Valve Says "Yes" To Steam Linux This Year
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
One is Steam on linux period. Even if it were its own little universe, having the support of Valve and the steam platform opens up a lot of opportunities for gaming on linux.
Another is Valve's core games on linux, which would definitely give a big kickstart to linux as a gaming platform.
Perhaps the most important could be when the top tier multi-platform game engines begin including linux as a targeted platform as a matter of routine.
Sometimes, mac ports that are done by third parties are not on steam because they can't split the revenue, so you still have to get the mac version separately.
But even with all the hurdles, I think this is a great step in the right direction.
Steam on Linux will probably ship with the audio/graphics/input libraries it needs, so 3rd party developers don't have to worry about environment nearly as much.
Wasteland 2 chose Unity engine because it's so cross-platform. It even has unpolished Linux support. The Linux port of Unity hasn't been released, because developers were doing that in their spare time and it wasn't up to Unity creators' standards. Now, InExile has been given Unity source for purposes of creating a decent Linux port. It's a single anecdote, but it illustrates what I'm saying above. Makers of Unity will probably want to get the most out of it, so Linux port of Unity will be contributed "upstream" and it's very likely that Unity will support Linux from now on.
I do not see Valve releasing clients for every distro out there.
For Linux/Ubuntu to be really strong in gaming, Steam is a big plus, however we also need strong driver support from nVidia and ATI. As far as I know, the best drivers on Linux are still not on par with their equivalent on Windows in terms of performance. If playing the same game on Linux means losing 10 fps on your favorite game, this may not be a very enticing alternative if you have both systems installed.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-46...
The thing is, somebody updates the GPU drivers on Linux, with OS X most of the time you're tied to the drivers that came with your OS installation.
Forget performance, ATI drivers are so unstable it's barely usable (eg. Gnome 3 restarting regularly, like once per hour), and that's just plain desktop apps (Vim/browser), trying to run some version of VLC from default repo instantly crashed the PC (needed to restart), when I tried to play games random graphics bugs were everywhere (texture artifacts, framebuffer not clearing properly, etc.) All distros I've tried so far have problems with closed source drivers, and the OSS ones don't have HW 3D I think because it's slow as hell. Also - you can't alt-tab from full screen games. I looked it up, found a post that started with "you need to modify your xconfig" closed the tab. I think linux needs a lot more polish to be viable for everyday use as multimedia/gaming desktop OS, I would love to ditch the windows partition and rebooting but I don't think it's going to happen soon.
I guess that would depend on how the client software is built and if they utilize the shared libraries included in the Linux distribution. If dependencies are compiled into the distributed binaries, it's really not that hard to repackage the artifacts into different packages for different systems.
Credit to Humble Bundle for showing that DRM-free can be profitable, and Linux can make up a substantial slice of the revenue pie.
That I can definitely get behind!
I'm tempted to install another partition of Windows with nothing on it except steam and the drivers necessary for me to play games, to see if it'll make starting steam any faster.
In all seriousness though (and this is a question that everyone should ask themselves semi-regularly in a product-consumer situation): why do you matter? If you don't have a compelling answer to this question, it may be that you don't.
The problem with people arguing about DRM is that fundamentally most people don't seem to care. Video games are a billion dollar industry, but non-DRM'd games are not.
You can vote with your wallet, but the data seems to indicate that your wallet is too small to matter.
> Video games are a billion dollar industry, but non-DRM'd games are not.
It only should increase the incentive to avoid buying DRMed games, and specifically support those who aren't scared to release theirs DRM free.
For example look at the latest Humble Indie Bundle. Linux users pay highest average for the set. It shows that they encourage developers to produce Linux games more than users of other OSes (obviously since Linux games scene is lacking). You can argue, that Linux games market is miniscule, and if so, why even bother to send your message in such form? But you still see people showing appreciation, and developers can take note of this.
If we assume every bundle gets a total of a million dollars, shared between 5 games or so, that makes 200 000 per game, minus the donations to charity and the fees to the Humble Bundle organization. Let's say 150 000 dollars per game in the end. 15%-20% is 23 000 to 30 000 dollars, just for the Linux Port. If you are an small team of indie developpers, I'd say that is not negligible at the end of the day.
In my opinion Kickstarter (or grant) model is infinitely better, because it doesn't insist on treating a game like a physical object. The "selling software" model is horribly flawed. Writing software is like research - a big cost and effort once, then very little cost to benefit from it. It is fair to have effort of research/software development proportional to reward the researchers/devs are getting. With "selling software/drugs" it's not proportional.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/05/18/th...
Hell, one of the biggest reasons I patronize the Humble Indie Bundles is because I can get the games into my Steam account.
There is a positive side of Valve's interest in Linux though. It'll encourage others to pay more attention to Linux, and eventually more DRM free games will be available too.
I don't think that follows.
Steam takes that to the next level -- because they can add fines of real money (losing your account), and actual permanent bans (of credit cards and real identities) as the cost of cheating, the gaming community embraced it and cheers for it.
So, we are in a situation where the vast majority of the player base considers DRM not just acceptable, or good, but a strictly necessary part of the product. The things that are commonly considered the evils of DRM (ability to take away ability to use product) are instead considered a primary selling point. How's that for food for thought.
And to single player games this issue doesn't apply at all.
GMs do not have the power to that job, unless they have something that's approximately equal to DRM. Catching a subtle cheater is a much, much bigger job than cheating. If someone cheats every day, you'd be lucky to catch him once a month. To actually stop cheating from happening, you need penalties that are high enough to make that once a month count -- so permanent global (so they won't just move on to the next server) bans (and ip bans don't cut it), or failing that, monetary punishment.
Tell me how your third party arbiters achieve that without essentially implementing DRM?
> And to single player games this issue doesn't apply at all.
Except when there is publicly visible scoring/achievements system that you want to keep pure. >90% of new games on the market are either mp or do that.
From the player perspective, I'd choose a multiplayer game based on the community. Sometimes community can identify cheating just by observing something unnatural, and those users will quickly be boycotted. So GMs are needed to intervene when human decision is necessary. They not necessarily have to detect the issue themselves first.
(Correct my if I'm wrong, that's what I remember from reading about it before, but something could have changed recently.)
If they have publicly promised it, and people have taken action upon it (for instance buying games that they wouldn't have bought otherwise), then if they fail carry through on it you have grounds to sue for promissory estoppel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel for more on that.
Winning said lawsuit is not a sure thing. But the pledge may wind up being more binding than it would appear on the surface.
"Unless there was some situation I don't understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available."
So, that's pretty clearly not a guarantee of anything. And furthermore, as another poster there said, the thing Valve employee doesn't understand is bankruptcy. Unless there is a legally binding agreement, they won't be allowed to just give away such a valuable asset. Bankruptcy doesn't mean they fire everyone, shut down everything, and burn down the buildings. It means they sell off the profitable parts and try to keep them running. And the ability to control tons of DRMed games people have installed is very valuable.
A real, legally binding promise would be something like KDE had with Trolltech. Trolltech explicitly (real contract, real lawyers, etc) guaranteed, even in bankruptcy or change of ownership, that if they stopped making open source releases, then Qt would become available under the BSD license. (This was more important back before Qt was already GPLed, as it is now)
I personally love and trust Valve, but I understand that others may have a different risk tolerance.
Please point out where I said it wasn't.
But if you're going to be snarky and pedantic about it, please point out where I said you said Steam isn't DRM.
For example requiring one to connect to their server prior to playing (implicit requirement of having an Internet connection) is a ridiculous restriction.
What overhead? You mean the 100MB RAM and 0.1% CPU the Steam client takes? Wow, that really is a high price to pay for the ability to re-download any game I own on any PC, and the automatic updates.
requiring one to connected to their server prior to playing is a ridiculous restriction.
Steam offers offline mode. You only need connect to their server when you download the game. Now, some games are more restrictive, but those are not made by Valve- only offered on their platform. That was someone else's choice.
It is a good model, IMO, and similar to what Amazon does when an e-book is priced at $14.99 ("This price was set by the publisher"). Let other companies do what they like, and let the market decide for itself.
Clearly, if you hate DRM for philosophical reasons, you will hate Steam. If you're pragmatic, you may love it.
I do use steam. A lot. Unfortunately, everything sometimes doesn't just work. For example, I've been left without access to my games a number of times due to internet problems (either in general or just with my gaming desktop) and while offline mode could get around that, I need to be connected to the internet to put it into offline mode and its rare, if ever, that I'll know about internet problems in advance.
So not everything just works for me.
Besides that, though, Steam is the first store in which I've ever impulse bought games - and I've done so multiple times now and probably the majority of all games I own are through Steam. They just make it so easy to find games I want, check the forums for criticism, buy the game, download it and then connect to friends. That experience is one they've done very well and why I still use it despite having had problems. Luckily my account has never been locked - thats a horror story I don't want to experience...
The gap between programmer and user is Linux's biggest fault. For example Unity, developers recognised an issue with the UI. Instead of doing user studies and tweaking it for the better they canned Gnome and reprogrammed it. Now they're in the same situation but with an entirely different codebase.
Having a large company with a product that has to work will add consistency, and hopefully force Linux to start tweaking instead of redeveloping.
I might actually install it on my next machine.
2. I do believe your view of Unity is a bit odd. Canonical recognized that the state of Linux UI/DE was NOT going to make the leap from programmer. They saw this VIA user studies. That is when they decided to create Unity. And user study after user study Unity keeps coming out ahead of all the other DE in Linux and is on par with usability of current OSX. Point being, Ubuntu is going after users the right way. Unity in 12.04 shows this and the reviews speak to it.
3. Sometimes you simply have to rewrite. This is a fact (sorry Joel) in software. The challenge is to recognize when it is necessary and avoid it when not 100% necessary to achieve your business objectives.
In 2012.
The problem here is twofold, though I'm not necessarily saying these comments apply to you, you are apparently willing to endure some inconvenience.
First, people should always check hardware support before buying a laptop if they intend to install Linux. I'm not trying to be a neck-beaded dick (although I do need to shave), I'm just pointing out that many of the problems people have with Linux stem from well-known incompatibilities that could have been avoided with different hardware choices. Which brings me nicely to the second point...
There is a communication issue in the Linux community. We (I'm including myself here) need to stop over-selling Linux. It is not a computing panacea for everyone, and so long as hardware support lags behind Windows "selling" Linux as a drop-in Windows replacement isn't a good strategy.
Getting someone to install Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE isn't a victory for the community if his hardware isn't compatible and things don't work right. It would be better to tell him that he should think about purchasing a Linux-compatible computer in the future and perhaps directing him to a list of compatible hardware.
Sure. But that wont cure a fundamental problem with the X11/Xorg infrastructure.
You cannot quickly and switch desktop orientation, resolution and layout (not to mention drivers) seamlessly like on Windows without killing your entire X-session. Killing your entire session. Jeez.
At the root of this problem is an architecture which is lagging on what Microsoft could deliver in Windows 98. You cannot make Windows and reboot-jokes while you have this Achilles-heel dragging your video subsystem. You seriously cannot.
And no new version of Ubuntu can overcome this underlying issue, no matter how much fluff and candy they add elsewhere, as long as they rely on the ancient relic that is X11.
As far as I know, when Google decided to make Android and ChromeOS (a complete failure as far as any metric goes, but still worth mentioning) they decided:
1. to base it on Linux, because that makes sense and
2. not to base it on X11 because they wanted it to be flexible and they wanted their users not be limited by what architects could think of in the 1984.
For end-user Linux to ever become user-friendly Xorg needs a complete architectural overhaul. I cannot see anyone arguing this.
And even if seemingly everyone agrees on this, nobody is pushing forward for it to happen. Make of that what you like.
The only thing that is really ugly in X11 is the protocol, but so is win32 api :)
On my Ubuntu system, I can change orientation, resolution, and layout from a little control panel without restarting the session. I have no idea if Xorg restarts; the superficial behavior is almost identical to Windows. From the user's point of view, it doesn't seem to matter.
> For end-user Linux to ever become user-friendly Xorg needs a complete architectural overhaul.
Every mainstream desktop environment seems to have handled the major aspects of display usability just fine. The only serious issues I've encountered have been one-off bugs related to drivers.
> I cannot see anyone arguing this.
Everyone agrees X is a mess. But why must we continue to use X and not Wayland?
#!/bin/sh
xrandr --output LVDS1 --off
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1200 --rotate left
xrandr --output HDMI1 --mode 1920x1200 --left-of VGA1 --rotate left
Dependencies is still a problem, however. There are still a few cases where I had to spend significant time to make a game run correctly because of dependencies. And the online resources on this matter are scarce.
But even on a Linux backend, it's possible to introduce specific formats encompassing all needed libraries. That's what being done on the Open Pandora, where a single PND file contains, in a zipped format, the executable, all the needed libraries, and the data for the game. That way, you avoid the problem altogether.
I doubt Valve need two years to port it to Linux. With Gabe's track record of taking his time developing software, I don't think we should get our hopes up too soon.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-08-12-valve-on-st...
It very interesting to me to think about Valve's motivations for doing this. One theory is that they want to develop a console (which I have heard denounced as a far fetches rumour on here).
So if we assume that this is not the case, and that you have a smart and well established company like Valve porting their flagship products to the Linux platform; what does that say about how they see the future for Linux in the consumer space?
In other threads we have people worried that the coming UEFIgate will leave the majority of devices locked out of running a Linux OS. If this is the case then why would Valve now be deciding to take on the task of porting everything over to a platform that was as good as dead to the consumer?
If the future is ARM based devices and UEFI then people won't be able to install Linux even Windows 8 sucks to an obscene degree.
(Yes, I know there are differences, but the point is that the same base code can be ported easy if they do it right)
steam install halflife2episode2
that is, if they provide a command line interface :-)
steam install halflife2episode3
[1] http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2011.pdf
[2] http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/video-game-industry-...
Are you referring to the Steam Mobile app? (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/steam-mobile/id495369748?mt=8)
That's a pretty far cry from being a real client. Granted, I'm sure it's been hell trying to figure out how to play in Apple's garden - not to mention porting their engine to iOS/Android. But still, they've got a ways to go before I think we can call them a real player in the mobile gaming market.
EDIT:
> For another, Steam was released a decade ago in 2002 - and if that's "1 decade too late," […]
Good point. Steam was a huge game changer and still continues to impress me. But I think the parent was referring to being a decade too late in the sense that the industry is shifting to mobile (though I'm not sure I completely agree - not for the AAA titles on Steam, anyway).
Desktop gaming is not shrinking. It's rapidly shifting from physical retail to digital delivery, and it's very likely growing very rapidly. Most of that "other delivery formats" column is Steam, not mobile and browser games.
Of course, no-one outside Valve actually knows that, because they choose do not publish sales data, and they were estimated to have 70% of the digital delivery market in 2009, and probably much more of it now.
Mobile and browser games may be growing very, very fast, but that's a very fractioned world, based on micro-payments. That's not where you'll see most of the "AAA" titles in the near future anyway.
Overall, there are a lot of different needs to cater to, and people playing on browsers are probably very different from the ones playing on consoles, and so on. None of this segments is going to fade away any time soon.
If Valve manage to deliver a platform with an easy-install that works cross distro it would seem a very good place for developers who want to port to Linux but are scared of distro fragmentation issues.
I hope that I will be able to run games under Linux that I have already bought for windows without having to re-buy them.
In other words, I doubt Valve is going to create a hyper-robust platform that can intelligently install any package; that's completely unnecessary for their purposes.
What this would provide is a "distro within a distro" where only things like the kernel version would vary. This would potentially allow anything within steam to sidestep a load of the distro compatibility issues. Instead of creating a .deb and a .rpm you just package for Steam.
Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market. I'm sure I'll enjoy a few Steam games on my Linux box (which I use basically 100% of the time), but this is hardly a paradigm shift. Consoles and mobile (maybe "web" will persist as a separate sub-market, but I'm not sure about that) are the future of gaming platforms.
Source?
Let's throw bullshit in the air, it's not like anybody has numbers or give a flying shit about them anyway.
> Consoles [...] are the future of gaming platforms.
Consoles have been the future of gaming platforms for 25 years now. And oddly, computers are still there as gaming platforms with developers and distributors making significant amounts of money from them. Hell, computer-based gaming has never been better as far as I'm concerned, the big shitty franchise-based publishers are getting the fuck away from it and indies are coming back to the front of the scene.
Consoles are not the future of anything, they're a gaming media amongst others. And mobile is nice, I play a lot on my phone, but let's not kid ourselves: it's the future of killing handled consoles and that's about it.
Second-best graphics card (GeForce 680) is $550 these days.
Xbox 360 was $300/$400 depending which version you chose. PS3 was $500/$600 and I really can't imagine next generation being significantly more than that.
Or were you talking about something else?
Console growth is considerable. Hand-held, including phones and phone-like devices, is growing even faster.
What's prevented consoles from fully conquering the desktop is a few key applications for which the PC is still a superior platform. One is ultra-high-performance graphics, especially when directed at enthusiasts, and the other is anything that requires a keyboard to be reasonably useful, e.g. strategy games and MMORPGs.
If the next generation consoles include a mouse and a wireless keyboard, the PC gaming market would implode in a matter of years.
Kids that have grown up with an XBox of PS3 aren't going to want to fiddle with drivers or find out how to patch their game using the "Downloader App" or endlessly wrestle with DRM. They won't bother to switch unless there's a very good reason, and every day there's fewer reasons.
Have you used Steam? It patches games automatically and you don't have to fiddle with DRM. My Steam client keeps dozens of games perfectly current without asking me. This is part of why everyone loves it: specifically because it makes it as close to painless as you're going to get.
Also, I'm guessing that a good number of current PC devs/gamers grew up playing a Nintendo console, and they still migrated over, somehow.
Even as painless as Steam is, there's still the driver wrestling, yak-shaving that is maintaining a properly working Gaming PC. Some people enjoy the challenge. This is not going to fly with those used to the "put in disc, play game" crowd.
In time the "PC" will slowly fade away to be replaced by other things just as the precursor to the PC, like the "Minicomputer" and the "Mainframe", will become an anachronism. I'm not saying this will happen tomorrow, but you'll see a shift over the next ten years.
There comes a point where the performance advantage offered by the PC, which is considerable, is negated by the fact that developers can't make use of it. What good would a graphics card with 3,000,000 shaders be today? Why should you need a 256-core CPU to play games? If your equivalent console had only 1,000,000 shaders and 64-cores, which would surely attract scorn and derision, would you really be missing out on much in the scheme of things?
aka it handles all DRM issues as long as you leave Ubisoft rotting.
I was very annoyed when I couldn't play COD4 with keyboard + mouse on the 360.
There are a few trackball controllers (http://trackballcontroller.com/) which promise to fix this, but I wonder about that. Most balls are removable for cleaning, and anything removable on a controller will end up underneath the couch eventually.
PC's were never originally intended to be games machines anyway, my first PC didn't even have a soundcard (as was common for PCs in ~1993) yet id certainly did well with wolf3d on the PC.
Since people are currently doing their work on a PC/laptop and that is also what they are using for web browsing etc it makes sense for them to re purpose it into a gaming platform. This is especially true of either very casual gamers who just want to play farmville or a few flash games and don't want another device, it is also very true for techy types who enjoy building high performance systems for the purpose of gaming.
Of course this really goes down to how you define a "PC", I think of Steam as basically a games console implemented inside my PC. Let's say for example a system is released with high performance graphics than runs a stripped down Linux distro with only Steam + a few other apps. Is this a PC or a console?
On the other side of the fence , MS is making their Xbox more PC like. For example adding internet explorer.
PC gaming will only die when the PC itself does.
So we're doing that thing where we just make shit up now about the largest gaming market in the world?
Consoles are a primarily American/Japanese phenomenon with some other western countries participating. PC gaming is how the entire world games and it's growing faster than ever.
The "entire world" doesn't really matter. If some dude in Somalia has money to buy a PC game, he probably has money to buy a console.
Recipe to make desktop into console. 1. plug desktop into tv. 2. buy wireless mini-keyboard and mouse, or install menu system that operates by D-pad to select games. 3. There is no step three.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/97705-pc-gaming-vs-console...