Valve Re-affirms Commitment To SteamOS and Linux After Hiding Steam Machines from Store (neowin.net)

An anonymous reader writes: Valve recently removed Steam Machines from the Steam Store navigation menus which naturally led people to believe that Valve was giving up on that initiative, also leading to concern about its operating system, SteamOS. In a statement posted on its blog today, the firm said that it's still committed to SteamOS and Linux. It said the main reason for removing Steam Machines from the navigation menu was due to the low amount of traffic the page was getting. In a statement, Valve said, "We've noticed that what started out as a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation turned into a story about the delisting of Steam Machines. That section of the Steam Store is still available, but was removed from the main navigation bar based on user traffic. Given that this change has sparked a lot of interest, we thought it'd make sense to address some of the points we've seen people take away from it."

Comments

X-Box One X by Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, 2019 is the year of Linux on the video game console.

Were there 27 items there?

[Hognoxious]

Were there so many items there that it wouldn't fit on the screen? No?

So why didn't you leave it the fuck alone? Stupid millenials.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Oswald McWeany]

Were there so many items there that it wouldn't fit on the screen? No?

So why didn't you leave it the fuck alone? Stupid millenials.

Actually, they don't do it much anymore, but a common tactic in the old days at grocery stores and department stores would be to periodically change the layout of the store and move things around. The purpose of which was to make it hard for shoppers to find what they were looking for and perhaps see some items they wouldn't typically seem and maybe buy them.

Thankfully, that's a practice that has been more or less abandoned as stores these days try to make it easier for you to find things so you have a positive experience and come back. They take the long-term approach to profits rather than the short-term approach of 30 or 40 years ago. So you can't blame changing things when they didn't need to change on Millenials... Baby Boomers and earlier generations were doing that first.

Generation X is the only common sense generation. :P

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[alvinrod]

Thankfully, that's a practice that has been more or less abandoned as stores these days try to make it easier for you to find things so you have a positive experience and come back.

No, today the big stores track purchases and do all kinds of analytics to find out that if you put the Doritoes next to the toothpaste, sales increase by 2.7%. Any experience you have is one carefully crafted to wring as much money out of you as possible. It's not much different than in the past, merely just more refined and scientific instead of haphazard.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why every Home Depot around me has a totally different layout even when they're only a few miles apart? Another reason why I prefer to go to Menards, even in other states the stores have nearly identical layouts.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[AvitarX]

I assume it isn't a shift to long vs short term view of profits, but instead the reality of competition.

25 years ago, when I was a child, there was one supermarket around, now there are 4 within a quarter mile.

25 years ago, they could have a bad experience and still get all of the business, now they need to compete on things such as the experience, or I'll go across the street or 500 yeards further down the road.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[MoaDweeb]

Traffic flow analysis Is still a big part of supermarket layouts. From vegetables are at the front with the bakery (feel good smells and looks fresh) and then milk and bread is at the back of the store so you have to walk past everything else to get what you want.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Wal-mart and the likes still try to randomly change the store layout when it suits them. Typically it's around the big spending times. So Christmas, Independence Day, etc. Mine did their's about six months back and completely rearanged electronics. So now the Cat 5e is next to the home security equipment, the USB hubs are next to the hdmi cables, and the shitty AntiVirus software is next to the magazine rack. (The one improvement.)

My bigger gripe is the fact that you can go to a place like Best Buy and buy a computer that you can't buy RAM for. Despite the fact they sell RAM, it's not the kind that the machines they sell actually need. They stock PC4, most of their machines, about 85% of them, require PC3. Worse, no-one else in town sells RAM. And they continue to wonder why Amazon is eating their lunch.....

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why didn't you leave it the fuck alone? Stupid millenials.

Yes we get it, you're old and too senile to remember that everything you created was unstable rubbish built on the laziness model of conforming to the Microsoft monopoly. Forget portability, forget standards and forget stability: "Hey let's develop non-portable Windows applications, build our websites on ActiveX and have our line of business applications tied to Internet Explorer!"

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Still better than webapps which have 30 seconds between screens and take 12 GB of random code from the internet to build.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then their analysis methods are broken. I've been buying shoelaces in a hypermarket 20 miles away for years, because my local store doesn't have them anymore.

Turns out they do. They just moved them between dinner plates and tupperware.

Putting stuff next to irrelevant things might get more impulse buys, but it will make it harder to find for people who are actually looking to buy the damn thing.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's rich coming from the generation who came up with "agile development" rather than actually learning how to fucking write code correctly.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why every Home Depot around me has a totally different layout even when they're only a few miles apart? Another reason why I prefer to go to Menards, even in other states the stores have nearly identical layouts.

Two Menards stores located near me have nearly identical layouts, but are mirror images, so I still sometimes get mixed up.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[jdschulteis]

Traffic flow analysis Is still a big part of supermarket layouts. From vegetables are at the front with the bakery (feel good smells and looks fresh) and then milk and bread is at the back of the store so you have to walk past everything else to get what you want.

My nearest grocery recently remodeled, which included putting a small refrigerated endcap near the checkouts, for people who just want to grab some milk. The main dairy case is still in the far back corner of the store.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Originally, everything in the store was kept either behind the counter or in a stock room and you had to ask the person behind the counter for everything you wanted (or provide them a list) and they would go and bring it to you for checkout. It was in the stores interest to keep everything logically organized so they could find things and bring them to the front counter quickly.

Woolworth's changed the whole paradigm where you would browse the store shelves and product displays yourself and bring them to the register for checkout. Perhaps we should blame them?

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another reason why I prefer to go to Menards, even in other states the stores have nearly identical layouts.

Never even heard of it. Must be one of those places that only exist in redneck states.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Still better than webapps which have 30 seconds between screens and take 12 GB of random code from the internet to build.

Yeah the fact that you have to wildly exaggerate in order to attempt to mount a defence does indeed prove my point.

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly has produced much better results than whatever your definition of "correct" might be :P

Re:Were there 27 items there?

[Hognoxious]

Like Windows 10, Gnome 3 and systemd? Ship it now, patch it tomorrow.

Now do your homework and take out the trash or you'll be grounded for a month, you spotty little bell-end.

P.S. Ever considered learning to write in actual sentences?

Screw that!

[freeze128]

Nobody cares about steam machines. We want Half-Life 3!

Re:Screw that!

[Sarten-X]

...why not both?

Re:Screw that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Half-Life 3 Confirmed!!!

Re:Screw that!

[Dutch Gun]

I've been half tempted to get a job at Valve with the sole purpose of putting together an underground team to finish HL3.

Re:Screw that!

[supremebob]

If they made Half Life 3 and Portal 3 exclusives to the SteamOS, it might actually become a popular gaming platform.

Hell, I'd configure dual boot on my Windows gaming system in order to play those titles if they were reasonably priced. Hell, they might even want to bundle those two games together with a copy of SteamOS on a USB thumb drive, making it the next generation Orange Box.

Re:Screw that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go for it. They're big into the 'open office' and all the desks have wheels business, and you basically go do whatever the heck floats your boat (from their recruiting videos). Taking on HL3 as an initial project, though, is a mite gutsy.

Re:Screw that!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it gutsy? Nobody will ever care or be surprised when you never finish it. Fuck, maybe you'll even pull a GoldenEye.

Re:Screw that!

[dyslexicbunny]

Exactly!

Linux has a chicken/egg problem with games. There's limited AAA game support because there's limited install base and there's limited install base because of limited game support. Toss in Team Fortress 3, Left 4 Dead 3, and potentially DotA 3 and I think you will get a significant install boost so long as the installation process and operation is seamless from a user's perspective.

Re:Screw that!

[Anonymous Coward]

half life 3 shud b on line with ppl taking on teh rolls uv gortan dawg and chell

Release Half Life 3 on steamOS only

[Anonymous Coward]

That will get market share up.

linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam Machines aren't the best. But Steam on Linux is wonderful. Solus is doing some great work on it recently.

How about re-affirming your commitment to

[Anonymous Coward]

The Half-Life series you ass-stains.

Valve could give it a push long term

[Anonymous Coward]

If they decrease the prices for developers that provide support for Vulkan on their store it would give a nice stepping stone to promote SteamOS or other Linux variants a more solid stepping stone to entice people to at least give it a look and when a larger and more recent game releases are available at the product release perhaps then PC users will seriously consider ditching microsoft windows 10/1x..etc... abuses and all imposed we do whatever we want with your machine bullshit.

Re:Valve could give it a push long term

[exomondo]

If they decrease the prices for developers that provide support for Vulkan on their store it would give a nice stepping stone to promote SteamOS or other Linux variants

Why? Vulkan is supported on Windows too, just like OpenGL.

Re:Valve could give it a push long term

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking for comment from real graphics developers here... Does Vulkan actually improve your cross-platform experience above and beyond OpenGL?

One of the things that has always bugged me with modern (pipeline-based) OpenGL was that writing GLSL shaders that worked across AMD, nvidia and other GPUs was problematic if you tried to do anything more than ultra-basic geometry, vertex and fragment shaders. This would lead to end-users getting weird GLSL compiler errors at run time (from their local video drivers). You could try to get around this by pre-compiling your GLSL shaders (and so fix the errors in your own shop) but then you'd have to pre-compile for Windows AMD/nvidia, Linux AMD-closed/AMD-open/nvidia, macOS AMD/nvidia, iOS and many flavors of Android.

Has Vulkan actually improved things here by pre-compiling GLSL to a single standardized SPIR-V bytecode for distribution to all platforms? Are vendors any better at compiling "advanced" SPIR-V operations to native GPU code without falling in a screaming heap?

Re:Valve could give it a push long term

[Anonymous Coward]

What are they actually doing with your machine and abusing you? The problem with highly ambiguous and sensationalist posts like yours is that it highlights the fact that things aren't as bad as you make out. It might be enough to scare people off switching to windows but existing users just see the sensationalist nonsense for what it is.

The sensationalists of the tech community burn credibility with silly statements like "microsoft is stealing and selling your personal data" all the time and it only serves to deafen users to the real problems. Sure the real problems aren't as dramatic as you make them out to be but that's just reality and will help to educate users rather than deafen them.

Re:Valve could give it a push long term

[exomondo]

SPIR-V bytecode still has to be interpreted by the driver and ultimately vendors can also extend SPIR-V themselves so in general vendor-specific problems still exist. As to your specific question you can have GLSL shaders that compile fine through glslangvalidator but a particular vendor driver might choke on the SPIR-V due to vendor or even architecture specific vkPhysicalDeviceLimits for example so you can find yourself using one buffer type on one vendor and a different buffer type on another vendor which starts to complicate things.

Aside from that I have had a couple of complex shaders that run fine on AMD but crash on nVidia - AMD has always been more strict on the spec but it's probably worth noting that these were all GLSL shaders compiled to SPIR-V. So sadly things don't seem to have gotten better by having an intermediate representation, though I can't speak to HLSL and don't have that much experience with it.

Re: Tux Racer

[Anonymous Coward]

1- Develop game and market it to freetards
2- ???
3- Profits!

The developer went out of business in 2003.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah we know Linux sucks and no one in their right mind actually *wants* to use it, but we are basically desperate and have to do something.

Steam on Linux

[seasunset]

There are plenty of Linux titles on Steam. Maybe not many AAA ones, but a lot of indies, that is for sure.

The majority of games that I have work fine on Linux. Indeed I do not remember the last time that I had to reboot to Windows in order to play a game.

Interestingly some Linux games are way more CPU/GPU intensive than on Windows. Anyone knows why?

So, thanks Valve for Linux support! Please keep it!

Re:Steam on Linux

[barc0001]

> There are plenty of Linux titles on Steam. Maybe not many AAA ones, but a lot of indies, that is for sure.

Actually at this point there's lots of what I'd class as AA and AAA titles that are on Linux. It sometimes takes a bit to get them ported but a surprising percentage of my Steam library works under Linux. Borderlands series, Bioshock series, Metro series, XCOM and XCOM2, Rocket League (maybe not AAA, but it's the best value I've ever gotten for $20 - 400+ hours in so far...), etc.

Re:Steam on Linux

[TechyImmigrant]

There are plenty of Linux titles on Steam. Maybe not many AAA ones, but a lot of indies, that is for sure.

The majority of games that I have work fine on Linux. Indeed I do not remember the last time that I had to reboot to Windows in order to play a game.

Interestingly some Linux games are way more CPU/GPU intensive than on Windows. Anyone knows why?

So, thanks Valve for Linux support! Please keep it!

If you made Portal 3 availability contigent on a majority voting for Gabe for president, he'd win.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DamnOregonian]

Quite a few AAA titles these days, actually. I've been pleasantly surprised by that. When I first started using Steam on Linux for gaming, there wasn't much at all.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DamnOregonian]

HL2, Civ, Portal, Total War series, Middle Earth, Shadowrun, Warhammer, Witcher, Arma, Counterstrike, POSTAL, Saints Row... It's amazing these days.
Of my 442 Steam games, 199 of them are supported under Linux.

Re:Steam on Linux

[farble1670]

Actually at this point there's lots of what I'd class as AA and AAA titles that are on Linux. It sometimes takes a bit to get them ported but a surprising percentage of my Steam library works under Linux. Borderlands series, Bioshock series, Metro series, XCOM and XCOM2, Rocket League (maybe not AAA, but it's the best value I've ever gotten for $20 - 400+ hours in so far...), etc.

And that's not good enough for a gamer. They want AAA titles, when they are released. They want them as good or better of an FPS as windows. They want them to run w/ the same stability as windows.

Windows gaming PCs are a thing. They are well understood and documented. There's just no incentive to try something else that is known to not work as well. Gamers don't care about FOSS they just want Overwatch not to crash out in the middle of a rated match.

Re:Steam on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"They want them to run w/ the same stability as windows."

This remark is kind of funny.

"[...] just want Overwatch not to crash out in the middle of a rated match."

Wait, you really do seem to think games on Linux crash a lot, or at least more than on Windows.
Is that a thing, that people think games on Linux crash frequently...?

Re:Steam on Linux

[barc0001]

> And that's not good enough for a gamer

Like hell. I'm "a gamer". It's perfect for me. I'm also the type of gamer who doesn't go run off and buy the new shiny for $80 when I can get the bugfixed GOTY edition with all the extra content a year later for $20 on a Steam sale. There are many different types of "gamers" and what's on Linux would satisfy a surprising percentage of them if they knew it was there.

Re:Steam on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Saints Row fan (3 and 4) I'm very excited that they ported their games to Linux. Except that their games frequently lock up on Linux. And they broke Linux save support with Saints Row IV after adding Workshop support (which I only found the hard way after my save synced on my Linux machine). Gat out of Hell has worked really well, though. Oh, and I've had freezes on Windows too, but a lot, lot less frequently. Then there's the car audio issues in Saints Row 3 (which might be in 4 but there's so little point to cars in 4).

I guess what I'm saying is, Saints Row has a lot of bugs, but they're worse in Linux. That's the sort of support I see from people supporting Linux. At least a few of the indie "for Linux" games are badly broken--not simply the wrong/missing libraries. Thankfully that's the exception to the rule. Still, about 60% of my games are Windows-only (maybe Mac too) and over 50% don't work or play/glitch horribly.

I'm not complaining. I've just come to accept that Windows is a gaming OS.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DamnOregonian]

I actually haven't had the same experience. Almost all of the bugs I've run into were "Game doesn't start"- Steam missing 32-bit library X, apt-get it.
As it sits right now- I don't have a single Linux game out of 199 that doesn't run well.
Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I had a game crash. I know it happens occasionally, but it's pretty damn rare. I'm of course also running better, and less weird hardware these days than I was in the past, with less weird things done to my OS. None of the software is bleeding edge, it's just an old tried-and-true Ubuntu distribution. As I've become more lazy and less tinkerish, my system has become more stable (weird, right?)

Re:Steam on Linux

[tepples]

I'm also the type of gamer who doesn't go run off and buy the new shiny for $80 when I can get the bugfixed GOTY edition with all the extra content a year later for $20 on a Steam sale.

I guess part of it has to do with how long after release the game's publisher plans to keep the online multiplayer matchmaking servers operational.

Re:Steam on Linux

[Darinbob]

Kid gamers. They want exactly what they friends are playing, which means first day of release, and they will stop playing it in two weeks.

Re:Steam on Linux

[barc0001]

Sure, but a lot of the games I buy are mainly single player - or single player playable anyway - the Borderlands series is an odd mix of both and I've played through it both as a single player and with friends in co-op.

And if you're a publisher that's shutting down matchmaking servers for a game released only a couple of years ago, you're probably not going to be getting much repeat business from customers when your new game comes out. How long you support your product is a factor in many peoples' buying decisions. So the smart companies will spend a few bucks a month keeping the lights on for older games. The dumb companies won't be around too long anyway.

Re:Steam on Linux

[exomondo]

Who really cares what OS it is? On my gaming PC I turn it on, launch the game I want to play and then don't even see the OS. Whether it's Linux or Windows makes no difference and dual booting means you aren't beholden to one or the other anyway.

Steam Machines (Linux gaming in general) need to provide some compelling thing that you can't get on Windows, not just supporting a subset of the games available on Windows. The biggest praise I see in every discussion on this is just people being surprised at how many games are supported but really given that Unity, Unreal and Source engines are all supported on Linux it's not that big of a leap.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DrXym]

There are perhaps 30% of titles that run on Linux. Most run flawlessly but some run abysmally.

I've seen games kernel panic my PC, render with missing textures / flickering, dialogues that are too big to fit a laptop display, controls which are broken and a heap of other obvious issues. It suggests to me that devs might be building for Linux to tick the box but they're often not testing the game very thoroughly.

But back to that 30% figure. That's why SteamBox is not going to take off. Not now, not ever. My own view, one which I've held since Valve started this initiative was that SteamBox was just stepping stone to produce a streaming service - that if they could port games to Linux then it costs Valve less money to host those games in the cloud on their own OS + hardware than if they paid Microsoft a license. SteamBox itself was never going anywhere.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DrXym]

Exactly. The quality of Linux ports was all over the map. Some worked extremely well and some were nigh on unplayable.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DrXym]

games on Linux crash a lot, or at least more than on Windows.

It's not about Linux vs Windows. It's about one platform receiving a heap of testing and bug fixing vs a platform which doesn't.

Many of the Linux ports are shoddy and it showed in the number of issues they suffered. It's not the fault of Linux or of some inherent superiority of Windows but of time, resources, effort on behalf of the developer.

And not just of the game dev, but also the graphics driver. NVidia / AMD push out frequent Windows driver updates that optimize performance or fix issues for specific games. Linux gets none of that.

Re:Steam on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

> Metro series

As in Metro 2033 Redux? Random off topic tech-support question, but does it actually let you past the intro? I've tried it on three vastly different Linux boxes and, during the intro, the monster grabs me and kills me and the game is over. There's no solutions on Google etc.

thx

Re:Steam on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

They are all playing on their phones, though, so the only Linux version that matters to them is Android.

Re:Steam on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen games kernel panic my PC

A game should never be able to panic your kernel. If you haven't already, please send a full, un-tainted panic log to the kernel developers so this can be fixed.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DrXym]

It's no my responsibility to test someone else's game for them. That's their job.

As to why it happens, it's probably because Linux graphics drivers simply aren't as robust as Windows ones. The Windows drivers can take more abuse (broken calls etc.), are optimized better and have special cases for problematic titles.

Re:Steam on Linux

[higuita]

More AA and AAA games:
War thunder, almost all Total War games, the two newer tomb raider, MiddleEarth - Shadow of Mordor, Stelaris, City Skylines, CSGO, Dota2, Portal series, Half-live series, TF2, Hitman, Mad Max, Company of Heros series, Football manager series, newer civilization games, Payday2, Dying lights, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, witcher2, age of wonders 3, Alien: Isolation, newer Warhammer series, Dirt series, F1 2015 and 2017 ... hey, go check the list : http://store.steampowered.com/...

Re:Steam on Linux

[exomondo]

Many of the Linux ports are shoddy and it showed in the number of issues they suffered. It's not the fault of Linux or of some inherent superiority of Windows but of time, resources, effort on behalf of the developer.

It's economies of scale. Obviously developers aren't going to put the same effort into servicing a very tiny portion of the market as they do into servicing the majority of the market. Most gamers also don't care about the OS at all, they'll play on whatever it runs best on because you can always just dual boot.

And not just of the game dev, but also the graphics driver. NVidia / AMD push out frequent Windows driver updates that optimize performance or fix issues for specific games. Linux gets none of that.

That's just completely incorrect. The changelog on one of the very recent linux drivers for nVidia's GPUs shows multiple fixes for specific games:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-304.37-driver

Moreover shader compiler optimizations are shared across platforms as they aren't related to the OS.

Re:Steam on Linux

[DrXym]

Very recent? That link is to 2012. It's also the proprietary NVidia driver, not the open source driver that most Linux users would be using in their dist.

Re:Steam on Linux

[exomondo]

Very recent? That link is to 2012.

In any case your assertion is wrong.

It's also the proprietary NVidia driver, not the open source driver that most Linux users would be using in their dist.

The default nVidia driver in SteamOS is nvidia, not nouveau. Also nVidia does not produce the open source nouveau driver so when you say "NVidia / AMD push out frequent Windows driver updates that optimize performance or fix issues for specific games" obviously the driver in question is the proprietary nVidia driver and not the open source one and your assertion about that driver is wrong as they do indeed optimize performance and fix issues for specific games on Linux.

Not to mention that anybody concerned with gaming on Linux is going to be using the proprietary nVidia driver and not the nouveau driver because of its far superior performance.

Besides that, if your complaint is actually about the open source driver then there's certainly no reason that nouveau developers couldn't work closely with game developers to optimize their drivers for specific games.

Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Dega704]

The broken-record repetition I'm hearing is HL3 exclusive. Yes this could be a good idea, IF Linux/SteamOS were a more established, mature platform among average gamers. It's not. Imagine this from the perspective of anyone who isn't a Linux nerd. You're a PC gamer, HL3 comes out, you want it, and you can't get it unless you buy a new, underwhelming game console (That's how most users will see them, and they just want to play on their PC), or dual boot their existing computer; hardly a reasonable expectation for the non-technical. Does anyone actually see this going over well? Because I see it turning into a riot-inducing fustercluck that will make loot boxes and GamerGate look small in comparison.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Lanforod]

The broken-record repetition I'm hearing is HL3 exclusive. Yes this could be a good idea, IF Linux/SteamOS were a more established, mature platform among average gamers. It's not. Imagine this from the perspective of anyone who isn't a Linux nerd. You're a PC gamer, HL3 comes out, you want it, and you can't get it unless you buy a new, underwhelming game console (That's how most users will see them, and they just want to play on their PC), or dual boot their existing computer; hardly a reasonable expectation for the non-technical. Does anyone actually see this going over well? Because I see it turning into a riot-inducing fustercluck that will make loot boxes and GamerGate look small in comparison.

Just make the HL3 release SteamOS exclusive for early release, 3 months later release it for Windows and Xbox One.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Dega704]

This I find reasonable. It would incentivize gamers to try out Linux/SteamOS without necessarily punishing them for not using it. I still think the graphics architecture needs more work first (Vulkan should be well established and supported, and give us graphical GPU settings equivalent to Windows for hell's sake), but it's in much better shape than it was 6 years ago.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[farble1670]

Just make the HL3 release SteamOS exclusive for early release, 3 months later release it for Windows and Xbox One.

Why? Why does Valve even care where their games are played, let alone why would a publisher sacrifice the majority of the sales that happen before or on release day. I'm asking a serious question.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Anonymous Coward]

All that does is hurt their revenue and punish gamers for no good reason. If you want people to switch you won't get them that way, all you do is show what an uncaring bastard of a company you are that is willing to screw over paying customers to force them to do what you want.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[gravewax]

blackmail is reasonable? all this would do would be decimate their sales and piss off a load of fans. It is those sort of tactics that alienate the user base and clearly point out that they do not care what the users think or want.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Teckla]

Why does Valve even care where their games are played

Because Microsoft still has multiple monopolies generating enormous amounts of profit, so they can keep trying to crush Steam with the Microsoft Store indefinitely. It's good for Steam to keep a Plan B around.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Bert64]

How is this blackmail?
Make the early beta versions available for linux, linux users tend to be more technically literate and therefore more useful as beta testers.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[iampiti]

While I'm not sure this would be the best idea timed exclusives are pretty common so at least it wouldn't be something that hasn't happened before. Most people would just wait I guess.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[iampiti]

Because if Windows keep being the dominant OS for PC gaming then Valve's business depends too much on Microsoft and one doesn't need to be too bright to know that's not a position you want to be in.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the early beta versions available for linux, linux users tend to be more technically literate and therefore more useful as beta testers.

The whole point of SteamOS was for it to be more mass-market and not restricted to the "more technically literate". But even if that is the case restricting the beta test to Linux would be moronic if the majority of your customer-base is on Windows.

Re:Linux isn't ready for exclusive titles

[sad_]

you don't need to buy anything, you install it on your gaming pc you already have, on a second drive so you don't have to overwrite your current install.
steamos is made for sofa, living room gaming. you don't need a keyboard, it can't get easier then that.
why isn't steamos a success? because people don't see the benefit, more AAA games on windows and nothing to pull them towards steamos in specific.
i didn't have a windows gaming pc, i gamed on consoles because linux didn't have many new games (lot's of OSS and retro games though). so when steam because available, steamos was a good choice for me. i don't care about AAA titles, i care about fun games, and indie offers just that plenty.

Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[MindPrison]

...doesn't really work out of the box on Linux, not even Mint Linux 18.3.

Yes, you can "could" make Steam VR work, yes, steamVR runs...but when you have the vive connected, it will mess with your xconfig settings or xorg or nvidia settings totally. It will extend the screen to the VR googles, it will not return the settings to normal, it will mess everything up, and you'll end up just unplugging the thing after a while - and yes...this is STILL exactly the same scenario 2 years later.

Steam Linux? Yes - it works, sorta...Certain games works on it. And works just fine, but others like Ark - Survival evolved (which is insanely graphics demanding) will even on a 1080ti - get the "light ray" bug, where there's "rays" of darkness that will overshadow the game, psychedelic rain that will make it impossible to fly - and they all blame Nvidia drivers...which in turn blame bad coding on the game devs, or game engine devs. etc.

On Linux - gaming is all one big "who'd dunnit" blame game, no one owns any responsibility, and I doubt it'll ever be fixed.

Despite that, I still run Linux 90% of my time at home, because it's a ROCK stable platform for pretty much everything else. And I love the speed and smoothness of the everyday usage, surfing, video, editing, programming - and everything non-game related, it's the bee's knees.

Re:Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[DamnOregonian]

Steam Linux? Yes - it works, sorta...Certain games works on it. And works just fine, but others like Ark - Survival evolved

Haven't played Ark on it (I have it for PS4) but of my 199 Steam Linux games, the vast majority work perfectly on my 1080Ti/7700K.
I'm also using it headless via Steam in-home streaming to stream the games to either the Steam Link attached to my TV, or my Laptop running Linux Steam. The system auto-logs in and auto-starts Steam in big-picture mode.
I couldn't be happier with Steam on Linux. I do also have a Windows partition on the machine, but I don't boot into it very often.

Re:Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[UnknownSoldier]

> but others like Ark - Survival evolved (which is insanely graphics demanding) will even on a 1080ti - get the "light ray" bug, where there's "rays" of darkness that will overshadow the game, psychedelic rain that will make it impossible to fly - and they all blame Nvidia drivers...which in turn blame bad coding on the game devs, or game engine devs. etc.

ARK was built with a heavily modified Unreal Engine 4. I seriously doubt that the (GPU) shaders running Linux are different from the shaders running on Windows -- but it would be good to confirmation on that.

Still, that sucks that nVidia + Epic won't take responsibility for it. :-/

Have you tried turning off light shafts ( god rays) and bloom?

r.BloomQuality=0
r.LightShafts=0

> I still run Linux 90% of my time at home

If anyone is curious you can filter in Steam games that run on Linux via this link:

http://store.steampowered.com/linux

Re:Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[Anonymous Coward]

ARK was built with a heavily modified Unreal Engine 4. I seriously doubt that the (GPU) shaders running Linux are different from the shaders running on Windows -- but it would be good to confirmation on that.

It's worse than that. They're using an early 2015 version of UE4 and trying to cherry-pick newer bugfixes to backport, and have just generally made a gigantic mess of the whole thing. As a result, any platform that doesn't use DirectX 10/11 is a buggy pile of shit. You can't really blame Linux for ARK's problems when many of the same issues plague macOS and PS4 as well. The game apparently doesn't even download the full assets for non-Windows players! The listed storage requirements for macOS and Linux are 1/3 that of Windows, and last I checked it was still fairly accurate, with the Linux install being somewhere in the 20-30GB range while Windows was more like 50-60GB. Is it really any surprise the game is horribly broken?

It's also gotten progressively worse over time, which is usually not the case with games in development. When the game left early access, caves were unplayable because of broken shader effects, a problem that had plagued the game for at least a year, but they also managed to completely break water so that, from a few months before "release" until sometime months after, it was a solid grey surface. Those two problems made the late-game basically unplayable. To be fair, I just checked and it looks like both of those problems have finally been fixed, but there are still issues with the water, and the cave shaders appear to have been "fixed" by switching to flat lighting in caves. Either that or they fixed one thing and broke another, could go either way.

I tried to take a screenshot of the half-working "fixes" but now attempting to use the Steam overlay to take a screenshot crashes the game. Also, most of the old bugs I ran into are still there, like the game crashing if you change focus during load, or the numpad being broken. It's one step forward, two steps back with this game and developer. And to reiterate what I said at the start, many of the Linux port's problems can also be seen on PS4 and macOS. ARK is not an example of Linux gaming problems, it's an example of how horribly a developer can fuck up cross-platform porting.

Re:Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt that the (GPU) shaders running Linux are different from the shaders running on Windows

Several reasons:

The Engine may be using a different backend, Direct3D isn't a thing on Linux, so it might run into a bug in the OpenGL/Vulkan backend.

The Windows drivers actually contain patched shaders to deal with buggy AAA games, there is a long history of drivers checking what application they are running to intercept and replace bad shaders, implicitly perform missing but required API function calls, cheat at benchmarks etc.. Since the executable on linux is different from the Windows executable these patches might not be applied correctly, if the driver has them at all.

Re:Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[UnknownSoldier]

Now this I definitely could see as being a/the problem!

Maybe a quick test would be to rename the Windows ARK executable and compare the visual output with the vanilla filename? If they differ then you know that the Windows Driver is in "automatic run-time patch mode" for the game that isn't getting applied on the Linux side.

Another test would be to do single "frame capture" -- dump all the D3D calls and see how they are getting translated to the OpenGL backend. That would help narrow down where the problem is.

It sucks that of the 4 companies involved: Microsoft (D3D), Epic, nVidia, Studio Wildcard -- that no one wants to take the time to figure this shit out.

Re:Meh...2 years with HTC VIVE, and it still ...

[higuita]

VR is one of the things that valve is fixing in linux... the original development was done for windows, as it was a race to see who was the first to reach the market and "land grab" the market... now they have more time to port to linux and fix bad code on the VR libraries and missing features on linux

Ark - Survival is full of bugs ... i would bet the right answer is on nvidia saying bad code (game or engine), being just one example of some bad code working by accident on windows, but failing on others. Notice that nvidia also have many bugs, but as many developers use nvidia, most of they are already workaround.

I do bless AMD open source drivers, they are getting better and better and with then it is usually easier to find who is to blame about those kind of problems.

Re:Tux Racer

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're talking about my penis then I agree with you!

No one believes you anymore Valve.

[AbRASiON]

Just sit back and collect your 30% from sales on the store and please, stop talking, going forward. It's done.

Re:No one believes you anymore Valve.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sit back and collect your 30% from sales on the store and please, stop talking, going forward. It's done.

If I could, I would mod this "sad but true"

Netflix, Crunchyroll,...?

[dltaylor]

I have an XBox 360, and Wii U, both bought for a couple of specific title, but also to be used for media (the 360). The 360 isn't very good at it (lots of background hiss over HDMI, of all things), but, since I cut the cable boxes loose, I have tried Netflix and Crunchyroll on both. Netflix still runs better on my old WD Live than either, and Crunchyroll is buggy on both of them (better on the Wii U, though).

If a Steam Machine had functional apps (not work-arounds) for Netflix, Crunchyroll (Hulu, ...), AccuWeather, and was as good as my Live for DLNA and NFS-attached media servers, OTA TV, and Internet radio (Kodi), I would buy one for that. I can't find any info on Steam's site to say it does.

Does it?

Madden NFL and FIFA

[tepples]

And if you're a publisher that's shutting down matchmaking servers for a game released only a couple of years ago, you're probably not going to be getting much repeat business from customers when your new game comes out.

Tell that to Electronic Arts, publisher of Madden NFL and FIFA. Players are expected to buy the sequel every year. And they do, in droves.

Re:Madden NFL and FIFA

[exomondo]

It operates kind of like a subscription and works out to a few dollars a month except that you still have all the offline components of the game without having to continue paying. That's why people keep buying it, they don't have to.

Also you mischaracterize it by claiming it is every year, in fact they don't shut down the servers a year after release, it's usually 3-4 years so if you work on that time frame it becomes even cheaper.

Re:Madden NFL and FIFA

[barc0001]

Madden, FIFA, NHL, NBA, MLB games are an outlier as for interest with their fans they rely on staying within shouting distance of the real teams' rosters so a game that's even 2 years out of date will not be a "realistic" experience. Look at the NHL right now for example, who's on fire and a widely liked underdog? The Las Vegas Golden Knights. Who's NOT in NHL16? The Las Vegas Golden Knights....

Only Steam on Linux works with multiseat

[bastafidli]

Steam on Linux is essential in our household, since that is the only solution that supports multiseat. I have dual GTX 970 and GTX 710 with FX 8370 supporting 3 seats. This allows me to have two users play ttwo sessions of games such as Civilization 5, Tropico 5, Total War, City Skylines and many other Linux games on steam in parallel while maintaining only single computer. We can also play 3 sessions of Minecraft in parallel.

I think this could be real differentiator for Steam boxes and SteamOS for Valve for families that have two kids without buying two computers or gaming consoles.

SteamBox was never going to sell

[DrXym]

I always thought the SteamBox was a trojan horse to build up a streaming service. Valve encouraged porting games to Linux so ultimately they could host them more cheaply in the cloud. Valve wouldn't have to pay licensing fees to Microsoft if they could use a modified Linux image to host the game instance.

The idea that people would buy fat SteamBox devices was pretty tenuous. They cost the same amount of money as a regular PC but ran a fraction of the games. Not much value proposition in that.

Re:Tux Racer

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I used the plural.

yap

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they are as commited to those as they are with most of their framchises 3rd game

Do NOT piss on my leg...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and tell me raining!