What Should Valve Do For Linux & Open-Source?

[FutureSuture]

This is job for GOG, not for Valve.

It's too much work for GOG.

[DMJC]

Hamish Wilson +1

You hit the nail on the head buddy, Wine is definately a half measure, It is better at backwards compatibility with Windows than Windows itself is. Yet the wine devs aren't interested in fixing the couple bugs that stop it being magnificent. If wine had a built in glide to opengl renderer, and supported direct3d immediate mode rendering, wine would actually run ALL the old games that noone can play on Windows anymore. That would be a pretty awesome thing. D3D10/11/12 support is going to keep wine chasing Windows well into the next decade.

I've always felt that Linux should be trying to position itself wherever Windows isn't. A couple years ago Microsoft cancelled Flight Sim, with the right effort Linux could have completely taken over the flying game market. Most Wing Commanders, Freespace, X-Wing/Tie Fighter games, X1/2/3, X-Plane, and other flight simulators, already run either in dosbox, wine, or natively. Linux just needs to implement some nice joystick programming guis, and go for the throat of that market Space/Flight sims have loyal followings and people willing to stump up money for the products when they can get them.

Adventure games, are another obvious market for this, combine open source tools for making the games, with the ability to play all the older titles in the genre, and then focus hard on the new titles. Maybe move into something else afterwards like Racing games, similar to flight/space simulators, and grow the market. Make the controllers work perfectly, make it easier to use/better to use than on windows, and then grow the market out. RPGs/FPS games are one of the hardest areas to really impact on because while Linux has a lot of those titles already it doesn't have CoD, and Battlefield, easily the two biggest FPS genre games right now.

[jvillain]

Any company who wants to do anything with linux has to go full open-source or not do linux at all. The linux community is the most unfriendly community out there for companies.

What a load of shit. Linux is very friendly to companies. What it isn't, is down on it's knees begging it's master to forgive it for what every the master happens to not like at the moment. There is every difference in the world between an application like say Oracles DB being propriatary and a vidoe module that your computer is completly useless with out being propiatary. Personally I couldn't give a damn if steam open souces any of their games or their client. It woiuld be nice if they did but I won't lose a second of sleep over it if they didn't. But then again playing games is completly out of the question because the open source driver has almost no support for AMD SI hardware and the POS blob ( not the the game blob the driver blob) doesn't work at all with with my OS.

[kraftman]

AH delete my comment about the sad cold truth that linux is really a broken mess in relation to what valve wants to do with it? Okay then, go on believing what you will, but the fact that valve is going to HAVE to jump through all these hoops is just sad. And whats more unbelievable is how half of u think its what normal devs would do. Hell no, Valve is amazing, but if just about any other company saw the sorry state of software intended for gaming on this platform, it would leave an awful taste in their mouth and they would move on, cold, simple, truth. Its why after all these years we have basically gotten nowhere in terms of gaming, the humble bundles are but a small speck on what is the gaming industry.

You should be sorry for them damn troll, because they had to deal with dozen versions of vb, dx and .Net crap. They had to deal with os x brokeness as well. Hard and cold truth about broken mess.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

It's too much work for GOG.
Linux is, what, 1% of the market for desktop computers?

Oh, this guys doesn't learned HIB, Kickstarter and Valve lessons.

[archibald]

My tuppence: if Valve wish to do more than running steam on Linux and getting games ported to it then that's excellent news and they should be applauded for it. I think that work on optimising the open source drivers would be the best use of their time. If they want to do more, then I would ask that they try to help resolve the S3TC and floating point texture patent problems.

[AJSB]

Some Windows games under WINE have another problem: PUNKBUSTER

For all that use PUNKBUSTER, they don't work and will NEVER work online.

EvenBalance told already so....they will NEVER support WINE.....they do however support native Linux games.

[dumbo]

It's less about "what should Valve do for Linux" and more about "what do Valve need to do".

For steam:
- the marketplace is overcrowded.
- steam's reputation as dynamic/community driven is pretty much zero.
- EA's Origin is a direct threat. (IMHO it's also technically superior - needs a UI rebuild though).
- imho there's a potential for an MS windows 8 app-store for the desktop.
- free-to-play games are damaging the market.
- low-tech indie games are bypassing steam.
- the EU ruling on digitial resales.
- there's little obvious room in the new consoles for a 3rd party marketplace.

There are reasons to be positive (Steam isn't going to shutdown tomorrow) but it doesn't appear to be a particularly strong position.

So, steam needs a new market and regrow some damaged credentials asap...
- offer an incentive for companies to port existing games to linux. (a sales guarantee or something)
- come up with a 'steam standard layout' which distributions can provide (version 1.2 of lib1, version 3 of lib2), installed in standard directories. i.e. /usr/lib/steam/2012.1 /usr/lib/steam/2012.8 [game devs can target one of these]
- do a steam hardware/software survey on linux asap.
- allow/encourage desktop integration of steam by ubuntu et al.

From a consumer point-of-view, valve are interested in profits not linux. It may be that this project is simply a way to gain leverage over MS.

[entropy]

It's less about "what should Valve do for Linux" and more about "what do Valve need to do".
For steam:
- EA's Origin is a direct threat. (IMHO it's also technically superior - needs a UI rebuild though).

Can you elaborate a bit more about the superiority of Origin?
Serious question, I don't know any technical details of Origin.
I always hear people moan about Steam alternatives like Origin
to be way more invasive in terms of DRM.

[dumbo]

Can you elaborate a bit more about the superiority of Origin?
Serious question, I don't know any technical details of Origin.
I always hear people moan about Steam alternatives like Origin
to be way more invasive in terms of DRM.

I'm not an expert, but it doesn't seem that either is more invasive than the other, although I think Origin doesn't even mention DRM. (and their original T&Cs were awful)
- both seem to be applications with webkit frontends and similar amounts of DRM.
- Origin's navigation is a nightmare, browsing/finding things is not obvious. (given the lack of content, this kindof makes sense).
- Steam's interface is 'not slick'. (i.e. Despite being N years old, the back button still does not remember the state of the previous page o_O)
- Origin's interface is far more responsive/slick. (multithreaded? a newer webkit version? better GPU acceleration? simpler html? better/newer os integration? less content? probably all of those...)
- Origin continues to show pre-release versions available for download after the game has released o_O. (i.e. the BF3 beta sits alongside the BF3 release client icon as I 'can' download it, even if it doesn't make any sense).

In the overall scheme of things, both are pretty rubbish, but Origin seems far faster at being rubbish. (afair neither system lets you pick where to install individual software - kindof crazy in a world of SSDs)

-> the complaints I've seen about origin mostly involve the BF3 browser plugin (which isn't even part of origin), the lack of software and "not wanting to run both steam and origin".

It's possible/likely that the Steam/Linux build would involve a rebuild for windows...