starfyredragon
04-16-2011, 05:46 AM
One thing I'm noticing is a number of indie developers (such as minecraft and Amnesia if I recall correctly) are making their games linux-compatible because it gives them a smaller pond to be a fish in (making them proportionally a bigger fish, so to speak).
As steam is becoming a major venue for indie games, steam should really be available for linux too. I'd personally, for the sake of avoiding distro hell, make it a very specific distro of linux, more than likely vanilla Ubuntu which is the most common home linux distro at this point. Doing as such would allow Valve to have a basic idea of how the system is running and what packages are available. Further, users of other distros would likely be able to install it, but since they're using the "non-supported" distro, they would know ahead of time that there's a chance that it wouldn't work as tested by steam (which may affect their choice in distros) as well give Valve the ability to say "Hey, we told you which linux we support. Not our problem." (Which would be helpful since support can be costly. Although I'd like all linux to be fully supported, I know that'd be expensive as f***.).
Similar to how you'd have steamplay for the mac, you'd have steamplay for ubuntu. Steamplay for mac has a tendency to favor the big title games (since big title games are more likely to transition to Mac), steamplay for linux would favor the indie games (which have a tendency to use fewer proprietary libraries, and use more linux compatible languages such as java.)
As Mac is Unix based, it shouldn't be that big of a jump to make an Ubuntu steam. And it'd be nice to see which games are natively linux compatible instead of having to install Wine (which works only barely most of the time) and having to try a bajillion configurations and alternatives to see which games will work and which won't.
The change would ALSO likely let valve track how many "windows" users are actually linux users running a heavily modified Wine.
Also, valve is becoming a pretty big fish, but it still has to compete with retail for game sales. Having linux support would allow it to cover a base retail doesn't cover. (Finding commercial linux games is a pain in the a**, a pain that valve could make money by solving.)
Besides, linux has the nice ability to completely drop OS GUI features (or run a minimal OS gui). Doing that, I could squeak out an extra quarter-gig of ram and a good amount of CPU cache for my game specifically, letting me up the graphics a notch. And running Team Fortress 2 at a higher FPS makes me happy.
As steam is becoming a major venue for indie games, steam should really be available for linux too. I'd personally, for the sake of avoiding distro hell, make it a very specific distro of linux, more than likely vanilla Ubuntu which is the most common home linux distro at this point. Doing as such would allow Valve to have a basic idea of how the system is running and what packages are available. Further, users of other distros would likely be able to install it, but since they're using the "non-supported" distro, they would know ahead of time that there's a chance that it wouldn't work as tested by steam (which may affect their choice in distros) as well give Valve the ability to say "Hey, we told you which linux we support. Not our problem." (Which would be helpful since support can be costly. Although I'd like all linux to be fully supported, I know that'd be expensive as f***.).
Similar to how you'd have steamplay for the mac, you'd have steamplay for ubuntu. Steamplay for mac has a tendency to favor the big title games (since big title games are more likely to transition to Mac), steamplay for linux would favor the indie games (which have a tendency to use fewer proprietary libraries, and use more linux compatible languages such as java.)
As Mac is Unix based, it shouldn't be that big of a jump to make an Ubuntu steam. And it'd be nice to see which games are natively linux compatible instead of having to install Wine (which works only barely most of the time) and having to try a bajillion configurations and alternatives to see which games will work and which won't.
The change would ALSO likely let valve track how many "windows" users are actually linux users running a heavily modified Wine.
Also, valve is becoming a pretty big fish, but it still has to compete with retail for game sales. Having linux support would allow it to cover a base retail doesn't cover. (Finding commercial linux games is a pain in the a**, a pain that valve could make money by solving.)
Besides, linux has the nice ability to completely drop OS GUI features (or run a minimal OS gui). Doing that, I could squeak out an extra quarter-gig of ram and a good amount of CPU cache for my game specifically, letting me up the graphics a notch. And running Team Fortress 2 at a higher FPS makes me happy.