I've heard similar theories about SteamOS. That it was a threat to Microsoft since they had just released their own store on Windows 8 that competed with Steam. I'm inclined to believe it since Valve seems to not care about it much anymore.
Since MS is mostly "behaving" themselves, Valve is keeping SteamOS around, but not focusing on it.
At least for now... (it wouldn't surprise me if MS became more aggressive in their W10+DX12+"Xbox everywhere"+"MS Store" push...)
Isn't that the core market?
Any sources to back up this claim? 10% performance hit compared to what? Windows? A different Linux distro?
I've found that for native games, Linux can actually offer better performance in many cases than the Windows version.
Someone also did a test recently (full video on Youtube) with the Windows version of the new Doom running on Linux through the WINE emulation (yes I know its not technically an emulator) via Vulkan and the performance exceeded the Windows version.
This isn't necessarily valve's fault though. It's because the devs will shit out a Linux build without even trying to run it or they just don't care.
Some games work great. Some don't work at all and shouldn't even be listed with Linux support.
I sincerely hope Linux takes off as a viable gaming platform. All the tools and components are there. The only thing missing at the moment is developer mindshare.
There are some problems and glitches unrelated to the games, in my experience (like how newer nvidia GPUs have screen tearing on Ubuntu -- unrelated to vsync, by the way -- and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it for the time being)
Ah, here it is. From https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3snvpc/steamo...
"took a quick peek at the latest Geekbench executable for Linux(3.3.2,) it was compiled with GCC 4.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 - a 5 and a half year old compiler. Windows version was compiled with MSVC 2012 update 4 released 2 years ago."
Take note: That ars article was done ~15 months ago (november 2015). In it, they used Ubuntu 10.04, which was released in April of 2010 (thus '10.04')! Steam wasn't even released on Linux, until nearly 3 years later, in 2013!
That article is so BS that you should ignore it outright. It's not even fit to be toilet paper.
Borderlands 2, for example, plays fine for me on a i7 930, with a GTX 570. An older rig.
Dota 2 with OpenGL rendering hits or exceeds the Windows FPS when run on Linux.
Switch to Vulkan though and it craters.
Source engine games with OpenGL rendering often outperform Windows.
nah, not really, only dota2, because has no wrapper, at least for valve's source games.
Most of the issue revolves around GPU drivers, which in theory valve is not responsible for, but they have hired devs to work on the open source AMD drivers. Even then, most devs don't optimize for OpenGL. That's again on the dev, and not valve, unless valve is going to provide devs to every game developer out there to provide linux support. Vulkan (hopefully) would resolve that, as optimizing vulkan builds makes games run better everywhere.
Of course they aren't putting ALL their eggs in this basket. ~90% of their revenue comes from windows, so they should be putting most of their effort into windows support. You can't lose your current customers while trying to make the future better. The fact that they are in fact fixing things and hiring driver devs is a great sign. And I believe they provided the rocket league dev too?
Either way, progress is coming, slow and steady. linux as a primary gaming platform works just fine for me, thanks to valve.
Confirmed by a happy occasional CS:GO player here.
Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, specially Microsoft, go the extra mile to make sure games perform well on their platforms, even special casing APIs for specific games.
Windows also runs on arbitrary hardware
Valve isnt trying to discourage devs from using windows. Windows is still their main income source. Linux only devs aren't going to make valve money during the transition to windows. The goal is to build the game library on linux so it is a valid competitor.
Also, they can't really make a ton of special OS level APIs, since they are trying to keep things generic. they dont want to fork Linux, they want to maintain compatibility. I mean, open is the entire premise of leaving windows. And if you mean higher level APIs, there's things like: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/ one of the top things in porting a game, is that directX covers more than just graphics. opengl + SDL2 covers most of it. steam audio makes it so you can write code once and have it work everywhere.
So yeah, they are working on making APIs that make it easier for devs to release linux/SteamOS games without needing the player base already there, because linux "just works" with the middleware.
The short of it is: they are actively doing a lot of stuff to advance linux gaming still, just a lot of it is behind the scenes now and aimed at devs or not directly steam related (you dont see the fact that they hire mesa devs through steam updates).
When one attends GDC, they have booths were they give support directly to customers, they also fly-in to relevant studios to sort out any kind of performance or bug related problems they might be facing.
And the point still stands that this is a future investment for them. They aren't pushing to make linux exclusive, they are pushing to make linux viable. Valve has ~360 employees. Linux has a ~1% gaming market share. If valve has even 4 employees working on Linux, they are essentially scaling their effort based on current income from the platform, whereas Sony/Microsoft get 100% of their income from a singular platform, so they spend 100% of their expenses on building that platform. If valve switched over and said "ok, all employees full bore on SteamOS, ignore windows", they would lose a LOT of money. Besides, the goal here isn't to make SteamOS "their" platform, they goal is to make gaming work on an open platform. Microsoft has to entice people with support in order to keep them locked in to their garden, Valve is trying to unlock the garden (to an extent).
if they want growth, they should spend more than just 1% on the platform, but people are acting like they are spending 0% on the platform. It's still improving and actively being worked on, but this is a big undertaking for a team of 4, OS updates, dev support, steam client, etc etc... And if the team is bigger than 4, then they are in fact spending more than 1% on a 1% market segment, which still proves the point of "they havent abandoned it, its just not growing at the 'right' pace in publicly obvious ways"
https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-just-added-the-best-way-of...
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/28/windows-10-will-soon-blo...