Valve has clearly got big plans for Linux gaming. "Linux is the future of gaming" etc... They're banking on a huge switch towards it with their Steam Box. It might take a while for all new games to have Linux support as standard but I think, with Valve's backing it will happen
Remember we're probably talking about a gaming "appliance". Non tech friend of mine came up with his "must haves" for this:
- Must be relatively inexpensive - £200-300 is ideal, although less would be brilliant;
- Must be easy to setup and use - the latter meaning no fancy processes needed to configure;
- Must be quiet and low power draw - remember that these are destined for living rooms;
- Must self-update in a transparent manner - multiple mandatory reboots are not on;
- Must not need to be connected to the net 24x7 to be usable - i.e. must have an offline mode;
- Must support one, and preferably all, of the major/A-list titles released per year;
- Must be usable with a (prefably wireless) game controller - no NEED for keyboard/mouse;
- Must have a way (cloud?) to backup your games and especially game saves.
Interestingly enough, the questions after that were about possible non-gaming uses for the SB; will it be usable as a media player; can I run office type apps on it; can I check my email and facebook on it? And there's the exciting bit - if SB is a success AND they do allow this non-gaming use, are we going to find that more and more people then effectively have a Linux PC in their living room?
If so, then Linux has bypassed the desktop battle (which it's unarguably lost) and moved onto the consumer space.
I think Linux moved into the consumer space when the TiVo came out some 13 years ago.
These days, off the top of my head, in my house Linux is hidden away in:
o Samsung Smart TV
o Internet router & access points
o Mobile phones & tablets (Android)
o Hauppauge network media player
o TiVo
There must be others that I have either forgotten or don't know what the firmware is based on, but that is a mix there of ARM, PowerPC and MIPS devices running Linux embedded enough that the user shouldn't know or care that there is Linux under the hood. Of course as a bit of Linux geek I tend to go poking around and possibly rooting such devices.
Chalk these ones up for Windows:
o Satnav (WinCE)
Pretty sure that is it, you can spot Windows a mile off
Only problem I can see is traditionally you need Nvidia graphics for Linux as the AMD driver were a bit sucky. I will be very interested to see how Valve push that one, as AMD still seems the best value at this sort of end of the market and a top end APU would probably do the job nicely.
I wonder if this news means that the majority of PC users that remain are mostly gamers !
Yep, my bad, I actually meant visible consumer space. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic but open source apps are a lot better these days, and folks are more goal-oriented, i.e. not "can I run Microsoft Word" but "can I load my Word documents", so a non-Microsoft OS in the living room I think has more of a chance.
According to the last VM engineer who visited, their V boxes are also WinCE powered - maybe that goes some way to explaining why they need a weekly reboot!
I'd be very surprised if AMD aren't camped out on Gabe's lawn this minute since, as you say, an A8 or A10 powered SB makes a lot of sense. I've seen some on the 'net saying ARM power for SB to keep power draw down, but that makes absolutely no sense at all to me.
Conversely NVidia would be really ill advised to just ignore this - especially if there's home-brew versions of the SB permitted.
Dooms meant games on Steam-for-Linux. Actually, I've been thinking that I've got a lot of "spare" disks lying around, maybe the time has come to see if I can get a cheap eSATA crate and slap a Linux distro on there and get some Linux games played.
I don't think it will ever happen. Things like the steam box are an appliance, and if you can tell what OS an appliance is running then that kind of means you have failed as an interface designer.
I am now thinking that Richland isn't up to the job for this. However, we can't be far off AMD announcing the new steamroller based part and that is rumoured to have a pretty huge graphics section. That would nail the hardware requirement, then they just need to send a pair of video device driver engineers for a 1 year stint at Steam to get the drivers working properly. Or put it another way, if they launched a steam box with the current A10, then in 6 months time it would look very lame.
www.leonslost.com
Steam: Korath .::. Battle.net: Korath#2209 .::. PSN: Korathis .::. Origin: Koraths
Motivate me on FitBit .::. Endomondo .::. Strava
I have a PC and Windows operating system for gaming. If gaming didn't require me to use Windows, I wouldn't use a Windows OS. I would use the many different UNIX or Linux operating systems.
This means Windows is just the middleman and it's costing me unnecessary money. Steam sees this very clearly and that's why it's moving towards Linux. It all started because of Windows 8, in my opinion. Windows has it's own gaming platform and based on the path of Windows 8, it seems to be catering to the laptop and tablet market, and Steam knows this and simply isn't going to sit there and be affected by Microsoft's own goals.
If Steam removes the middleman, creates a secure platform for itself and create a console too, it's basically just entered the console market while still being a PC gaming platform. This is the best thing to gaming since consoles.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)