the rest of Visual Studio. No, Eclipse doesn't count.
Game devs are used to the Windows ecosystem. Compared to it, what's available on Linux is stone knives and bearskins. Until that changes, not many game devs will be enthused about Linux development.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Right, and Natalie Portman is never going to target a guy with a SlashID in the high 7 didgits.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Steambox; the proverbial unicorn of the console world.
I'll pay for one with the bitcoins mined from by Butterfly Labs box.
complete list of valve linux games on steam
I took on a project of trying to convert my gaming machine to Ubuntu this summer. No wine, only native games that would run on 12.04LTS. The result: Summer is over, and I'm back on Windows.
At first it was nice to see more games running on Linux, and even Steam available for Ubuntu. However, the vast majority of title's I owned on Steam weren't available, and the ones that were were buggy. Take for example the Valve title DOTA2. It works on Ubuntu through steam, natively, but it's slower, and has several annoying bugs when typing in chat and minimizing the fullscreen to the desktop.
Skype works, but was buggy. My headset worked, but had more static, etc, etc.
What's more is I had two random crashes. One due to a kernel update that rendered my machine unbootable, and the other (after a fresh reinstall) due to a nvidia proprietary driver update that continuously crashed X server on boot. I'm not sure what the underlying issue is with Linux. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to get anything that's a binary (not open source from the repositories) working properly. But this seems to be my experience every year since about 2006 when I attempt to transition everything to Ubuntu.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
So these must be mirages:
Left 4 Dead 2
Half Life 2
Half Life 2: Episode One
Half Life 2: Episode Two
Right, and Natalie Portman is never going to target a guy with a SlashID in the high 7 didgits.
I can confirm the above is true.
Fuck Ajit Pai
I agree but it is not going to happen.
1. The kernel developers hate closed source drivers and sees this as a way to discourge them.
2. They believe that not having a binary interface improves security.
3. They believe the myth that if you just provide the interface that the community will write the drivers.
Of course what happens is the closed source drivers just write an FOSS stub that they use to provide a binary interface to the closed source drivers.
As to number 3 I call it a myth because it is. AMD has released the docs to their gpus and guess who is doing most of the work on the AMD drivers? AMD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"You should be playing games on your computer!"
What you are really saying is "The OS I'm a rabid fanboy about can't do that, so I hate it and don't want others to do it because it makes my OS look bad!"
That is very silly. Playing games on the computer is a perfectly valid use for it. One of the great things about a computer is it can do, well, almost anything. You can have a computer that does a whole host of different things, all in one OS. And games are a great form of entertainment. They are much more stimulating and interactive than TV, and they are good value for the money in terms of hours of entertainment per dollar spent. If you don't enjoy them that is fine but acting as if they are invalid is stupid.
It is even sillier to imply that you should only want to do "real things" which really sounds like work. Guess what? When you grow up and get a real job you'll find that after working for 8+ hours a day, and then doing housework and all that, you don't feel particularly inclined to do more work that you don't need to. You may wish to unwind. How you do that may vary, TV, books, yoga, videogames, music (listening or playing), sports, etc, etc. However whatever you do, that is not a waste of time, it is quite necessary to maintain a healthy mental state. Focusing all of your time and energy on work is a surefire way to burn out.
Also, if you don't believe that you can do "real things" with Windows, that only belies your own zealotry and inexperience with computers in an enterprise setting. Real shit gets done on Windows every day, all over the planet.
So Gabe is learning that Microsoft is planning on walling up and is moving to keep his options open. That's good, that makes business sense. But there's a problem...
Steam has made the concept of a perpetual, one-time rental service palatable. For the vast majority of purchased made on Steam, you don't own your games anymore. Sure you never technically "owned" any of the games, but you know what I mean - you could keep them and back them up, make copies of the installers and whatnot and not rely on a vendor to authorize continual access to the game. But Steam does, and what's worse, people are happy with this. I suppose it's better for a lot of people than to have to deal with buggy disc-based copy-protection checks and what not, but it's still DRM.
The problem with this is that because the majority of people have no problem with this and see no long-term ramifications for this, everyone releases their games on Steam. That's fine, except it becomes the ONLY option to get a lot of games. I cannot get Dishonored DRM-free - it's Steam or bust (or torrents, but that's not financially palatable to developers I suppose). So if I have a problem with Steam's EULA or ToS, I'm basically unable to play the extreme majority of top-tier titles, and only some of the indie titles out there. GoG provides a good alternative, except that they don't cater to Linux users which reduces my interest in them as a long term source of games (I use Windows now, but won't be forever and want to ensure I have an exit strategy).
Of course, in terms of Linux, no-one has made such an impact in getting games on Linux than Valve has with Steam for Linux. However, this in turn might reduce the motivation to make a DRM-free Linux (or Windows) games if Steam is there and us minority fellows aren't worth the trouble. Which saddens me greatly, because it means DRM will never leave us because too many gamers cannot stand on principle, or simply don't care. I'm not going to say my opinion is any more right than anyone elses, so please avoid the flames.
And hairyfeet, don't reply to this. I know you're unable to understand the concept of differing opinions.