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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Well, there is some teasing along those lines there:

> Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014.

But more importantly, control of Steam gives Valve a lot of leverage in this. It's easy to see the reasons for Linux support in indie games. But harder to see why mid-tier developers like Paradox or Eugen started to port their latest games to Linux. It's a good bet that some kind of a Steam-related carrot was involved there.

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Juho, great call-out with the "Steam-related carrot", I hadn't really thought down that path but you are absolutely right. Valve could easily offer big discounts in their split with the publishers for the first few years for Linux sales.

My (possibly very incorrect) assumption was that the profit from the Linux sales were so low as to not matter, but maybe they can provide a catalog-wide carrot... something more significant (as you suggested) to motivate the publisher en-masse.

This was my thought also. Offer $100 in games with the console, or release hl3 only on the console.

I'm really glad you guys pointed out this was a console launch because I tried to point it out on reddit and got shut down...

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1mywq0/steamos_annou...

Argh, that can be frustrating. I for one certainly agree with you :D

This is likely to be coupled with some manner of hardware launch, as well. I am skeptical that the name "Linux" will be a particularly useful term in that context.

Couple that with my skepticism that they're actually shipping much if any traditional Linux userspace software, and it's even less useful to compare potential SteamOS users to traditional Linux users.

Other than that I agree that with Valve as a patron there's a lot more credibility. Steam was a long-term move, and it paid off. So Valve has a good track record and solid momentum. If they can help make it easy for game companies to port their work, taking out a significant or non-trivial amount of work and offer the carrot of sales & paying customers, I could see this taking off.

I was skeptical of Steam back in 2004 but I wasn't thinking long term enough. Launching your own operating system isn't a short term move. It suggests to me that this will only get better and more impressive over time, if Valve is as committed to this as it seems.

What are your definitions for "traditional Linux userspace software" and "traditional Linux users"? Do you consider Android to be "Linux"?

"Traditional Linux userspace software" is an informal definition, but let's say something like X. Or your average window manager. Or, say, almost anything from GNOME.

"Traditional Linux users" is another informal definition, but if you use a distro, you're probably a traditional Linux user. Contrast this with an Android user. They run the Linux kernel but the software they interface with is an entirely different breed. The statement "Android is Linux" is true, definitely, but it's inside baseball to anyone but us nerds. The Linux-y aspects are more or less invisible (by design).

I'm not trying to slight either desktop Linux or Android or SteamOS or whatever, just to be clear. I think it's a huge win for Linux, at least in some sense.

I think it's misleading to read "Linux" and imagine "desktop GNU/Linux with all the trimmings." I can't imagine there won't be some way to get that on a SteamOS machine. My skepticism is directed at the idea that Valve will ship anything which, out of the box, resembles a traditional desktop Linux experience. I expect it will be more like an Android experience than Ubuntu, with rather limited access to OS internals, filesystem, package management, etc.

Does that make more sense?

The closeness of the SteamOS experience to that of a typical desktop Linux distro is irrelevant. If it runs on the Steam Box, it will run on a Linux desktop of compatible architecture.

Considering there is already Steam for Linux, its probable that Valve will ensure Linux games run on both platforms equally well.

In any case, if there is no need for "all the trimmings", if Valve just wants to make an entertainment pipeline, then that's fine by me. It's the same kernel; this is a huge win for Linux by any measure.

> on both platforms equally well

But if they are optimizing a number of things in their own distribution, it's not far-fetched to think that games would run marginally better on the SteamOS.

I expect optimizations will come in the form of:

- GPU driver improvements (they've already been working with nvidia, amd, and intel) which everyone benefits from

- kernel patches (maybe they fiddle with the scheduler or something) which anyone could pick up

- new/improved subsystems (perhaps they do some low latency input or audio layer), which (assuming they open source it) distros could choose to adopt or not

- improving porting techniques for bringing games or game middleware to Linux based platforms (everyone benefits)

It's possible that some stuff could be foreign enough to the way it has always been done on linux that it may take some time to make it upstream (see wakelocks from Android finally turning up in the kernel under a different name and a different implementation but providing the same functionality), but if it actually improves things, eventually I suspect the mainline kernel or distros or whomever will come around.

e: fix formatting

I think you misunderstood the point of my comment.

The context was whether or not "Linux users" will pay money for software. In this respect, the closeness is only relevant insofar as it is useful to discuss "Debian users" in the same breath as "SteamOS users."

> but let's say something like X. Or your average window manager. Or, say, almost anything from GNOME.

This doesn't apply to embedded Linux, or Linux for servers, which could be argued to be just as "traditional" a use case as Linux for desktops.

Additionally, for the desktop use case, nearly every distribution uses a different window manager anyway. There are such a wide variety of window managers, I wouldn't know how to compute an "average" between them in a meaningful way. Although I use Linux for a desktop everyday, I don't have GNOME installed, and I would barely notice if X was missing and replaced by Wayland or a different component.

> I think it's misleading to read "Linux" and imagine "desktop GNU/Linux with all the trimmings."

Right. It's not Linux for the desktop, or Linux for the phone, or Linux for embedded devices, or Linux for servers, it's Linux for the living room. My point is that due to the diversity of the Linux ecosystem, there really wasn't such a thing as a "traditional" or "average" Linux Desktop in the first place, and that we can't even say Linux for desktop is the "traditional" or "average" use of Linux. Anything running the Linux kernel should be able to call itself Linux, without qualification.

That's fine, but the context was whether "Linux users" will pay for software or not. I basically agree with you in terms of the facts, but speaking primarily in terms of user behavior, each of those platforms is manifestly different.

I think it's pretty unlikely that Xorg won't be a part of it somehow. X+extensions is basically the only meaningful, portable, direct interface to video hardware that exists on linux. At least if you want the hardware vendor's own drivers (which steambox obviously would, Nouveau is not up to the challenge).

It would also mean that all the 300+ games that currently work on Steam For Linux would have to be retooled for whatever proprietary windowing layer Valve would have to invent. And Valve would have to convince nVidia to come along for the ride.

My guess would be anything that runs X.org + Gnome/KDE/XFCE ... (and the list goes on)

My guess is that SteamOS is a rather specialized flavor of linux ... akin to Android.

... Just my 2 cents.

Yes, this is a more succinct phrasing of what I meant. :)

Android is Linux, but very clearly not "traditional Linux".

"Traditional Linux" suggests to me the traditional distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, etc.

It'll be interesting to see how much SteamOS will look like a traditional Linux. Considering the many Linux offerings on Steam, I suspect they'd like to have executable compatibility on that level, which Android probably doesn't have. But will it be as wide open as a traditional Linux? I suspect not.

It'll probably be along the lines of Chrome OS, where you do have access to the full Linux system, you just have to work for it...

Even if the market is small, it's critical to be "first" than later. That way you get a bigger share of the market instead of being drowned in an ocean of software like on many app stores these days.

A steam-related carrot with lower fees might be a huge incentive. But when we are speculating a gaming company in the business of selling $60-$100 games might be more worried about their ability to differentiate their products from sub-$10 games. If they believe steambox could provide that then it might be an easy sell.

Remember:

The PS4 and Xbox1 both are literally built on top of DirectX11, meaning that games for next-gen consoles (read: AAA) will be DirectX by DEFAULT but will certainly not be OpenGL by default.

And OpenGL is a requirement for Linux support of these games.

How Valve is strong arming manufacturers into writing the graphics code for their games in BOTH frameworks is beyond me. I'm not sure the major engines out there support both either.

But Microsoft won a massive coup this generation with all consoles being Win7 developer kits + Visual Studio 2012 + DirectX 11.

With Microsoft providing the major tools for AAA-games, it's going to be harder going forward, not easier, for the Linux proponents to make their case and win.

> The PS4 and Xbox1 both are literally built on top of DirectX11

I'd love to know where Sony said that the PS4 uses DirectX.

They discussed it at length at GDC: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/sony-dives-deep-into-t...

That doesn't seem to say the same thing: the article says it has the feature set, but it doesn't say it uses DX11.1+.

Edit: oh, just read MLR's comment.

Both PS4 and Xbox One are now on the X86 architecture. They also share the same GPU (with minor differences).

PS4 runs a BSD derived OS with a Sony-specific graphics library called RSX (very similar to OpenGL, but much lower level).

Xbox 360 and PS3 games threw away the fixed function graphics pipeline. Everything was done with shaders. With Linux graphics drivers nearing OpenGL3 compliance, it is much more feasible to target Linux in addition to Windows and Consoles without needing to re-architect the graphics architecture of your engine.

It will be trivial for next-gen developers to target PC/PS4/Xbox One/SteamBox.

Some clever folks might even be able to compile once and dynamically link against platform-specific graphics/platform libraries. :)

edit: this was directed at criley2 - not McGlockenshire

Isn't RSX (Reality Simulator) was just a name for nvidia graphic chipset in PS3? Oh wait, it is.

PS3 used libGCM and PSGL, which is pretty much OpenGL ES 1.1 + Nvidia Cg. Don't forget the fact that OpenGL ES isn't OpenGL.

XBox never used DirectX neither, because why would you need such abstraction if all of your target market has the exact same hardware inside? (I'm omitting fact that guy above compared Direct X and OpenGL which is retarded). It used something similar, but not the same.

So RTFM or STFU.

I certainly did confuse the RSX (ps3 GPU) with libGCM (the ps3 GPU library). I haven't forgotten that OpenGL ES isn't OpenGL - it's OpenGL minus all of the garbage.

It's also true that Xbox 360 did not use DirectX. But they DID have an abstraction in the form of the XDK (Xbox 360 SDK).

Comparing OpenGL and DirectX is not retarded - they are both competing graphics libraries that are slowly converging on the same feature set.

Just FYI the PS4 low-level library is called GNM, and their higher-level wrapper is GNMX.

(source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-cre...)

I was wrong re: ps4's library name. Thanks for the article. I left the games industry just before the transition to the new consoles.

With Nvidia drivers you can use OpenGL 4.3 (the most recent version). It's only the Intel drivers which are limited to OpenGL 3...

"Sony is building its CPU on what it's calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set, including extra debugging support that is not available on PC platforms. This system will also give developers more direct access to the shader pipeline than they had on the PS3 or through DirectX itself. "This is access you're not used to getting on the PC, and as a result you can do a lot more cool things and have a lot more access to the power of the system," Norden said. A low-level API will also let coders talk directly with the hardware in a way that's "much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL," but still not quite at the driver level." http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/sony-dives-deep-into-t...

Is what I was going on, but I can see that "DirectX feature set" is not the same as "DirectX", so I apologize for misleading.

The PS4 does not use DirextX, they use their own system, people are getting confused because they said it had features equivalent to 'DirectX 11.1+'.

Most major engines, such as Unreal/UDK, already allow export to Linux and consoles, so what the console supports isn't the limiting factor it was when everyone had to code directly to the metal.

As other have pointed out, you are obviously wrong about Microsoft Direct X being available on Sony's Playstation 4.

But you are also wrong in the larger picture. Direct3D and OpenGL are first and foremost abstraction layers to access the GPU. Since in a console the hardware is immutable, you can gain a lot of performance by skipping (or trimming the fat of) these abstractions.

The XBox 360 version of DirectX is very different from the PC version: it's much much closer to the metal and exposes pretty much all the GPU functionalities.

Here is a thread talking about XBox 360 dev: http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=62049

There's no reason to think that it will be any different for the XBox One. Hardware-wise it's a very average PC: its sole advantage versus an actual PC is this ability to get that much closer to the metal.

So, dev tools for PS4 are still bad?

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