Valve's Gabe Newell Makes New Linux Comments

[leech]

I always crack up when people say "PC Gaming is dying!" There have been people saying that for 15 years. Yet it keeps going stronger and stronger. There's even a huge surge in 'Indie' games coming out that is bringing back the heyday of the gaming industry, and what do you know, a lot of those games are being ported to the PSN and Xbox Live environments.

I put the people who say "PC Gaming is dead/dying" into the same group as those saying "PCs are dead, 'cause mobile is king!" camp. As in, they're idiots and have no clue what they're talking about. "Sales are down!" Uhm, that's because much like Televisions, computers have become a common commodity, and people generally have several within their household. Once there is a no longer large improvements in screen size and resolution and processor speed, the mobile devices will run into the same thing where people aren't constantly getting new phones/tablets every year or two.

[BSDude]

I always crack up when people say "PC Gaming is dying!" There have been people saying that for 15 years. Yet it keeps going stronger and stronger. There's even a huge surge in 'Indie' games coming out that is bringing back the heyday of the gaming industry, and what do you know, a lot of those games are being ported to the PSN and Xbox Live environments.

I put the people who say "PC Gaming is dead/dying" into the same group as those saying "PCs are dead, 'cause mobile is king!" camp. As in, they're idiots and have no clue what they're talking about. "Sales are down!" Uhm, that's because much like Televisions, computers have become a common commodity, and people generally have several within their household. Once there is a no longer large improvements in screen size and resolution and processor speed, the mobile devices will run into the same thing where people aren't constantly getting new phones/tablets every year or two.

Can someone pin this to top?!

[tarceri]

Once there is a no longer large improvements in screen size and resolution and processor speed, the mobile devices will run into the same thing where people aren't constantly getting new phones/tablets every year or two.

Yep, with phones this is starting to happen already. Its amazing that so called market analysts don't see this coming and continually predict massive growth years into the future. Anyway its refreshing to read someone posting this seemingly obvious observation.

[Luke_Wolf]

I always crack up when people say "PC Gaming is dying!" There have been people saying that for 15 years. Yet it keeps going stronger and stronger. There's even a huge surge in 'Indie' games coming out that is bringing back the heyday of the gaming industry, and what do you know, a lot of those games are being ported to the PSN and Xbox Live environments.

I put the people who say "PC Gaming is dead/dying" into the same group as those saying "PCs are dead, 'cause mobile is king!" camp. As in, they're idiots and have no clue what they're talking about. "Sales are down!" Uhm, that's because much like Televisions, computers have become a common commodity, and people generally have several within their household. Once there is a no longer large improvements in screen size and resolution and processor speed, the mobile devices will run into the same thing where people aren't constantly getting new phones/tablets every year or two.

my understanding was that the "PC gaming is dead" mantra has actually been around since the 80s (in other words since there's been PCs and consoles in the gaming market) but otherwise spot on

also I'll just leave this here

[ZebCarnell]

I always crack up when people say "PC Gaming is dying!" There have been people saying that for 15 years. Yet it keeps going stronger and stronger. There's even a huge surge in 'Indie' games coming out that is bringing back the heyday of the gaming industry, and what do you know, a lot of those games are being ported to the PSN and Xbox Live environments.

I put the people who say "PC Gaming is dead/dying" into the same group as those saying "PCs are dead, 'cause mobile is king!" camp. As in, they're idiots and have no clue what they're talking about. "Sales are down!" Uhm, that's because much like Televisions, computers have become a common commodity, and people generally have several within their household. Once there is a no longer large improvements in screen size and resolution and processor speed, the mobile devices will run into the same thing where people aren't constantly getting new phones/tablets every year or two.

Exactly, I'd like to see new tech like Virtual Reality getting developed and released on mobile or console devices before PC.

[dee.]

Yep, with phones this is starting to happen already. Its amazing that so called market analysts don't see this coming and continually predict massive growth years into the future. Anyway its refreshing to read someone posting this seemingly obvious observation.

That's because the room for growth in the phone market comes from the low-end... end of the spectrum. In a big part of the world there are still huge numbers of dumbphones in use, and when smartphones become cheaper, they're going to be able to grow the market by replacing the dumbphone market.

So the mobile smartphone market still has some potential for growth, but you're right in that it will reach a plateau eventually.

As for mobile devices completely replacing actual computers, yeah that's bullshit. What's happening now is actually just market correction: the PC market has long been oversaturated - in the early 2000s, it was the internet bubble, then the second internet bubble, then the social media bubble... which has caused computer manufacturers to market the computer as an everyday appliance - which the PC was never meant to be.

Then tablets and other smartdevices show up and they fulfill the "appliance" role much better than even small computers. They fulfill the task of being the "dumb layman's computing device" much better - to be fair, chromebooks do this pretty well too. So now the PC is returning back to its old roles - content production, work, speciality niche applications, gaming, etc. So the answer to the "mobile vs. desktop" war is a pretty boring one - neither is going to destroy the other, both are going to have their places and roles to fulfill and the markets on both are likely to stabilize, at least until some new geegaw shows up to disrupt the market.

It's all fairly simple if you just look at the big picture.

[RealNC]

Half-Life 3 confirmed.

[Kemosabe]

Linux is not a problem if you have a constrained set of supported architectures and applications. It becomes a problem if you give too much freedom. For example should you use systemd and pulseaudio or something else. That's a difficult issue. You can't expect them to test everything.

Nah cmon. Games don't need to know anything about systemd pulseaudio or similar stuff - what a rediculous excuse.
Whats the point using Linux while all the effort goes into cloning MS/Apple monoculture? Seriously, you can't bring sucess to "Linux" by forcing it to be a bad copy of something else. The advantages flexibility, diversity, freedom and control should be written bold, not be hidden as different-than-windows-defect.

[curaga]

My entire life is at the mercy of two corporations, Google and Valve, who definitely have my best interests at heart.

Fixed that for you. Your choice, but it makes me sad.

[caligula]

Yes, but it's also an issue about quality, afaik Apple's default solution is also good for audio editors, on Linux you have to use (and learn, which is most of the problem) using jack because of the latency.

Systemd by now is an easy choice, can't lose.
X.org isn't gone, wayland isn't ready yet. Libreoffice for most MS office users is a pita.

To sum it up, while it's getting better, desktop Linux isn't there yet about quality.

Agreed the situation will be a lot better when most Linux systems run systemd, pulseaudio, bluez5, kernel 3.10+, btrfs, wayland, opengl 4.0 capable gpu drivers.
Problems that remain are: how to output digital multichannel audio to your receiver. Currently I don't know if any Linux technology does this. If it does, it uses legacy DD or DTS lossy audio. For example I tried this with pulseaudio and multichannel routing only works with analog for me. Tried with 5 nvidia cards with hdmi output, intel, sound blaster audigy 2, external DACs.
On top of that game distribution might need a single package manager. While all of them have advantages, the package management isn't a hard task. We could do better and have only one. One that also supports per user app installation so that you don't need to be superuser.