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Comment by matt_heimer | Hacker News Reader

I have to wonder if the Ubuntu/Redhat type of Linux is really the right target for Valve. Those tiny Android on a stick and Ouya type of systems are just going to keep increasing in power. I guess you could dual-boot Android/Ubuntu but I see Android winning against desktop Linux for most consumers.

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>I see Android winning against desktop Linux for most consumers

Erm... maybe, but not for the consumers who are in Valve's target demographic. Valve sells AAA video games, and while tiny systems might have the hardware to be able to play today's TF2 five years from now, their games will also have moved on.

Android only works on PC at all through third-party forks, and certainly doesn't have GPU support. Whatever else you think of Canonical, they've been taking point on getting graphics driver support for Linux.

> their games will also have moved on.

Valve Time seems to disagree.

Valve Time is a popular joke because of Half-Life, but if you set that aside they actually release things pretty consistently. With all the engine improvements and content updates, TF2 in 2013 is only barely comparable to TF2 in 2007 in terms of gameplay, and not at all in terms of system requirements to play at high quality. And apart from that, since the Orange Box in 2007, they've released major games in 2008 (L4D), 2009 (L4D2), 2011 (Portal 2), 2012 (CS:GO), and 2013 (DOTA 2). The only year they missed was 2010, but that was the year they released the OSX ports of all the Source games. They also rolled out Linux support this year, although I imagine the transition from OSX to Ubuntu was much less difficult than from Windows to OSX.

I recommend you to read again the article. Newell here makes some interesting points that directly address your concerns. Briefly:

(a) Games of tomorrow will be made to host creative communities, which almost mandate those games to be for desktops. It's just too awkward to do serious modding work in a tablet.

(b) What is really worrying about the PC is not the format being outdated -- Minecraft, LoL, TF2 and WoW attest to its potential. What's wrong is Microsoft awkwardly replicating mobile ecosystems. Creating videogames now is all about novelty, taking ideas to market fast, and growing cool communities around these games. This just can't happen, when your platform maker is Big Brother's whiny, lazy cousin.

All in all, I just don't get why the Droid Brigade is so enthused about mobile gaming. It's probably an USian localism. The cons: Android smartphones are slow and jerky and shit; the iPhone is like Manhattan if it were a North Korean gulag; fat-fingering your way around is the shittiest of input methods; and most of the games are preheated gimmicks, tastelessly exploited before the camera until boredom strikes.

The big thing missing from that discussion was any real discussion of input devices, other than a mention that these are important. The CPU & GPU and other stuff in the base box are relatively easy to handle with an arbitrary version of Linux or Linux derivative. The interesting action is in coming up with innovative input devices that will appeal to a broad enough main seam audience that game writers will support them.

The obvious reason is that Ubuntu has proper support for x86_64, and Nvidia graphics cards. You can't play AAA games on an ARM SOC (yet). Plus Ubuntu (w/ Nvidia drivers) supports the latest OpenGL, and the native display stack is quicker than Dalvik + Native on Android.

I couldn't think of a better target for Valve than Ubuntu or Redhat.

Actually ARM SOC faces some serious issues about increasing performance. Especially with memory on chip. None of the ARM fabs are able to produce at the size needed to get further speed increases easily. Intel on the other hand is still driving their size down.

Most of the performance increases in ARM recently have been from multiple cores. That ship has sailed. The low hanging fruit has been gathered. Anyone expecting performance increases similar to what Intel managed on the x86 over time is going to be disappointed.

Intel will probably get isn't offerings down to compete with ARM before ARM is able to boost performance to compete with Intel.

> Actually ARM SOC faces some serious issues about increasing performance. Especially with memory on chip. None of the ARM fabs are able to produce at the size needed to get further speed increases easily. Intel on the other hand is still driving their size down.

Didn't apple just announce their A7 chip (64bit, double registers, etc), supposedly based on the arm8? Rumor is that it is 20nm process with TSMC as the fab.

TSMC isn't supposed to hit 20nm wide production until later in 2014 last I heard. Haven't seen anything about Apple using those chips, but that could be the case. Expect most of the performance gain to be from increased memory instead of actual CPU.

But it isn't just a matter of raw size. The performance you are getting out of it at a given size is an issue too.

ARM may take the world of smartphones by storm, but it really hasn't made significant inroads into areas where performance matters.

Much in the same way that mobile/social gaming didn't displace "hardcore" gaming, ARM hasn't displaced Intel. It just found another audience with different priorities.

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