Steam Linux Gaming Usage Remains Just Above 1.1%

[Remdul]

Quite simply, Valve will have to greatly sweeten the deal with free extras to entice gamers to choose 1st generation official SteamOS Steam Machines versus their Windows counterparts or even regular gaming PCs.

Valve will likely give away a free copy of Half Life 3 with the machines.

If they'd hold back the HL3 PC version for a few days, the machines would be sold out in no time. But Valve (IIRC it was Gabe) explicitly stated they will never do such thing.

[zanny]

without some serious exclusives gamers will never switch, they're too busy getting molested by their Uncle Satya and downloading things the hard way.

It doesn't really need exclusives, if Valve just released their future games for SteamOS before all the other platforms it would move the market. Like how GTA5 did drive console sales due to its delayed PC launch. Albeit, it would hurt their margins to wait that long, so something like a 1 - 3 month gap would move units.

If developers got used to OpenGL + SDL, they would find it is a much easier platform to write for (remember, they are targeting only the steam runtime) now that vogl is getting mature so you can debug your graphics pipeline appropriately. And the ability to directly read driver source and library implementation (Mesa) would be a tremendous benefit when instead of working around API bugs in directx and breaking the game if it were ever fixed, you could just upstream bug report your problems, like Aspyr should be doing with Beyond Earth...