Valve: Linux More Viable Than Windows 8 for Gaming

[Yogurtmaster]

Is it really necessary to keep constantly trolling with those tired stereotypes? I'm not even a Linux user and I'm educated enough to know that the philosophy behind Linux is about freedom not being a freeloader.

Well, then you are really not educated at all. Go Google Android Market and you will see that this is what is happening there and even John Carmack said there wasn't enough money in the Linux market to worry about it.

Linux is really about freedom of speech. That is the REAL open source model, this is true. However, over time a lot of people have released free as in having no price and that is what a lot of people think of these days and a lot of those same people are not as willing to spend cash. This is been pushed over to Android and many people are hoping ads will sell their game instead of outright cash.

[Yogurtmaster]

Valve is not happy about the direction of the Microsoft Store so they are trying to push people to Linux.

It's an irrational fear and very few people will actually switch in the end.

Windows 8 is the first step into a new computer revolution in UI, but the old Win32 applications are not going to go away.

When has Microsoft never been for backwards compatibility? Even some dos games can run under the command line shell, the rest can use DosBox.

Windows has been around almost 28 years at this point. Yet we can still run DOS games that have been around longer.

While they panic, I have to laugh. It's really an overreaction.

I am wondering something though, I am wondering about faster updates to the code base now. I wonder if Windows will be updated every two years instead of 3.

[Athernar]

I already repsonded and it doesn't belong in this thread, I'll reply when you actually reply to y post in that other post. untill then grow up.

It belonged enough in this thread for you to make the claim in the first place. (And to go on about the revenue split too) But I can see now you're not going to respond since you know anything you say will prove you to be the ignorant fool you are.

No indi being and then not being indie plays perfectly into my point, I still don't think you understand what my point it, since I don't think you have a point, you surely haven't said what your point is for the last 10 posts, you've just been arguing off tangents on other things.it however does not prove your point that everyone should have special deals (you know outside of that dreamworld of you where you think garage devs without economy experts get 5% deals, while the huge AAA devs with economy experts and expensive contract lawyers get 30% deals :rolleyes:)

Dreamworld? Hah! Says the deluded child that thinks megacorporations with a history of monopolist practices are "nice".

what is your point again ?

and as I said, Valve isn't offering games on steam because they're nice, they're doing it to make money. they're offerign other devs to sell their games on their service. a service that costs to maintain, to pay for developers and management and servers for the service. a service that offers a valuable servcie that they're using to make money. to make money, they need to be paid by the people who use their valuable service.

You REALLY don't understand economics do you ? based on your argument style evasions, off tangents and lack of understanding of basic concepts like economy, I'm starting to think you really are 14, most 14 year olds don't understand money and think everything is free because their mother pays for them. So again, if you're 14, then I'm sorry then I understand why you don't understand these things.

As I said in my last post, you killed your own argument. If bandwidth is essentially free as you said, then the direct costs of having a game on Steam are essentially non-existant. As such, Valve will want to get as many games as possible on Steam to expand the install base, and to make some revenue rather than none, to offset maintenance costs for the content servers that exist already.

So what costs are there Hawkman? You've ruled out bandwidth yourself, server upkeep will exist regardless - as will dev costs for the Steam client. Patching is dev-controlled now with SteamPipe. So where are the big costs?

Now do you have the integrity to actually respond with a counterpoint to the above? Or are you just going to whine like a baby and repeatedly say "tangent" and "economics"?

And avgaink you're showing that you know nothing of Microsoft and going off on tangents ignoring everything I wrote. MS offer free expert help to startups and indie devs that show promkise, Devs that are having issue get free advice, and they offer seminars for up and coming devs and coding gatherings. You know all the community stuff that Valve doesn't do. A

And WOW, free content updates ... yup, you must be ~14 if you think that's anywhere close to the stuff MS does for the dev community.

If anyone is 14 Hawkman, it's you with your ever decreasing post coherence and spelling ability, and absurd desire to turn everything into a male genitalia-waving contest.

And since your fake troll quote didn't contain a single word I said, and also said the opposite of what I said. then no you didn't snip out anything. you simply made up a whine comment that had no relation to what I said at all.

Grow the F up.

At this point there's not point arguing with you anymore, since you don't understand the economics, you don't understand how the world works, you think valve magically gives away money and gives good deals to small companies and bad deals to big ones who can refuse and they can't afford to lose, you don't read my posts and you don't reply to what I actually post.

So until you actually reply to my post and show you can act like an adult, there's no point arguing with you, I've already explained it all to you several times, and you have yet to reply to it once. Could it be because you're to stubborn to admit you're wrong, so you just keep on arguing around the point.

If you'd like to point out what part rather than simply cry about it, then do so. If there is something that got edited in by mistake then I'll apologise, rather than run away from it like you have with the "engine core" thing.

You're a complete joke Hawkman, your post quality is rapidly decending into the pit. Your "arguments" consist of you saying "YOU DONT KNOW ECONOMICS!!!!111", you dodge whenever I make a counter-point and you sit there and honestly think anyone is going to buy your double-standard of Microsoft doing things because it's "nice", but when it comes to Valve they're purely in it for the buisness.

Get a grip. For someone that harps on about "Economics" you seem to be especially ignorant of the distinction between publically and privately owned companies.

[Mando]

They're wasting their money with Steam on Linux.. Even if Steam gives Windows 8 the finger, that doesn't stop steam partners from publishing direct and gaining access to the Windows 8 Marketshare.

BTW, Why isn't Valve ripping on OSX/Apple with the same hostility?

thats too easy, they arnt worried about losing ?25 a week from apple steam sales :p

Unless Valve have a way of wrapping direct3d into opengl or convince developers to use openGL instead of directx, its not a total solution, Always been the same for Linux and always will whilst DirectX is the more used API.

[Noir Angel]

So ONE dev out of thousands. Yeah, it's the YEAR OF LINUX.

:rolleyes:

Not just any dev, Valve are PC specialists, they are about the only company left that develops specifically for the PC, instead of lazily backporting from console to PC

That article btw should be titled " optimized version of linux L4D2 runs better than the windows version running on an old unoptimized engine", And looking where Valve/Gabe has been going with it since then, I'm starting to doubt the factuality of it int he first place. it seems it was just him laying down some groundwork for his FUD campaign. and hey look, it worked.

Do you have the slightest shred of evidence that this claim is true? Given that L4D2 hasn't even been made available for Linux yet I'm guessing not. If it looks as good on as it does on Windows, your argument is Bunk (not to mention that Valve did a lot of work to improve the performance of Source since 2004)

Who games on a PC anymore anyway? What about consoles? Are they gonna move away from those closed systems too? Hey I got an idea, make a MP game on pc that isn't hacked to death in six months or less and ill listen til then pls stfu.

Don't be fooled by the new age console kiddies, a lot of people still love PC gaming.

Well, then you are really not educated at all. Go Google Android Market and you will see that this is what is happening there and even John Carmack said there wasn't enough money in the Linux market to worry about it.

Linux is really about freedom of speech. That is the REAL open source model, this is true. However, over time a lot of people have released free as in having no price and that is what a lot of people think of these days and a lot of those same people are not as willing to spend cash. This is been pushed over to Android and many people are hoping ads will sell their game instead of outright cash.

The Android market has the same amount of apps on it as the Apple store, and whilst I'll admit that it's not *completely* open they really only remove malware from the Android market. And if a developer makes money, why does it matter how? It's their choice to release apps with advertising.

[threetonesun]

Not just any dev, Valve are PC specialists, they are about the only company left that develops specifically for the PC, instead of lazily backporting from console to PC

I recall something with Portal 2 having console loading screens on the PC.

[ahhell]

Not just any dev, Valve are PC specialists, they are about the only company left that develops specifically for the PC, instead of lazily backporting from console to PC

So?

It's still just one dev out of thousands. Why would anyone bother going through the hassle/expensive to develop for an OS that is used by less than a few percent of PC users? Other than Gabe and Notch, NO ONE.

[ViperAFK]

That article btw should be titled " optimized version of linux L4D2 runs better than the windows version running on an old unoptimized engine", And looking where Valve/Gabe has been going with it since then, I'm starting to doubt the factuality of it int he first place. it seems it was just him laying down some groundwork for his FUD campaign. and hey look, it worked.

ummm... why? Do you really think the windows version isn't optimized? They've had far more time to optimize the game/engine on windows than on linux.

[Yogurtmaster]

The Android market has the same amount of apps on it as the Apple store, and whilst I'll admit that it's not *completely* open they really only remove malware from the Android market. And if a developer makes money, why does it matter how? It's their choice to release apps with advertising.

Android sales of applications have been far less than that of iOS. I mean far less to the point that a lot of developers have to drop Android or they have to try to survive on advertising. Many are failing at the advertising level as well.

I wouldn't call that good at all and we have seen this with Linux as well. A lot of people have in their minds that Free means FREE as in beer and not ONLY free as in speech.

This is a bad thing for those markets. I doubt you can really argue "Hey it's great to be on a platform that doesn't make that much money".

[spaceelf]

Not just any dev, Valve are PC specialists, they are about the only company left that develops specifically for the PC, instead of lazily backporting from console to PC

Yeah...Windows XP PCs...which strangely have about the same tech as consoles.

[NightScreams]

lol, nerd arguments. Well think i'll just go and actually play a game right now, like the rest of the normal world without debating whether or not i'll be gaming on a Linux console box or whatever unlikely radical change in the gaming industry happens by the year 2020.

Think i'll play some Painkiller H&D.

[HawkMan]

(snip)lots of off tangent whinign that has nothign to do with what I said and more whining that MS is evil without a single bit of proof or countering myactual arguments(snip)

Still waiting for an actual reply

ummm... why? Do you really think the windows version isn't optimized? They've had far more time to optimize the game/engine on windows than on linux.

Actually, Valve themselves said they hadn't done the same level of optimizations on Windows.

you dodge whenever I make a counter-point and you sit there and honestly think anyone is going to buy your double-standard of Microsoft doing things because it's "nice", but when it comes to Valve they're purely in it for the buisness.

You haven't made a SINGLE counterpoint yet, just going off on tangents and saying "MS Sucks and is bad". I never said MS wasn't in it for the business. but they do a hell of a lot more for small developers than Valve has ever done. again, WHEN did Valve send experts out to help small devs last ?

[Gerowen]

So gaming is not part of your entertainment OS then?

Valve can spread this BS all they want, it still doesn't make it true. And even if they make steam run on Linux. All the other non valve publishers isn't going to spend the millions to make their games run on Linux, much less support them. And I bet when valve eventually gets around to it and see how little they get back and how much it costs them and do the math and see the result is far in the negative, they won't be doing much Linux dev either.

I wouldn't discount it, there's a large community of users who weren't using Linux a couple years ago because Ubuntu has made great strides in the user friendly department. Don't get me wrong I'm not one of these delusional people who is going to start screaming Winblow$ sucks and hailing the awesome perfection that is Linux, I just prefer it. The Ubuntu software center has grown from a user friendly front-end to the synaptic package manager to a full blown app store where you can still gain access to all the FOSS that has always been there, as well as buy books, buy commercial games that have Linux ports, and all sorts of things. The gaming experience is still far behind Windows, but it's doing a decent job of holding its own for the community of people who do actually use Linux exclusively like myself. I'll bet that if Steam created a Linux port of their client and it actually ran good and wasn't just the windows version wrapped up in a pre-packaged copy of Wine, that a lot of Linux users would, initially at least, start haemorrhaging money on Steam and wiping any of their computers still running Windows. If the majority of Linux users are anything like me, they would have no problem spending money if they had decent options for games on their operating system of choice, but with a market share below even that of Apple's operating system, it's a little hard to get any serious attention from developers other than ourselves.

Here's a screenshot of the Ubuntu software center right now.

[farmeunit]

(facepalm) Closed platform because it has an app browser? Really? Ubuntu has software center for years but you declare it as open? Give me a break.

No comparison between the two, BTW. The software center is just an easier way to get software, you aren't tied to it. Are you tied to this in RT? Yes. iOS has ALWAYS been closed, so that's why no one says anything. Windows was open and now it's not (I know it's for RT only). Android allows you to install software without the Play Store, same as Linux.

[FloatingFatMan]

Windows has always been open, yes. However, WindowsRT is a brand new product and has always been closed, so qualifies for the same dispensation you grant iOS.

WindowsRT != Windows 8 or any other version of Windows.

Windows 8 is just as open as older versions of Windows, when it comes to anything to do with Win32.

[Athernar]

You haven't made a SINGLE counterpoint yet, just going off on tangents and saying "MS Sucks and is bad". I never said MS wasn't in it for the business. but they do a hell of a lot more for small developers than Valve has ever done. again, WHEN did Valve send experts out to help small devs last ?

You did exactly what I predicted you would do, run away. Bravo, you are a fine puppet.

As I said in my last post, you killed your own argument. If bandwidth is essentially free as you said, then the direct costs of having a game on Steam are essentially non-existant. As such, Valve will want to get as many games as possible on Steam to expand the install base, and to make some revenue rather than none, to offset maintenance costs for the content servers that exist already.

So what costs are there Hawkman? You've ruled out bandwidth yourself, server upkeep will exist regardless - as will dev costs for the Steam client. Patching is dev-controlled now with SteamPipe. So where are the big costs?

Now do you have the integrity to actually respond with a counterpoint to the above? Or are you just going to whine like a baby and repeatedly say "tangent" and "economics"?

Clearly you lack the integrity and/or maturity to respond to the evident counterpoint (bolded!) in the above quote.

Tell me Hawkman, do you actually have any reasoning at all? Absolutely anything that isn't just a flimsy "because I say it is"? Any proof at all? Because frankly, all I'm seeing is a small child humiliating himself with his inability to actually respond to any counterpoints or back up his own arguments. Pathetic.

[HawkMan]

You did exactly what I predicted you would do, run away. Bravo, you are a fine puppet.

Clearly you lack the integrity and/or maturity to respond to the evident counterpoint (bolded!) in the above quote.

Tell me Hawkman, do you actually have any reasoning at all? Absolutely anything that isn't just a flimsy "because I say it is"? Any proof at all? Because frankly, all I'm seeing is a small child humiliating himself with his inability to actually respond to any counterpoints or back up his own arguments. Pathetic.

I didn't run say, I'm just still waiting for YOU to give any actual reasons and arguments. As for your quote of yourself, I already answered that, twice.

[uh20]

hey guys, just registered, i feel like making a one and for all guidebook about this pointless war

on the main topic: linux more viable than windows 8 for gaming

well, lets check out whats needed for a good gaming o.s.

• a renderer, which generally only consists of directx, opengl, and a bit of opengl spinoffs for other platforms or engines. although it was not true for the longest of time, currently the highest version of opengl has a bit more features (and because of its low-lying architecture) can also be a bit faster than directx 11.1, that being said, speed and capabilities are not completely needed, as developers still prefer to use directx9/opengl3.x for development, in which directx9 can be faster but has less features than opengl3.x ----> in a nutshell, both O.S.'s are pretty much 1:1 in rendering performance.
  
• a underlying desktop manager, in the linux world, there are hundereds for these, in windows, only one, they get their advantages and disadvantages from both, currently linux desktops are fairly ok, but they are using outdated stuff, for example, most run on the X display manager, which, although is simmilar to the windows manager, X is harder to implement new things onto, and when it does crash, it actually crashes everything, unlike windows's (what) manager, granted linux desktops are very flexable for development (you could in theory make a desktop just for your game), so between linux and windows, its a tradeoff between flexability and reliability, while both being fine at performance.
  
• sound manager, i cant stress how bad most linux sound managers are, such a manager as pulseaudio, its fine, and perhaps a bit nicer sounding than stock windows, but its a pain in every which way to tweak (especially with multiple speakers), and it eats up power, because of this, windows gets a definitive win.
  

so, we all know now that desktop-linux is just slightly worse than windows for normal creation, unless you make you own desktop, which it might get a bit faster, but, well, yea, its pretty close

valve have stated linux was MORE viable than windows though

and by what i have collected in the facts department, its only fair to say linux equally viable than windows.

why would valve state that it was more viable then?

heres some factors that, in theory, could make linux more viable in the long run

• most of linux have universal dependencies, this is a great thing for developers, i myself cant tell you people enough how easy it is to port from linux to other platforms, by developing for linux as a base platform, you can make a pain-free port to nearly every phone, computer, or console (but its better you use the console api) in existence, linux can be more viable because it can chug out non-dependent games faster for anything you use.
  
• linux is free to edit, this is a little nice, instead of developers having to explain the problem to a windows dev, and hoping it gets fixed next version, you can instead fix the bug yourself, because the underlying code is not locked-down to edit's, alongside this, most distributions like ubuntu have auto-updaters, so you can pass the code you fixed over to the ubuntu team, and they can test it and add the fixed dependency for everyone to update in perhaps mere weeks, instead of the normal 1-2 years for a windows (i think its called service pack) update.
  

so, to an extent, valve can say its a bit more viable, i dont think anyone can disagree now.

this is just a bit more ranting

of course, its not like valve is a little angel, they are equivalently just as crappy as the windows metro store. since steam is a choice to download, and is supporting the morally better linux platform, which really needs steam for the sake of its miniature %1.1 survival, its not completely fair to say steam is as bad as the metro store, but if both could be wiped off the earth simultaneously (and please, give me that button) everyone would benefit.

so for anyone that cares for linux to take over (and it would be nice, not having to pay money and such) than the above statement is quite literally the only thing that makes steam better than the metro store

and finally, this

? ???? here goes to everyone who really likes microsoft, the simple fact that its a money making company is enough reason you should like it a little less.

[aviator189]

i had tons of respect for valve.

but i just despise them now. or newell anyways.

all they're afraid is if the ms store will eventually outpace or hurt their steam business.

[Lord Method Man]

simple fact that its a money making company is enough reason you should like it a little less.

I wish you would started your post with this. Then I would have known right away not to read any more of it.

[aviator189]

i had tons of respect for valve.

but i just despise them now. or newell anyways.

all they're afraid is if the ms store will eventually outpace or hurt their steam business.

[remixedcat]

LEAVE GABE ALONE!!!!!

[uh20]

I wish you would started your post with this. Then I would have known right away not to read any more of it.

wow you guys are squares, im leaving (lol ragequit)

[Athernar]

I didn't run say, I'm just still waiting for YOU to give any actual reasons and arguments. As for your quote of yourself, I already answered that, twice.

Oh so now we can add liar to the list, as you haven't answered squat.

So you have no answer to the question where the big costs to Valve are that warrents indies paying a higher cut, so your claim that indies have to pay more because they sell less is completely baseless.

Thus, you have no evidence at all that indies pay more on Steam, and you expect everyone else to simply believe your claim to the contrary with no proof or reasoning beyond "cuz i sed so".

You're 2 for 2 on being completely unable to back up your side of the argument. What next? You're going to tell me Valve shareholders are possesed by the devil? :rofl:

[Growled Member]

LEAVE GABE ALONE!!!!!

Or what? :p