Hacker News Reader

Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but this sounds like an extremely bizarre proposal to me. Everything I've learned about Gabe indicates he has absolutely no interest in this course of events. Why would he want to run Microsoft when he is head of a large, incredibly successful, innovative, growing company like Valve? This makes zero sense to me.

"Yes, Gabe likes making games and selling silly virtual hats and guns that make big dimensional holes."

I think this is extremely belittling of Gabe and Valve, and games in general, and completely mistaken to boot.

View on HN

There is one thing that is important here. Valve/Steam, even if they have a linux client, are at the hand of Microsoft/Apple. I think the reason they are moving to Linux is to see if they can get out of that stranglehold but I doubt it. They can convert us techies, but most people don't give a crap's ass about Ubuntu or Mint, they want Windows+Steam+Office+Visual Studio (or whatever combination).

But make no mistake, if MS thinks of buying Valve/Steam (or Apple, but I think MS has a better chance) making Steam hard to install/use can kill it. Steam lives of Windows users and I don't see many people buying a Steambox (when they can either buy a full Windows PC or a Playstation 3/4 or Xbox 360(/720?))

If I recall correctly, Gabe expressed his fears that Microsoft and Apple would move against Steam, as it provides an "App Store" that would compete with that shipping with the OS, motivating his desire for a Linux-powered steambox and to make Linux a viable gaming platform.

Yes, I pointed to that, the thing is, people won't switch to linux because of that. I know Linux guys always want to say 'X is going to be the reason Linux will be adopted' but the thing is, it won't. Outside tech circles, and what I call technohipsters, Linux won't gain that much traction. Not at least to make Valve consider Linux only client. I have a Mac and PC at home. Steam on Mac has 76 games, Steam on PC 238. I don't know about Linux, but I'm guessing even less. And from those 76 Mac games, more than half are indie games. Few AAA games there were released on Mac Steam a good half year after the PC version. Do you really think the 50 million people that bought Call of Duty on the first weekend will move to Linux where they can't play those games?

A Linux based steam console will get more publishers on board if people buy it. There were rumors going around that the PS4 OS was going to be Linux based too. If that's the case Linux will get pretty much everything.

But people will only buy it if publishers publish for it.

And while I don't know the details of a Steam box, assuming a x64 config, you won't be able to really undercut Dell or HP. So why buy a Steam box if you can get a WIndows PC which allows you to run Office?

And about PS4, I have been out of the industry for a while, but if PS4 really is linux based, most games will target THAT specific linux distro with specific drivers. While I doubt Sony would make PS4 just another Linux distro, even if they do, they will add Sony Middleware to it that won't be available on other distros.

I would like to see Linux succeed. I periodically switch to Linux and back to Mac everyonce in a while, but I just don't see it. And back to the original topic, when you are a marketplace on another's man ecosystem, you will always be at their mercy. Now if Steam moved to the browser, maybe I could see something there, but Linux, no, sorry, not gonna happen (as much as I would love it to.)

Linux has been widely adopted for a long time, just not on desktop PC. Android is based on Linux, and we don't see Linux 'get pretty much everything'.

I believe console gamers and PC gamers are a largely different demographics. Among PC gamers, People don't switch to a platform because the game is there, instead, people play a game because the game is here on their platform.

Because Gabe is an engineer and engineers have an insatiable need to fix things and microsoft needs fixing.

But I don't buy it either. I think it would scare the pants off of the corporate customers of MS.

Fixing Microsoft isn't an engineering problem; if it were, I'd wager their thousands of engineers would've done it already.

It may be an engineer on top kind of solution that is needed. Apple had a designer at the top of their structure, so design got its way. This even made up for mistakes made while Jobs wasn't there.

Having Gabe in sufficient control of non technical managers may well work, but then you could switch Gabe out for any trustable non-manager.

I think it would scare the pants off of the corporate customers of MS.

Ballmer's erratic leadership is scaring the pants off of customers, ISVs, and IHVs alike. In fact, the only people who still have their pants are Microsoft's competitors.

He might be an engineer but he was at Microsoft for 13 years and served as producer for the first three releases of Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com