Valve to explain 'hardware opportunities' for Linux in the living room
"Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," Gabe Newell said.
Valve's Gabe Newell likes Linux. A lot. In spite of the operating system representing less-than-one percent share by every metric used by Valve, Newell believes that Linux will play a large role in the future of PC gaming--so much so that his company is invested in making a Linux-based Steambox. More information on the project could be available as early as next week, according to Newell. "Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," he said.
Speaking at LinuxCon (via ArsTechnica), Newell said that bringing Steam to Linux "was a signal for our development partners that we really were serious about this Linux thing we were talking about."
In addition to releasing games on the OS, Valve is showing their support of Linux by contributing to the LLDB debugger project, because developers frequently cite the need for a debugger to make Linux a better development platform.
Newell still believes Windows 8 is a catastrophe, pointing out that PC sales have experienced year-over-year declines. However, Steam sales have increased 76 percent--suggesting Valve is doing something right.
"Systems which are innovation-friendly and embrace openness are going to have a greater competitive advantage to closed or tightly regulated systems," he noted.
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Valve to explain 'hardware opportunities' for Linux in the living room.
"Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," Gabe Newell said.-
Gaben boxes.
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Linux is already in the living room. TiVo's been using it from the beginning.
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Pretty much this, - my Sony Bravia runs a custom linux kernel.
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At the risk, nay certain fact, that this is going to piss people off: Is just this a meme or are people really that into this game? I mean, if Half-Life 3 just never came out I don't think it would be that big of a deal. The other things Valve has done/is doing make the entire series kind of secondary. It's a fun series, but really, not *that* big of a deal. People screaming for valve to drop everything and work on HL3 is a joke...right?
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Both previous games are among the highest rated on Metacritic, you don't think people genuinely want HL3?
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Didn't say that, I'm just curious if people are actually that obsessed with getting it.
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I'm not sure how Valve can possibly make a HL3 that lives up to what people want, based on how much time has passed since HL2 and how much the entire industry has advanced. Look at how far GTA, Battlefield, COD/BLOPS, etc have come in their franches since HL2 came out. If HL3 isn't the most amazing game ever, it will probably be a disappointment to the fans.
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Bioshock Infinite got plenty of praise without advancing the genre too much. Yes, the tears in combat was something relatively new, but that's basically a bolt-on upgrade to a gameplay and storytelling mechanic that was realized in 2007 with Bioshock. I don't see that game getting universally rejected; it's a flawed gem, but it was pretty damn good, and even I like most of it.
The PC FPS genre is in a funk right now, mostly from Call of Duty, the avalanche of fallen developers who tried to push out games that tried to be Call of Duty, and the ultra-RPGification and ultra-microtransacting of free-to-play shooters.
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Valve's one of the last old-guard FPS developers who knows how to make excellent keyboard-and-mouse controls, and has the money necessary to make a game that isn't in a lockstep every-2-years pop-shooter fad train. Most of the others are gone:
- Id Software: made Rage; is now busy trying to find itself while Zenimax badgers them to finish Doom 4.
- Epic Games: Fortnite fell off the news radar years ago; they announced Infinity Blade 3. Probably some unannounced multiplatform project that they'll announce at the 2013 VGAs or 2014 GDC.
- Raven Software: stuck as a Call of Duty support studio; they were working on some James Bond game, but IIRC Activision let that license expire, so that project's probably canned.
Most of the other developers I could list here are either doing some free-to-play game, or are stuck under some megapublisher's agenda. Valve was in a very unique position where they could dictate their own future, but with DOTA 2, they flipped a giant middle finger at the PC FPS genre. Yes, I know they still update TF2; yes, I know they released Portal 2, and are rumored to announce Left 4 Dead 3. I miss Half-Life.-
Oh yeah, I should've listed Human Head Studios, as a lot of the old Raven guys went there. They got financially choked to death by Zenimax in the whole Prey 2 debacle.
Maybe I should also include 3D Realms (we all know the saga of Duke Nukem Forever) and Gearbox (the makers of Borderlands 2, AND NOTHING ELSE).-
What Zenimax did to Human Head was terrible. Prey 2 was less than two weeks away from reaching alpha. Testers both internally at the studio and the publisher were really excited about it. Now they're essentially a support studio, at least until they successfully pitch their next project, having recently worked on Bureau, Defiance and Bioshock Infinite.
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THE LAST.... THEY ARE THE LAST... THEY ARE THE LAST...
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Once upon a time, HL2 was the reason we all installed and excused Steam. Valve is built on Half-Life and I just think it'd be a shame if they abandoned it entirely. Half-Life remains one of my favorite games of all time.
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Epic was built on Unreal, and they DID abandon it entirely. And they're still calling their engine "Unreal Technology". We're at the point where even Gears has potentially lapsed, with Cliff Bleszinski and Rod Fergusson departed (though Chris Perna is still there) (and maybe there's some XBox One Gears game in the pipeline that hasn't been announced because Epic didn't want it to be a launch title).
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If that's true, they should throw a bone to the community, because two months from now will mark 6 years since the last Unreal game was released.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/49425/unreal-tournament-3-demo-unleashed (yes, that's right: Chris Remo was EIC at the Shack the last time an Unreal game was released.)
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Yeah, but Half-Life was a better and more important series than Unreal ever was. Unreal Tournament was a solid runner up to Quake 3, though. Also, Epic made games before Unreal. I dunno, a Valve that doesn't make Half-Life games feels like a Sega without Sonic, a Nintendo without Mario, or a Square without Final Fantasy. It just isn't right!
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Forget About Freeman
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i really want it, but i can't go crazy about it. i figure it hasn't come out yet because they don't have anything worth showing.
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SHOW ME YOUR TITTTSSSSSS
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I really hope this works out. Gaming will be much better off in the future if Linux is the primary platform for PC games.
Windows is just making all the wrong moves. It's becoming the ideal operating system for a teenage girl who only plays Puzzles and Dragons and browses Facebook.-
In my experience every successive windows version since, but not including, XP has been less user friendly than it's predecessor.
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I've used every version of Windows since '95 and XP is still the best, even better than Windows 7 for simplicity and ease of use.
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Linux as a desktop GUI environment is still kinda flaky; while GNOME has gotten a bit better over the past 10 years (part of it being a factor of faster hardware being able to mask prior UI sluggishness). 10 years ago, half the reason why I gravitated to OS X was because it was a BSD *nix with a rock solid GUI, and it still exposed access to a bash prompt. KDE is still crazy, and most of the other window managers still have a bunch of the nagging usability problems that GNOME has (though are sometimes worse).
Also, most Linux distros cut out libraries for proprietary codecs; I guess a "partially-closed" distro could take care of this (and get a 20-page irate diatribe from RMS). Hell, that's exactly what OS X is.
Yeah, basically the main thing holding me back from going primarily to Linux on the desktop is all the PC games (Steam or not) that are still Win32. I could probably part with most of them and set up a secondary Windows 7 system (much like the old "here's my DOS box for running Duke Nukem 3D because there isn't a stable engine port for Windows yet" days). -
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Microsoft is going to champion the Xbox. That is what they have sunk millions to develop and where their margins are. When you consider year on year declining PC sales, and the fact most PC gamers use Windows as their operating system the writing is on the wall for the era of Windows based PC gaming we've had since the 90s. It's doesn't have to be a bad thing either. All it takes is innovation.
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OK, I love everything about Valve/Steam and Gabe is awesome! But this is just stupid, "Newell believes that Linux will play a large role in the future of PC gaming". Yeah, no, just no! WTF is GabeN thinking?
Hey Gabe, just stick to Windows and get over your ego and your apparent need to hate on Microsoft. We won't hate you if you against your words about how crappy Win8 is.-
yeah, kill the mac client, too. fuck this shit, gabe. get back to hl3
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Keep in mind you're talking about the studio (and person) who single-handedly made Digital delivery a platform. Then they popularized digital sales. They were one of the earliest Purchase -> Free 2 Play conversions. They created the steam marketplace where users can buy and sell user-created goods. Valve's been steadily five years ahead of the curve.
They gets the benefit of the doubt.
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Unless they have a reliable way to get my entire Steam library running on a Linux machine, I don't see this happening.
There are already ways to edit Office files using a variety of platforms; that's not likely to be an issue for me (in terms of dropping Windows). Some of the other software I frequently use for work is also multiplatform. My games, however, mostly require DirectX. Maybe they have some sort of DirectX wrapper or something similar in mind.-
That is what it all comes down to.
They also have to prove why Linux is better for all those DirectX games than their native Windows, something I don't see happening any time soon, if ever. Interested in seeing what comes of it all, but it would take a lot to get me to drop Windows at this point.
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in a few years, hopefully directx won't be an issue anymore. we'll be back to opengl and much better cross platform play.
http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/game-developers-talk-up-opengl-at-pax-prime-2013.2376
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You will, in years to come. Windows is likely to become less relevant due to how out of touch Microsoft has been under Ballmer, and will possibly continue to be under his successor. Development will gradually include Linux more, then later include Windows less - unless Windows does a massive shift in many of its priorities. Nobody has embraced Windows 8, and it in fact delivers a worse user and gamer experience than Windows 7. If Windows 9 sucks, people will probably embrace it even less and Windows 7 will be the mainstay, just as 95 was mainstay through 98 and ME, and XP sort of was through Vista.
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If valve could make something good and worth selling, they would. They couldn't. Deal with it. They are printing monies with Dota 2 and eating that stuff that makes your poop gold so why would they even bother?
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Why couldn't they have just fucking made HL2: Episode 3 according to their original plan and pushed it out the door? At least then the series would have some proper closure. So what if it wasn't going to be revolutionary? It'd better than the sorry unfinished mess we have now.
Valve fucked this up. They have killed the series by delaying so long that the expectations have become impossible, and now we really might not get anything.
Half-Life as a franchise deserved better than this. People flipped their shit over the Mass Effect 3 ending, well at least Mass Effect had a fucking ending.-
They probably took a break from HL and focused too much on buying out other developers to make new games for them which turned out to be easier than making their own games and the original development team members got a chance to take up higher level positions with new teams. So starting up a new HL team would mean bringing only a few back and mostly new developers.
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It would have been more of the same and seemed old dated so they don't do it so they can't be accused of releasing something that feels old and outdated and have people say they are out of touch. Now you just have fond memories of HL and want more instead of dwell on what a bummer HL2 e3 or HL3 was.
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I'm guessing it will be put this month or next month.
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They'd pretty much have to release TF3 exclusively on Linux for me to be interested in it.
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The more I hear Gaben speak, the more I'm starting to think he's out of touch. I mean it's nice that he's rolling in so much dough that he can fart around on these goofy side projects that probably won't ever amount to anything. I'm happy for him.
But really, no one gives a fuck about Linux, Gabe. Make some games. I think of Valve simply as a retailer now and that's kind of sad.
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