There sure seems to be a lot of confusion here on HN about what Steam is. There are a lot of people that say the only reason why they ever run Windows is to pl

There sure seems to be a lot of confusion here on HN about what Steam is. There are a lot of people that say the only reason why they ever run Windows is to play games on Steam It seems like a lot of people hear that there will be a Steam client for Linux and somehow think that all these games will now run on Linux. Sorry to disappoint you. It seems that there is a misunderstanding of what Steam actually is. Steam is merely a marketplace, updater, and launcher for over 1500 games. Less than 5% of those games run on Linux. Valve only has 25 games that it produced in-house. Only 6 of these have been released since 2007 (their games alone hardly dictate how the industry will move. They are not a dominant player in this respect). Most of valve's titles have been mission-packs, or variants of Half-Life, TFS, or Counter Strike. If gamers can boot into Linux tomorrow and run Steam, will they? Would they really do it for the 100 games that are available (most of them dated and washed up games)? Then new titles come out or they want to play their current favorite (non Valve) game, they have to boot back into Windows to play those? Why would they do that? (besides geeks/hackers with too much time on their hands). I know that the majority of hackers love the openness of Linux and the smug "hipness" or "superiority" (or being in-vogue) of Apple, but I think that people tend to self dilute themselves with wishful thinking that Microsoft and Windows will somehow go away any time soon. It is comical to me how people can berate one closed platform - Windows (and list being closed as the reason why) and yet love other, even more closed platforms (Apple products, Steam...) Steam holds a monopoly on digital sales of Games in the PC market. Suddenly Microsoft wants to compete with them and they start ranting like lunatics (publicly calling windows 8 a catastrophe). Any company who does business with the public should expect competition. And the public should welcome it. It keeps prices lower and forces competitors to produce better software.