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Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais announced on Twitter that they've hired Andrey Smirnov to help them get some SteamOS changes upstream into the main Linux Kernel.

Here's what he said:

Andrey is a kernel developer we're hired to help us upstream various SteamOS driver changes, as well as undertake other kernel projects. First stop: Xbox One S rumble support!

You can see the post they're talking about on the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive. It will have to go through the usual process of getting feedback and possibly going through revisions before being accepted for a future Linux Kernel release.

While there is also the xpadneo driver for the Xbox One S gamepad, having more work out of the box is obviously a good thing for everyone. This is probably also useful for Valve as well, since it's one less thing they will need to maintain themselves for SteamOS directly.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: SteamOS, Valve
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mylka Aug 12, 2018
Quoting: Creak
Quoting: mylka
Quoting: GuestI simply love it to see Valve so dedicated to Linux.

but why arent they make new games, or just be publisher for games.
They are actually ;)
Gaben said they are working on several games, two of which are already announced: In the Valley of Gods and Artifact. The other projects haven't been announced yet.

ohh boy another card game. i liked gwent on witcher, but im not even playing gwent on gog
and a telltale/walking simulator game

dont get me wrong. its nice, but were are the big players? i dont mean hl3, or portal3, but sth bigger than a card game

playstation brings some new games like ghosts of tsushima, or death stranding. imaging such games from valve again


Quoting: Whitewolfe80
Quoting: mylka
Quoting: GuestI simply love it to see Valve so dedicated to Linux.

but why arent they make new games, or just be publisher for games.

Because that costs millions of dollars selling games makes them millions of dollars. Its profit versus potentional losses and valve hiring more linux staff is an outlay but its notwhere near the cost of developing a game.

i dont think all games cost millions.
anyways, i dont believe they make any money with steamOS. they want to bring there OS to the people, then they have to make games for it.
Whitewolfe80 Aug 12, 2018
Quoting: mylka
Quoting: Creak
Quoting: mylka
Quoting: GuestI simply love it to see Valve so dedicated to Linux.

but why arent they make new games, or just be publisher for games.
They are actually ;)
Gaben said they are working on several games, two of which are already announced: In the Valley of Gods and Artifact. The other projects haven't been announced yet.

ohh boy another card game. i liked gwent on witcher, but im not even playing gwent on gog
and a telltale/walking simulator game

dont get me wrong. its nice, but were are the big players? i dont mean hl3, or portal3, but sth bigger than a card game

playstation brings some new games like ghosts of tsushima, or death stranding. imaging such games from valve again


Quoting: Whitewolfe80
Quoting: mylka
Quoting: GuestI simply love it to see Valve so dedicated to Linux.

but why arent they make new games, or just be publisher for games.

Because that costs millions of dollars selling games makes them millions of dollars. Its profit versus potentional losses and valve hiring more linux staff is an outlay but its notwhere near the cost of developing a game.

i dont think all games cost millions.
anyways, i dont believe they make any money with steamOS. they want to bring there OS to the people, then they have to make games for it.

No not all games but games like Portal etc do because people expect bleeding edge graphics professional voice acting etc example Red Dead Redemption cost 100 million dollars to make. Ahh but we have a disgreement on the purpose of Steam os valve has Steam os as a back up incase windows try to make Windows app store a thing. If they wanted Steam os to be the go to linux distro they would need to make shit loads of improvements not just drivers also the last time they actively tried to talking to developers we got promises of Witcher 3 and Street Fighter 5 and we have neither of those.
mylka Aug 12, 2018
Quoting: Whitewolfe80No not all games but games like Portal etc do because people expect bleeding edge graphics professional voice acting etc example Red Dead Redemption cost 100 million dollars to make. Ahh but we have a disgreement on the purpose of Steam os valve has Steam os as a back up incase windows try to make Windows app store a thing. If they wanted Steam os to be the go to linux distro they would need to make shit loads of improvements not just drivers also the last time they actively tried to talking to developers we got promises of Witcher 3 and Street Fighter 5 and we have neither of those.

do they need a fallback OS? wouldnt linux + steam be enough.


i think steamOS has more potential. its a fact, that games sell better on consoles, so vavle needs to get them

make ONE steam machine (same hardware for all) like PS4/xbox. optimize steamOS for it. make 2-3 AAA steamos exclusive games everybody wants, make them buy steam machines, get the customers from ps4/xbox

yes, this would cost a lot of money, but i think valve has it
Purple Library Guy Aug 13, 2018
Quoting: Whitewolfe80No not all games but games like Portal etc do because people expect bleeding edge graphics professional voice acting etc example Red Dead Redemption cost 100 million dollars to make.

This in turn brings up another question for me. I've always generally accepted that for AAA publishers it's probably not worth it to release for Linux--but actually, when you consider that so much of the budget of an AAA game is not for the actual coding, support etc., it should be more viable for them to release cross-platform compared to smaller shops. I mean, say two thirds of the expenses on a game are for marketing and things like voice acting, as well as pay for a bunch of superfluous executives. That means additional costs for Linux are going to be a percentage, not of the whole expense, but of the remaining 1/3rd--voice acting and advertising don't cost more because of a Linux release.
Well I guess, as I've concluded before, it's not so much that it's not worth it financially for them, it's that the revenue involved is too small to be worth top executives spending their attention on it.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 13 August 2018 at 1:51 am UTC
Ardje Aug 13, 2018
Quoting: Whitewolfe80If they wanted Steam os to be the go to linux distro they would need to make shit loads of improvements not just drivers also the last time they actively tried to talking to developers we got promises of Witcher 3 and Street Fighter 5 and we have neither of those.
I bought a steam machine with steam os, and it saved me a lot of time figuring out how to optimize my system for being a low power embedded software development platform and being a gaming rig.
So it was well worth the investment.
Now Valve is investing *a lot of time* making Linux the gaming platform of choice, by making it the most advanced platform. You can see how Cro-team and Valve work together to resolve stutter in high end setups that plague all platforms. Except now for Linux. Because they can fiddle with and fix the Linux platform (mostly being graphics drivers needing to expose more information).
Make no mistake about it: Valve is creating the ultimate gaming platform, and it is using Linux to do that. And it is the opensource (AMD cards, intel even) drivers that help them fix issues, and recommend improvements to the vulkan standard.
Steam os itself gets new stable releases regularly. If I get my controller, and turn it on, there is a 99.999% chance I can select and play my favourite game that I played last year. If not, I can submit a bug and be sure Valve is hunting down platform changes, and either contact the original developer or make a steam platform backwards compatibility layer, like they did last time when they EOL'ed an old API rendering at least 10 of my games defunct. They fixed that for those that could not (for legal reasons even) compile and publish against a newer library.
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