The “Faster Zombies” blog post | Hacker News Reader

The “Faster Zombies” blog post

richg42.blogspot.com

92 pointsBuuQu9hu15 comments

"Valve being deeply involved with Linux also gives the company a "worse case scenario" hedge vs. Microsoft. It's like a club held over MS's heads. They just need to keep spending the resources to keep their in-house Linux expertise in a healthy state."

This is absolutely the point of Valve's Linux involvement, Steam Machine, and so on. It doesn't have to be perfect. It barely has to even work. It's a "fleet in being", ready for a fight with Microsoft that may never come.

Apple take 30% from all game transactions on Apple's iOS.

Google take 30% of all game transactions on Google's Android. (Amazon presumably take 30% from all Fire devices, but hardly anyone uses their store).

Valve take 30% of (many) game transactions on Microsoft's Windows. Somewhere at Microsoft there is a whiteboard with 'Valve' crossed out and 'Microsoft' written instead. They've a long way to go there without getting shot down by anti-monopoly authorities, but don't think they'll never try.

> Somewhere at Microsoft there is a whiteboard with 'Valve' crossed out and 'Microsoft' written instead.

This is exactly the kind of visual that we need in order to coherently think about the past and future of software.

It's a great short-story writing prompt.

Apple's App Store breaks even, and Google loses money on their market. Most app stores have classically done pretty bad. Hell: Steam's revenue is flat (new news as of today); and, if you consider its income, is meaningless to Microsoft. So, no: Microsoft almost certainly doesn't care about this market from a monetary perspective, no matter how large you like to think 30% is (which itself is just so deceptive: they provide diatribution and license management in addition to payment processing; conservatively high estimates of the take of a 30%-of-rebenue app store is usually more like 10%).

The reason these companies have gated stores and force paynents through them is for control over developers and lock in of purchases for users: what makes Steam a target for Microsoft is not that they extract some piddly percentage of a meager business on top of their platform, but the very premise here that if Steam ever wanted to they could just walk to another platform and users would get to take the investment of their software with them. Users on Android who spend hundreds of dollars on software from the Play Store will have to buy all that software again if they want it on an iPhone, but users who bought hundreds of dollars of software from Steam on Windows get to take it all with them if they move to Linux. If Microsoft has a graphic with Steam crossed out and Microsoft written in, it is for control, not revenue.

It's a shame if the biggest impact of Steam on Linux has been to encourage Microsoft to improve DirectX performance. I wasn't aware of Valve layoffs particularly hitting the Linux team, but it doesn't surprise me. Valve's efforts towards Linux have been quite minimal in the last year or so. Perhaps they're working on something behind the scenes, but SteamOS/Machines were effectively dead on arrival, and even Steam VR/HTC Vive still doesn't support Linux.

The "faster zombies" blog post mentioned was very big news at the time for Linux gaming, but since then, not a single OpenGL game has replicated the performance of L4D2. It's an accepted fact that games will see an FPS hit on Linux - not the end of the world, but not something that's ever going to attract gamers to switch to Linux unless they have other reasons.

Vulkan may change things, Dota 2 and Talos Principle benchmarks have been promising, and showing signs of the Windows beating (or at least matching) performance they promised 5 years ago.

A shame from the perspective of larger linux adoption, maybe, or by other viewpoints.

From the perspective of most consumers in the population of gamers it's a superb result. Competition in the platform space has resulted in improved performance and spurred development of technologies that facilitate better gaming experiences across several dimensions.

Why should Valve be a crusader for Linux? Their goal is to make great games and serve gamers.

> Why should Valve be a crusader for Linux?

Because they can put a definitive end on the standoff between them and Microsoft.

But that is not, and should not be their main goal. And if it's too expensive, it may end up detrimental to the "great games" goal. So, they should be looking into it, but there may be really good reasons to not do it.

I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

Overall, I'd guess the Gabe (having worked at Microsoft) is pretty comfortable with that platform, but likes having Linux their as a hedge (with potential to open up new markets too).

> I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

I wonder what's changed. Used to be people would reboot into Linux for better performance in Quake.

I don't recall that ever being a thing, and my quake addiction began playing on a cyrix based computer at large (for the time) lan parties.

We did a lot of things to eek out more performance but as far as I recall no one was booting to Linux to do anything except run dedicated servers.

It certainly worked for me. Linux ran SNES9x, Quake, and UltraHLE faster than Windows 95/98. I even got better pings. I stopped doing this around the time Windows 2000 came out.

It's not that people aren't willing to put in the effort to optimize games for Linux, it's the reality of graphics drivers being effectively a massive collection of bugs and special cases for specific titles or common programmer errors. If you have a direct line to the manufacturers like Valve does, you can ask for bugs to be fixed, for specific optimizations, or even for engineers to fly over and tune your shaders. For regular developers, you're happy if your game just works.

I remember Valve articles from that period when the Windows 8 Store was being introduced, and Valve started pushing Linux. I remember reading a similar article from them on the subject, but that one mentioned DirectX 9 Source Engine on Windows performance versus OpenGL 3 on Linux, which is a shady comparison to say the least. Just mentioning it, since such details got curiously ommited in the referenced article.

s/discrete/discreet/

A mod should perhaps retitle this. It's an insider's look at Valve's Linux effort. The title is correct, but not great out of context.

Agreed. The title really doesn't make sense.

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