Will "Steam for Linux" be something that you can just apt-get into your free as in freedom Distro and start running AAA games, or will it in fact be something highly proprietary which is designed for a specific subset of devices which happen to run Linux kernels?
I see a lot of people here discussing "market share" but as has been proved by Apple market share is certainly not everything. In reality the computer market is broken into a number of distinct markets that have overlap and some of these are more lucrative than others.
Pricing structure will make a difference here, I wonder if the Linux games will be the same price as their Windows counterparts? I remember a few years ago there were a number of companies that tried to break into Linux gaming but the prices for the games were astronomical. Many 5 year old games that could have had for Windows for about $10 were selling for $40+ on Linux.
Linux Steam could also focus on other styles of games too, perhaps there is more demand amongst Linux users for highly cerebral RTS & RPG games rather than the latest COD that could be sold at a higher price? All you would really need is one or two "killer" titles that were Linux exclusive (think XBoX and Halo) to make whole categories of gamers take it seriously. Of course it is both a blessing and a curse in the sense that stuff developed for Linux is often easier to port to other platforms than the other way around.
As a Desktop Linux user myself I am not too concerned with "market share" , to an extent I couldn't care less if I am the only the person that uses it. What I really care about is being able to use Linux for all of my day to day tasks (I have a Windows dual boot but I would rather skip the step of having to power cycle my computer at least once a day).
> As a Desktop Linux user myself I am not too concerned
> with "market share" , to an extent I couldn't care less
> if I am the only the person that uses it.
That's rather shortsighted. After all, you being able to "just apt-get" depends on a large number of people sacrificing a lot of time.
> Will "Steam for Linux" be something that you can just
> apt-get into your free as in freedom Distro and start
> running AAA games
That's rather shortsighted. After all, you being able to "just apt-get" depends on a large number of people sacrificing a lot of time.
Of course it does, I do not deny this. My point is that I don't think in terms of "Great, now there is X for Linux this will cause 1000 people to switch over" I only really care if it helps me in someway. Of course I understand that there are network effects at work.
Obviously not going to happen.
Why not? This is obviously going to incur some significant cost to Valve, I doubt they would do it just so they can run a store with a handful of $5 indie games or free games.
Either they imagine there will be a significant enough untapped market for Linux games now/in the near future or they have some other plan (such as a Linux based Steam Console).
If the latter is the case, then what will this mean for "traditional" Linux users? Will they be locked out of Steam or will they be able to ride the bandwagon and get access to all/most/some of the games that the console does?
> Why not? This is obviously going to incur some significant cost to Valve, I doubt they would do it just so they can run a store with a handful of $5 indie games or free games.
No, they will definitely have AAA games. (Or at least AA games...not sure how many A's Left 4 Dead rates.) The thing that's obviously not going to happen is sudo apt-get install steam -- at least, not from the official repositories. They'll probably provide their own debs and rpms, or maybe a straight binary download like they do for the Steam dedicated server.
I didn't necessarily mean to suggest that it would necessarily be available directly from official repos (although perhaps it could be, being able to easily install steam would be a good selling point of a distro that was not intended to be 100% free software). I wonder how ubuntu would feel as this could be competition for their own app store.
What I meant was will this be targeting the traditional distributions (Fedora/Ubuntu) and be installed in a relatively normal "Linux way" (like dropbox or spotify).
They could of course create their own Distro which would essentially be minimal WM + Steam + Other basic apps (Chrome,thunderbird,openoffice).
As I see it, it will be an app (if it ever happens, I'm not sure how much I can trust these "omg Steam is coming to Linux!" posts any more) that you can just install, exactly like Dropbox or Spotify.
It will then download your games whenever you tell it to and you can play them, just like Steam on any other plaform. Of course, which games those are will depend on availability of each individual game.
I'd actually really like it if it was a repo. Add "http://steampowered.com/fedora/username/securitytoken or /debian/ (etc.) to your list of repos, then apt-get install steam. The username/security token stuff is provided so that you get a dynamically generated repo, which includes access to the games you've bought. You could then install games via apt/yum (and I'm going to go ahead and assume they're all statically linked and include all needed binaries, because traditionally, closed-source games on Linux have forced users into dependency hell).
Steam then becomes a marketplace and apt/yum frontend :).
(Of course, I doubt very much that this is realistic; it'd just be awesome)
> The thing that's obviously not going to happen is sudo apt-get install steam -- at least, not from the official repositories.
This is completely possible. You can write a stub package that just automates the process of downloading and installing steam, and put it into debian's non-free repository. Flash player was installed this way for years.
I'd actually rather keep apt-get out of my games installation process. Obviously it would make sense for steam to call apt-get etc to install core libraries required etc. I'd rather not have some sort of dependency jungle whereby I have my system dependencies overwritten by some steam specific version.
The reason apt-get scares me for games is that it can sometimes get very carried away and start doing things like installing mailservers + alternative Windows managers + different java versions when I try and install a relatively small program.
Aye, and I wouldn't expect games companies to have the first clue about decent linux packaging. I say keep the games installed in Steam, but Steam installed with the package manager.
Will "Steam for Linux" be something that you can just apt-get into your free as in freedom Distro and start running AAA games, or will it in fact be something highly proprietary which is designed for a specific subset of devices which happen to run Linux kernels?
I see a lot of people here discussing "market share" but as has been proved by Apple market share is certainly not everything. In reality the computer market is broken into a number of distinct markets that have overlap and some of these are more lucrative than others.
Pricing structure will make a difference here, I wonder if the Linux games will be the same price as their Windows counterparts? I remember a few years ago there were a number of companies that tried to break into Linux gaming but the prices for the games were astronomical. Many 5 year old games that could have had for Windows for about $10 were selling for $40+ on Linux.
Linux Steam could also focus on other styles of games too, perhaps there is more demand amongst Linux users for highly cerebral RTS & RPG games rather than the latest COD that could be sold at a higher price? All you would really need is one or two "killer" titles that were Linux exclusive (think XBoX and Halo) to make whole categories of gamers take it seriously. Of course it is both a blessing and a curse in the sense that stuff developed for Linux is often easier to port to other platforms than the other way around.
As a Desktop Linux user myself I am not too concerned with "market share" , to an extent I couldn't care less if I am the only the person that uses it. What I really care about is being able to use Linux for all of my day to day tasks (I have a Windows dual boot but I would rather skip the step of having to power cycle my computer at least once a day).