Steam is now the de-facto "app store" of the PC as far as games go, which was no small feat. It took them more than 10 years to get to this point and it's now in jeopardy.
With Google and Apple already controlling the mobile app stores, various console manufacturers controlling their own ecosystems, and Microsoft attempting to abandon their "open" Windows (so they can run their own app store) - the industry is shifting into a position of hardware/OS manufacturers/monopolies taking massive cuts (30%) from the software market. Valve, without any hardware of their own, but a very large PC app store with a significant user base, really has nowhere else to turn. Gabe himself has expressed quite a bit of dismay over Microsoft's recent decisions.
I expect them to use everything in their power to make Linux become a mainstream thing. They're going to port all of their own games to Linux, and I expect at some point there will be Linux-only discounts for their games.
I really hope Microsoft underestimated their power, and that Valve is capable of doing this. It'll be better for all of us. The software industry is heading in very bad directions, and this is at least a glimmer of hope.
I would sympathize with Valve if they didn't completely ignore Linux before acting like the Linux community's best friend when it became apparent that they had nowhere else to turn to [1]. Like many, I'm a fan of their games and their flat management, but they have a history of being as short-sighted and callous as EA and I wish more people would see that [2].
I have a lot more respect for the people behind Humble Bundle/Wolfire, who went out of their way to support Linux long before it was cool [3]. Plus they don't force DRM middleware on you.
What? Humble BundLe totally sold out their integrity after they let THQ sell their games with the Humble Bundle brand, without linux versions and with DRM.
I was disappointed about this, too; not because it's necessarily bad, but because they had set the bar so high for themselves and then totally missed it with this. On the bright side, it raised a lot of money for charity.
Their integrity? THQ was about to tank, and they wanted to flip the games to whoever they could.
I'm sure that if there were THQ-internal beta versions for Linux and Mac, they would have happily shipped them.
Valve has a history of being as short-sighted and callous as EA and I wish more people would see that [2].
Your citation [2] doesn't in any way support that viewpoint. Actually, there probably aren't any citations which support that viewpoint, because EA is about as far opposite from Valve as a gaming company can get. (Zynga is likely the polar opposite.)
If your account is stolen and becomes VAC banned, Valve won't do anything about it and you will be stuck with gimped games, regardless of how much business you gave them (back then they didn't have security codes). I can't find this on Google, but at least twice I've read that Valve just ignores emails from game developers they're not interested in. In Team Fortress 2, the staff is allowed to hop on players' servers and practically cheat by mowing down everyone with overpowered weapons, and they ruined the game's integrity through introducing a microtransaction economy that they take advantage of to promote other Steam games.
Maybe Valve isn't as bad as EA, but it's hardly as good as its reputation.
> I've read that Valve just ignores emails from game developers they're not interested in
Details on that would be interesting. I have to say my first thought is that they probably get a lot of indie developers that want on the Network, and don't want to devote and entire position to explaining why not every publisher gets in Steam just because they want to.
> In Team Fortress 2 ... they ruined the game's integrity through introducing a microtransaction economy
So, they take their free to play game, and add the ability to customize your characters in ways that don't affect gameplay that make them money, and they have all of a sudden ruined the integrity of the game? Is it ruined because they want to make some money from it? I seem to remember that when they were just starting the hats, they were also putting out large updates for the player classes, for free.
> take advantage of to promote other Steam games.
You state that like it's bad for it's own sake. What's wrong with them promoting their other games?
> So, they take their free to play game, and add the ability to customize your characters in ways that don't affect gameplay that make them money, and they have all of a sudden ruined the integrity of the game?
I haven't played any TF2 and don't have any strong opinions on it, I just wanted to point out that it wasn't originally free to play. It was released as part of The Orange Box in 2007 and went free about 4 years later.
As wlesieutre mentioned, Team Fortress 2 wasn't free until after microtransactions have been around for some time.
Early on, the game had a consistent 1960s theme and each character had a consistent distinct sillhouette and behavior, so the game was easy to pick up and it was reasonable to play it competitively. It had great game design. Over time they ruined all of that for the sake of profiting off of addicted players.
I really can't muster much support for your indignation.
I can't help but think that the hats actually add to the game, by allowing players to choose a semi-custom look for their character while playing, making a specific character easily identifiable.
Your reasoning make it sound like you're just upset that they took something that you had been accustomed to, and changed it. I note how you didn't mention any stats, or even a hunch as to whether most players liked or disliked the hats.
Additionally, you cast the players as "addicted", and Valve as somehow taking advantage of their addiction. Let's get this straight. The players aren't addicted to TF2 (even if you somehow proved they could be addicted to competitive FPS muliplayer, there's plenty of alternatives), and Valve isn't taking advantage. To do so they would have to be preventing play unless people bought something, which they aren't. They simply provided an additional, fully opt-in set of features.
Finally, if you don't like playing with hats because it ruins some behavior you had come to rely on, find other people that feel the same way and start your own server and enforce a strict policy of exactly what's allowed. That's done often in serious competitive play anyways, isn't it?
>I would sympathize with Valve if they didn't completely ignore Linux
Can you blame them? I'm surprised they can make the numbers work even now, let alone 5 years ago. The probably still don't...its probably just a long range bet.
>Plus they don't force DRM middleware on you.
DRM is the future (not that I like it). The trick is simply to make it DRM like Steam where people barely realize its DRM and rather than EA's crap idea of DRM.
It seems entirely reasonable to me to have an equilibrium where there's some nonzero market niche of people who oppose DRM for practical and/or ideological reasons, and some nonzero number of developers that realize they can get access to that market by forgoing DRM on their products.
Case in point: Just yesterday I saw Torchlight 2 was on sale on Gamersgate. I was totally ready to buy it on the spot. Then I saw that it was Steam-only. And I didn't buy it for that reason, and that reason alone.
Those dollars from my entertainment budget are now ready to be captured by non-DRM products. If there are enough people like me, we can push back DRM, or at least keep it out of some corner of the market.
"After all, isn’t that what open source is all about – the idea that collaboration and teamwork achieve amazing things?" Written by Valve in the cited blog post, despite having nothing to do with open source.
I love this company. Since I've bought from them in the past, I get their weekend promo emails every week[1], and they are SO tempting. Wing Commander 1+2 for $2.39? I could buy 4-5 games from that list, spend less than I usually do for the Humble bundle, and actually get a lot more.
I'll grant that Desura is definitely a small player.
I've thought of GG as being a minor player but legitimately mainstream and big enough to worry, if not threaten, Steam.
OTOH I've always thought of GOG as owning a niche (legacy titles) that nobody else is much interested in, its very name sort of denotes how it's restricted.
I've always thought of GOG as owning a niche (legacy titles) that nobody else is much interested in
They started that way to gain the traction, but they definitely don't plan to stay that way - they add new titles and aren't focusing on old games exclusively anymore. I view them as a solid competitor to Steam which will threaten them even more in the future, since they have a resolute DRM free stance. Linux additions would boost GOG position a lot IMHO. They still work on adding old titles though, since that's their original specialty and that's a good thing.
I'm not sure about Gamersgate - never used them. Are they DRM free? If not, they aren't really offering anything better than Steam does, and won't compete with GOG here.
That's surely better than Steam already, which doesn't help filtering DRM free titles. Though Steam in general imposes its client DRM, even if the game itself doesn't use some heavier forms (like on-line type).
>The software industry is heading in very bad directions, and this is at least a glimmer of hope.
I don't buy this -- Steam is just another walled garden app store with the same conflicts of interest that we're used to seeing, such as giving top billing to their own products on their store, using DRM, promoting itself as an advertising space, etc.
The problem I have is: where are all the GPL'ed games? The Torque Engine was just released with a permissive free license, which is good, but it will probably take a really good engine being released as GPL to get people to really start embracing the development of games in a community-driven way, rather than being stuck in the ivory tower like most games are now. There really isn't any other meaningful way for us to oppose these abusive "app stores" rather than shunning them so that we can turn to more community-driven efforts.
Most good games are made by people who are paid to make them. Or people who hope to pay themselves when their game is finished and sold.
It's hard to get a large volume of unpaid volunteers to collectively work together on a creative endeavor. If I'm going to spend my free time working on something creative then it's going to follow my vision and not someone else's.
If you want a community driven game nothing is stopping anyone. Quake 3/Doom 3 are GPL'd. Unity is cheap. Plenty of games are incredibly mod friendly. There's been no better time in gaming history than to be indie than today.
No, that's not the problem with Open Source games. Open Source developers are more than capable and willing to work on a game. The problem is: they can't agree on anything except most basic game concepts. That's why you get:
- Freeciv
- Wesnoth (Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics)
- Nexuiz, Cube, Warsow, Open Arena, Alien Arena, and the other 68 quake 1 clones
There are very few creative Open Source games. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is one example, it's an OS game with no commercial equivalent. Teeworlds is another. OS developers only reach consensus on widely liked game concepts, creativity is very unlikely to be accepted. Instead of working on something exciting, they work on something everyone hates the least. It's a management problem, not technical or motivation problem. Votes become vetoes.
http://blog.asmartbear.com/ignoring-the-wisdom-of-crowds.htm...
Whoa - I'm not advocating for people to work unpaid. Don't know where you got that idea. I just don't think anything can really honestly advertise itself as being "mod friendly" or "community friendly" unless it's GPL.
Community driven somewhat implies unpaid. At least it seems so to me? There's no proven business model for games that supports paying a staff and being GPL. Being GPL also means you can't ever release on consoles, handhelds, or mobile.
I'm not sure how you could say Source engine isn't mod friendly. Lots of great mods have been made using it.
Professional grade engines are also becoming increasingly available at very affordable prices. With Unity there's really nothing stopping anyone from making any game they want.
> The problem I have is: where are all the GPL'ed games?
All the id engines have gone GPL. Ogre3d is a popular engine base.
A lot of game studios use some derivative of Unreal 3, which Epic will never GPL because they make money selling rights to it.
Most other engines, even beyond that, will have some proprietary inclusions that they don't hold licenses over, such as with the JK launch.
The lack of community FOSS game engine projects from the ground up is strange to me. It seems it would make a lot of sense for major industry players to band together and develop a really rock solid engine in the FOSS world to minimize the costs of engine development, even if in the short term they lose the benefit of being able to license their engine or profit off specialized graphics or gameplay tech they put in it.
I suspect the biggest reason this hasn't happened is that the big studios want engines that can also target consoles, which don't have publicly available SDKs. It would be hard for a project to ensure that they weren't constantly breaking the console ports when they might not even be able to run nightly builds and share the logs publicly.
And, of course, software patents are a constant threat.
Aside from third party licensing for middleware like Bink, Scaleform, Havok, console APIs, etc. I'd guess some if it has to do with the constant competition over graphics technology that's only just started to slow down in the last couple years, and perhaps that will be picking up again with the next-gen consoles.
I completely agree, though. There is a complete lack of solid open-source game software.
There is one huge difference, they are a 3rd party walled garden. They get a lot of flack but they were the only ones in a good position to do what they did at the time. The market place scene needs 3rd parties like Steam, GOG, (to some extent) Amazon, etc.
You don't buy insurance from the hospital or heaven forbid, Pfizer. You are only guaranteeing that all of the terms and conditions are against you. So why do the same with software by giving either the platform maker and/or publisher's extra leverage (yes, Valve publishes their own games, a whopping 1 game per year, but they'd likely quit making games before they'd give up selling someone else's software)? This is the unsung problem of UPlay, Origin, etc. as well as iTunes and whatever MS call their market places this week.
3rd parties need customers to exist. 1st parties can just make deals with other 1st parties for their survival. It is the same problem we had with the recording industry. Who cares if CDs are $15? There is plenty of money in breakage, movie tie-ins, TV singing contests, cell phone ring tones, advertising cross-overs, etc. In other words, mass market incest.
The road of the 1st party is the road to gamer fuel, in game ads, E.T., slow matchmaking services, platform locking, and above all product stagnation. Folks can hate Steam for whatever reason, fine, but please, go to another 3rd party if you can. Without them the future is bleak.
As far as GPL'd games go, they have the same problem as regular games. Asset generation for AAA titles is too expensive and too slow. If you want to fix that problem don't look to a new engine that will be outdated by the time your game is finished or a distribution platform. Devote your time to breaking the development cost/time problem and give that to everyone. As soon as we beat that, we will break the "1999 cycle" and we'll get the game that people beg for but the industry can't afford to produce.
I don't think that Valve is at danger at all. The types of games on Steam are COMPLETELY different from what is on app stores, and so are the prices and consumer behavior. People will pay large sums of money on Steam, in a way they won't in a mobile app store. And you can trust that you're getting a quality game.
They are in danger should Microsoft ever gain a significant foothold with the Windows Store. Microsoft can turn off "side-loading" of software in Windows and lock everyone into their walled garden. If Valve hasn't successfully migrated away from Windows by that point they will be completely screwed.
Given the importance of backwards compatibility for corporate Windows users and the history Microsoft has with the Justice Department, I find such a situation very hard to fathom. Microsoft is not Apple - they cannot use the Reality Distortion Field to get away scot-free with imposing draconian restrictions on their user base.
They'll just turn on signed side-loading in the high-end corporate version of the OS; with Microsoft providing the (revokable) signing keys as part of the corporate site license.
As for the Justice Department intervention? I wouldn't hold my breath.
If pain deploying applications on Windows becomes greater than pain of switching to Linux (porting applications and training personnel) then Microsoft might have a problem.
The EU didn't force apple to open up iOS, and this is with a near monopoly in the tablet space. Microsoft doesn't have to close down windows, they just need to make windows rt the default option for consumers wanting to get a machine that runs office and some games.
EU antitrust laws aren't against monopolys per se, but against using the power of a monopoly to gain an advantage in a new market. So, Microsoft wasn't fined for having a 95% of the PC market, but for trying to leverage that share to force its competition in the internet field out of the market. Apple tablets were born with the app store and conquered (created?) the tablet market, so, no problem.It'd have been different if they allowed people to install apps from anywhere and afterwards restricted them to the app store.
So, I think microsoft would be in big trouble in the EU if they tried to shut Steam out of the market by disabling third party software on windows.
MS would never be able to pull that one with an existing install base, so that's something we'd have to not buy in the first place, perhaps winRT 2.0 might look locked down like that.
The other scenario would be if windows moved to a rolling distribution type model, perhaps even for free. They could pull that move then.
This is how OSX is by default now. I'm relatively new to Macs but I was pretty surprised when I had to go into my preferences to enable the ability to run software downloaded from the internet (not from the Mac App Store).
As long as they provide the option to enable it, I actually don't see what's wrong with this. If someone can't figure out how to change that preference, then they are exactly the type of person who shouldn't be running random executables off the Internet.
> I had to go into my preferences to enable the ability to run software downloaded from the internet
Wrong, the default Gatekeeper setting is set so that:
- you don't have to if the software is recent and signed by the developer.
- you don't have to either for unsigned code: as explained in the dialog that pops up, you can right click instead and choose open, which will pop up a similar dialog alllowing you to whitelist this app only.
Threfore, don't ever turn off Gatekeeper in Preferences.
Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't noticed the right-click to whitelist option before. I'll have to go change the preference back.
I don't know if the software I was using was just old or if signing isn't common place yet, but I felt like I got prompted while trying to use some fairly popular software.
It's been a while since I've touched windows, but I think it has a similar system (although the option to run was presented as soon as you tried).
Linux is actually the worst in terms of easily running software downloaded from the internet. If you try running an executable with out the executable bit set, it will fail. Nautilus (a major file browser) gives the standard error for when you try opening a file-type that does not have a program associated with it. And, unlike your description of OSX, you can only enable execution on a per-file basis.
Don't laugh, it could work -- they could make an argument that, at least at first, doing a "soft release" on Linux first gives them access to a huge group of relatively savvy beta testers.
It would just be icing on the cake that they don't have to pay 30% or whatever to anybody else for those early adopters.
Now if we can only get semi-stable, long-term graphics driver support for Linux to be able to play these games. I think there may be light at the end of that tunnel, since hardware vendors seem to be providing more support for Linux now.
It's gotten so much better since Valve started to port over their games and they launched Steam for Linux which helped bring other Linux games to light.
This forced a good update to nVidia cards that helped boost all cards performance under Linux to be actually playable.
Once they port over DOTA2 (currently one of their most popular games that makes $$ after Team Fortress 2) this should also cause a large kickstart in driver performance as more users play their games on Linux.
Valve collects a lot of stats on systems that use their software, including hardware, driver versions, and installed libraries (I think?). They have the power to really drill down and find out which hardware and/or drivers are causing problems, and I expect they'll use it to good effect.
when that day comes, I am sure many would switch to Linux, especially among the developers. In the past few years using Windows, I have stopped thinking about device drivers at all, I just expected them to work. I am looking forward to the day where this comes to desktop Linux.
I feel like your and my experiences are completely reversed. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for 14 years, and in the past 8 years the idea of downloading drivers or hardware not working out of the box has become completely alien to me. The last driver I had to download for Linux was for a Lexmark printer in 2005. Everything since then has just worked. When I get in front of a windows machine, though, I'm always ripping through original packaging looking for network, graphics or peripheral drivers, even in Windows 7. I remember Windows XP SP2 didn't ship with drivers for the Intel Etherexpress line of network cards when it came out after 5 years of the eepro being one of the most popular network cards on the market. Insane. My normal trick became to boot the system onto a linux live cd or USB drive, download the drivers and then boot back to windows to install them.
I run Arch on a GTX 285 and never had graphics driver issues. All I ever had to do was tweak on coolbits in the xorg.conf to enable fan control and overclocking (which you have to do manually on Windows as well). The lack of any support of Nouveau makes me not want to buy an Nvidia product in the future, but Catalyst really is the elephant in the room - if only AMD would ditch it, make radeon work really well and embrace the kernel people to make it as good as the Intel driver, they would be in a really good spot.
But the drivers are there. If you are running any modern distro worth its salt, your graphics will work out of the box with the FOSS driver, and switching to the proprietary one is little more than a package get. Which is even easier than on Windows where you have to manually get the graphics driver if Windows doesn't recognize the card (sometimes it does).
Once Linux has good device drivers, someone will release a highly optimized distribution for gaming. Afterwards, I think Linux will start to become the leading desktop OS.
I have no problems with the Nvidia driver on Arch, and haven't had an issue in over a year. Everything runs rock solid, I've never had the display freeze or crash, and it runs a truckload of games in Wine.
Linux becoming a leading desktop OS is all about defaults. Unless it is sold in Best Buy on laptops as a default option, priced below the Windows variant license costs, it will always be a niche product because it requires users to go absurdly out of their way to find or install it.
The Steambox is much more likely to rectify that. Consumer Linux PCs in the guise of game consoles will get it wide deployment.
Linux does have some competitive advantages that may encourage stores to sell it pre-installed.
First, it is cheaper, so the store can advertise lower prices.
Second, many Linux distros look really nice, so if they have them set up on display their will be people who by it for that reason. Then, the first mover would get a reputation as the place that sells that awesome looking computer (and cheaper than the others).
Third, their is little direct cost to trying. They can install it on a few laptops, then if it doesn't work, re-image windows on them.
Of course, (I suspect) the main reason this has not happened yet is the (legitamite) fear that customers would be the computer and then say 'it doesn't work', when it cannot run software X, or open file Y.
I've been using Mac OS since OS 7.1 when I was ~14.
All through high school and my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree, and now working full time, I'm completely dumbfounded when Windows or Linux users talk about device drivers.
I was talking about not having to worry about device drivers and things "just working", you're talking about being on the latest and greatest version.
Those are two different discussions.
Obviously when Apple controls the hardware and software there are going to be some trade-offs, one of which, as you pointed out, is a lack of frequent updates.
Yup, I've been waiting for Dota2 on Linux steam for a few months now (getting the game to work via Wine & an ATI graphics card was one of the first things I spent hours figuring out after getting my linux box! http://www.hkmurakami.com/blog/2013/022_dota2_linux.html)
You didn't happen to run into (and solve) the issue of all characters moving in an extremely jerky fashion, did you (ie. take two steps forward, suddenly jerk back a frame)? It's the one thing I cannot solve and forces me to continue to dual boot >_>
Yet another reason to lament the lack of decent mouse driver support in GNU/Linux. As long as I have to relearn how to move my mouse in order to play a game, I'm going to keep a Windows box handy for games.
Yea my mouse is wonky as hell in Linux. Keyboard drivers too :( The mechanical keyboard I have at home doesn't even work in linux. Every keystroke registers as three other characters (e.g. the F1 key types out 'mij'). None of the keys work. But it works flawlessly on Windows. I realize this is as much the keyboard manufacturer's fault as anyone, but it just adds one more thing I'd have to sink hours into if I wanted to use Linux on my hardware.
If I wasn't into gaming, I'd be able to move completely off of Windows. But until games are available and peripherals "just work", that's not going to happen :(
Weird. I use a Das Keyboard and a $10 logitech mouse. I've never had any problems with mouse or keyboard on linux, ever.
They have always 'just worked'.
Is everyone with these stories using some obscure hardware which requires propietary windows drivers and/or some obscure distribution or something?
I'm not trying to be snarky or dismissive, but I've been using Linux for the last 14 years and I've never had any of these problems people talk about with regard to basic input devices or audio drivers.. even when I went through my Gentoo phase.
I have a fancy Logitech G500 (which is odd, because this mouse started as a cheapo MX510 and RMAs made it better and better over the years... haha, Logitech tech support is amazing and I always buy their stuff) and I'm surprised KDE recognizes all the buttons out of the box.
I also converted entirely from a Windows-only XP world, to a hybrid Ubuntu / 7 for gaming setup, and now I'm just running Arch only. I always got my pointer acceleration to align perfectly between them.
Hell, even the DPI switching on the G500 works. I think it is built into the mouse, though.
No, I've never had to download some weird proprietary driver for windows, keyboard or mouse. Doesn't work to me on vanillia ubuntu, dug around for a few hours trying to find a solution before just giving up and uninstalling.
The lack of games is my main issue - if that was solved, I may go buy a keyboard that works on linux :p
g400 (which is disappointing because my mx518 had no troubles on linux)
noppoo choc mini (only the new ones, the old ones work fine on linux). The keyboard at least is a solvable problem, and the weirdness is in large part due to the weird firmware which sort of pretends to be two keyboards. I found a fix for OSX, but was unable to figure out how to get it work in linux in under an hour. So, I just got an older keyboard for work where I have to use linux, and went back to using only windows at home.
I'd love to be in a situation where people who made peripherals made them work on linux in addition to windows, but that's not the way things work atm :(
Some clarifications
Yes, mice often have dpi-switching mapped to hardware buttons. However, as with my mouse, this hardware switching offers very limited granularity and many dpi "modes" can only be selected in software by a proprietary driver.
I'm mostly talking about RTS games (think StarCraft) as well as some rhythm games (think Osu!) where persistent mouse behavior is essential to playability.
Competitive fps players actually often play at very low dpi on essentially barebones hardware (think Intellimouse Optical @ 400dpi) compared to what's out there. Because these older mice don't actually have any dpi switching functionality, they usually don't require any special mouse drivers.
This is also not about whatever special fancy macro buttons on the mice not being supported.
If you desire a consistent mouse experience, you almost always want to leave the mice at their optimum DPI value and you are very limited in choice.
RTS players tend not to care about this because they do not need the level of accuracy required to ping off headshots while moving, thus they're happy with "good enough" while manipulating DPIs in ways that'll cause all sort of sensor problems which could be a deciding factor in an FPS game.
If you care about having the best mousing experince you're really talking about using a deathadder, g400 and their kin. You are correct though, fancy macro buttons and high price tags tend not to get you the best mouse. But to think the RTS player relies on their mouse as much as the FPS player is folly.
I play games at 1600cpi with a specific mouse with no acceleration. Even with the supposed fixes that disable acceleration in GNU/Linux, I don't get the same cursor response with my mouse that I would in Windows. In addition, my mouse's cpi can only be set to 1600 in software. This is especially problematic as I tend to play games where mouse accuracy is very important.
For what it's worth I had the exact same problem with Ubuntu; I play TF2 quite a bit and could not get the mouse controls to feel right at all. The acceleration just kills any accuracy when playing the game.
"System Requirements
PC or Mac with USB port
Windows® 8/ Windows® 7 / Windows Vista® / Windows® XP (32-bit)/ Mac OS X (v10.6-10.8)"
I enjoy the ability to fully utilize my right hand and minimize the amount of movement I do to and from the mouse, both for work and general computing.
Depending upon what you want from your mouse ( in the case of the naga, do you want custom binding of macros to buttons beyond a numeric keypad? => if so you need the driver support :( )
I have the Naga, and under linux you can program the buttons of it and any other mouse using imwheel. Then your macros are in a file on a disk, not on NVRAM on a mouse.
OK, it bothers me when people say "Steam on Linux".
It's really "Steam on Ubuntu". Some other distros are supported with 32-bit only packages, but if you're running a 64-bit OS you need .deb package support.
I haven't installed 32-bit support on any Linux system I've provisioned this decade. Even corporate IT at my job, who are normally borderline incompetent at providing a workable environment, have native 64-bit packages for everything I use.
So when Steam (and Skype, and so on) gets released "for Linux", I just sigh and shake my head.
I'm a Linux user. And I can't run your program. Don't tell me it's "for" me.
Valve is only providing official support for Ubuntu. The licence for the Steam Launcher (in Ubuntu) specifically grants permission for people to modify and redistribute the launcher to make it work on other platforms.
Yes...for instance, I use Arch Linux. 64-bit. With no 32-bit support.
I want to support Steam on Linux because I think it's a good thing. But I don't want to install 32-bit support in order to do so.
I realize that I'm complaining about something that has an easy workaround I'm refusing to use. But it's weird that they'll support 64-bit Ubuntu and not 64-bit anything else.
I'm pretty sure Google will ban it. They don't allow competing app stores (same reason Amazon basically forked the entire stack for their Kindle devices).
Maybe Valve will distribute Steam Android devices, but that seems silly.
If Valve wants to get mobile, they need to hope for the success of Ubuntu Phone / Plasma Active / Tizen. Even Ubuntu Phone is probably going to block in the Canonical app store competing markets.
Yes, but I don't see a difference between this and Steam on PC. An appstore is just an easy way to download apps. Steam can make a special homepage on Steam PC + a badge + a free valve game for every gamer using the app, and the google interdiction will just be nothing.
It is expectations and habits. On Android devices, people expect to get applications from Play / Amazon stores rather than manually downloading and installing an apk. I expect that a supermajority of Android users by a huge margin would not even understand the concept of "download and install an application package" even though they do it every day on Windows. They see Android, they go to the app store for programs.
Google cant ban apps. They do not have the ability. Sure, they can prevent it from going on their market, but nothing is stopping you from downloading an apk from anywhere (or making your own) and installing it.
It's the slow move from the Operating System to the GPU code; most games find Windows as much a hinderance as a help. I wonder if MS will try to do something useful to woo game developers more towards the Windows platform?
PC game developers could hardly be wooed any further in that direction. A game being released for Linux two years after Windows is hardly an imminent threat.
It's not a matter of when it was released, but that it's an indication that Valve is porting its Source engine to Linux. It looks like Future Valve games are going to be released on all three platforms simultaneously, which is a pretty big win for Linux.
Dota2 hasn't even been released yet. People are still playing a test version. It's still possible (though unlikely) for a simultaneous Windows/Mac/Linux release!
Meh, that's a weird nomenclature game. It's beta like Google Maps was for the first six years of its life. Valve is selling and running international tournaments on this "open beta." Like, it may say "beta," but it is definitely released. You can go on Steam and buy it right now. They even have a separate test client in addition to the nominally "beta" normal client.
With Google and Apple already controlling the mobile app stores, various console manufacturers controlling their own ecosystems, and Microsoft attempting to abandon their "open" Windows (so they can run their own app store) - the industry is shifting into a position of hardware/OS manufacturers/monopolies taking massive cuts (30%) from the software market. Valve, without any hardware of their own, but a very large PC app store with a significant user base, really has nowhere else to turn. Gabe himself has expressed quite a bit of dismay over Microsoft's recent decisions.
I expect them to use everything in their power to make Linux become a mainstream thing. They're going to port all of their own games to Linux, and I expect at some point there will be Linux-only discounts for their games.
I really hope Microsoft underestimated their power, and that Valve is capable of doing this. It'll be better for all of us. The software industry is heading in very bad directions, and this is at least a glimmer of hope.