Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

asark·

This whole thing has been pretty funny.

Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work.

Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games!

Valve: ...

View on HN

I think honestly Canonical is just "pulling a Redhat". Redhat walked away 20 years ago from the consumer market to focus on the server market (Fedora came much later.) Server is where they make money. They don't get any money out the video game market. The users don't give them any money. Neither does Valve. Nor the game developers. Nor the hardware developers. They need money to develop and maintain stuff and grow. They might reconsider if there is push from the server customers though.

My employer uses Ubuntu for most developers, meaning all our software is designed to work on the latest LTS Ubuntu and we (I assume) pay a significant amount for support. But the only reason we use Ubuntu is because it's more familiar to the average developer than RHEL.

So ask your employer to convey an interest in maintaining the 32-bit library.

That was after they realise that it boils down to 1% market size.

Right. Valve wants gaming on Linux as a hedge against Microsoft. They are swimming in money from selling cosmetic items in TF2 and Counterstrike and DOTA. So they can subsidize a bunch of Linux development that has no short term revenue value because they view a single dependency on Windows as a threat to their Steam vig revenue.

Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.

I think most of their revenue is from their distributor's cut - even Valve can't sell $3.5 billion worth of TF2 hats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com