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I think it will, not today but tomorrow. When talking about games at Linux it seems quit a few people start to think of those 1% market share Linux has on the desktop but it goes far beyond that. There are game-consoles, there are home entertainment systems, there are mobile platforms and so on. Valve going Desktop Linux, and even Ubuntu, is just the door opener. Its the first step to make Linux and Linux based solutions more attractive for gaming, for 3D, for end-users and for the mass market.
Valve doing this now will give them a competative advantage. That's in for them: offering there solutions on far more devices to far more customers. Its also a clear step out of the dependency to Microsoft. A dependency that is hitting back now that Microsoft introduced its app store as only way to get software on there new (RT) devices. Its needed else Valve msy find themselfs outruled by Microsoft.
A proper solution will be the use of crossplaform library to render those games available to virtually any system.
Audio issue, PulseAudio is the most common for the majority of Linux based system. Video issue is related to the vendors themselves (AMD, Nvidia and Intel), some commercial games runs on MESA based driver without hiccups because of minimum requirement.
Isn't it ironic the market number is used as an excuse, yet gaming publisher have no problem releasing their game on Apple iMac and MacBook which are far less popular than Microsoft Windows system wordwide?
Looking at hundle bundle website (http://www.humblebundle.com/), on average, Linux system users are willing to pay more than both Mac and Windows showing a potential growing marketing. When a gaming company saw that opportunity, expect other to follow the suit.




Member since:
2005-07-06
That's the classic catch 22 that maybe the Valve push will help with...
The number of people gaming on Linux is less because the hardware support for audio and video isn't as good because there are few companies that support it because there isn't as much of a market because there aren't very many solid games because the the number of people gaming on Linux is less... repeat.
I wish I could convince myself the Valve push will work :-|