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Good answer It’s possible that Linux gaming is about to become huge There’s an old (7 years?) Q&A interview with Linus Torvalds where someone asks him about "

Good answer It’s possible that Linux gaming is about to become huge There’s an old (7 years?) Q&A interview with Linus Torvalds where someone asks him about "linux on the desktop". After ranting about the craziness of packaging apps for all the different distros he specifically says Valve could be the company that drives standardization for that. Thought it was interesting that he forsaw valve getting so involved in Linux back then. Excited to see the effect of SteamOS/SteamDeck on the Linux ecosystem in general

emteycz 5y ago
Valve was big on Linux at least since 2012 (9 years ago)
DantesKite 5y ago
Me too. I think the consequences are actually rather deep, especially in the competitive gaming space, which for the most part, pales in comparison to the NBA, NFL, etc. I believe most games have been held back by developers constantly patching games. And occasionally from companies like Nintendo that restrict nearly everything that can be done on their platform. I'm not big on open source as being a solution for most problems. Copyright and capturing value are fantastic business models. But I think competitive video games are one of the spaces that can take advantage of open-source very well. Because the best games mature organically, bottom up, from trial and error. Take for example a game like chess. The rules are stable, well-known, and the meta continued to evolve for centuries. A similar phenomena happened in Starcraft when Blizzard didn't do any major patches for years. Historically developers have prevented games from flourishing and restricted their potential, marred by bad incentives. It's much easier to design for a platform where the specs don't consistently change. With a greater pool of developers, there's more incentive to create on this platform. I personally believe a generic video game creator would do very well. Something for an FPS game, a Super Smash Melee-like game, where you can edit the rules, speed, design levels, etc. The major reason this didn't happen on the iPhone is because of the lack of controls. Touchscreen just isn't as good.

emteycz 5y ago

Valve was big on Linux at least since 2012 (9 years ago)

DantesKite 5y ago

Me too. I think the consequences are actually rather deep, especially in the competitive gaming space, which for the most part, pales in comparison to the NBA, NFL, etc. I believe most games have been held back by developers constantly patching games. And occasionally from companies like Nintendo that restrict nearly everything that can be done on their platform. I'm not big on open source as being a solution for most problems. Copyright and capturing value are fantastic business models. But I think competitive video games are one of the spaces that can take advantage of open-source very well. Because the best games mature organically, bottom up, from trial and error. Take for example a game like chess. The rules are stable, well-known, and the meta continued to evolve for centuries. A similar phenomena happened in Starcraft when Blizzard didn't do any major patches for years. Historically developers have prevented games from flourishing and restricted their potential, marred by bad incentives. It's much easier to design for a platform where the specs don't consistently change. With a greater pool of developers, there's more incentive to create on this platform. I personally believe a generic video game creator would do very well. Something for an FPS game, a Super Smash Melee-like game, where you can edit the rules, speed, design levels, etc. The major reason this didn't happen on the iPhone is because of the lack of controls. Touchscreen just isn't as good.