Valve Has Hired Another Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Developer

[humbug]

SteamOS is only part of the equation, being a system designed to cater for the living room.
As far as Valve is concerned; they benefit when you use steam. Be that in the form of steamOS or the steam client installed on top of Ubuntu, Fedora etc in a desktop system.
Probably Valve is hoping that at some point the year of the Linux desktop will happen LOL. They probably hope that at some point in the next decade one or two of the major desktop distros will see a big surge in popularity. So valve hopes that by investing now in steam for Linux and in drivers, debuggers and everything else they do that they will be positioned to ride that wave.

[nomadewolf]

Any idea what long game Valve is playing here? They sure must have some ambitions with linux. Obvious guess would be steam machines except they arent doing well at all.

My hope is that they whish to have full compatibility with Linux and encourage more and more devs to support Linux/SteamOS. That way gamers can finally be freed from the yoke of M$!!!

[PackRat]

Any idea what long game Valve is playing here? They sure must have some ambitions with linux. Obvious guess would be steam machines except they arent doing well at all.

Steamos 3. We all know Valve's long game with the number 3. Gaben said they have 3 full vr games. Steamos has no exclusives. I can only Imagine that Valve has been holding back Half-life 3, it would be the only thing that could turn things around.

I still never played Half-life 2. It took too long to come out. I Lost interest...

[Ardje]

i dont see that ever happening if microsoft wants to stay in bussiness.
Also what stops steam from being a windows store app?

Microsoft will never allow a store app on the store app. And steam is exactly that.
So Valve will not be able to sell third party apps (games) through steam. They all have to be sold from the windows store.
And with windows 10S, the windows user first have to upgrade his license to be able to install third party software like Steam, or any other appstore.
As Microsoft predicted, 85% of the people won't upgrade (==paying) their windows just to be able to buy from others.

[eydee]

Judging from Phoronix articles about the extremely poor SteamVR experience, it's probably all about SteamVR. They've been obsessed with VR for quite some time.

[pal666]

Also what stops steam from being a windows store app?

microsoft. their store, their rules

[pal666]

I meant in the sense that it isn't a profitable effort for Valve.

how did you measure that?

[pal666]

I can only Imagine that Valve has been holding back Half-life 3

outside of your imagination valve already released two episodes of hl3

[cybertraveler]

outside of your imagination valve already released two episodes of hl3

Come on man. Yes, there is a case to be made that the episodes should be referred to as HL3. That's not how they were named though. Valve named them as HL2 episodes.

You must know that when people talk about HL3 they are talking about a non-existent game that they hope Valve will create and release in the future. There is no wide-spread confusion over this.

[moilami]

outside of your imagination valve already released two episodes of hl3

Fake news.