“I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.” - Gabe Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve
The award-winning game publisher, Valve, has recently chosen to give much less consideration to Windows loyalty and much more attention to Linux.
Although Valve has been designing games that run on the Windows platform for close to a decade, it’s only been creating games that run on Linux for about a year. Recently, though, Gabe Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve, said, in an interview, “I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space. I think that we’re going to lose some of the top-tier PC [original equipment manufacturers]. They’ll exit the market.”
Although such huge predictions have yet to be proven true, as Windows 8 has yet to ship mainstream yet, some things have proven true that may give good reason for Valve to foresee some success in Linux.
The first factor is that Valve is not alone. Major companies such as NVIDIA, AMD and Intel have been working closely with Valve to create games for Linux these days. As if that’s not enough, Left 4 Dead 2, a popular Valve game, performs at 315 fps (frames per second). A feat that not even the best finely tuned and over-clocked hardware can do in Windows, and we’re surely not to think that this game alone is some freak of nature that breaks all Windows speed records, are we?
The second factor that is contributing to the Valve endeavor surely has to do with the rise in Linux popularity. Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, have top-name backings, they’re extremely easy to install, much more stable, have a very familiar Windows like GUI interface, and, well, they’re free.
All of these things have not proven favorable for Microsoft. Especially since gamers (the Valve target) tend to be a fairly intelligent crowd capable of pulling off a Windows to Linux defect of their own, without any problem at all.
But there’s a catch to this new Valve / Linux love affair, and some big names in Linux aren’t pleased with it.
GNU creator, Richard Stallman, believes that Valve’s entrance into Linux is not beneficial to the open source community. He believes, like many, that one of the most important things about open source is that, typically, even the most high-quality apps are free, and they’re open. That leads him to have two problems with the Valve move. First, Valve will charge, and second, games from them, such as Left 4 Dead, are closed-source. Stallman does believe that, when game makers such as Valve create games for Linux, it can be great publicity for the OS, but he also firmly believes that coming in with closed-license software will not benefit the future of GNU/Linux.