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Oh, I agree with you and I too assume the revenue brought in is enough to cover costs for current Linux development. My worry is what would Valve do when the revenue drops or becomes unprofitable? 1% is still margin of error sized for companies, no matter how many millions it may represent.
I guess on the positive side, if their cost to maintain it is small, it's easier to argue against cutting Linux development ("It's less than 1% of spending, boss").
I would assume in general the possibility of contraction of the gaming industry as a whole as a reflection of the global economy. I guess it's a matter of whether companies like Valve and others seeing value in continued investment.
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Just no. Money is money, and every big company has become big because it has been struggling for every +1%.
For example, imagine if Steam user base doubles but somehow Linux gamers user base remains the same. That means, it's 0.5%, twice as insignificant, but still bring the same money as before.
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I think in general, I am just more cynical about Valve's motivations with Linux. It's not a huge loss to cut us and focus on more prifatble areas. On the other hand, they have contributed greatly, so even if they do abandon it, we still have all the improvements they've made and I'm very happy for that and prolly shouldn't complain.
I'm confident that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg, in the most positive way possible -with some worrying outcomes too-.
This year, we've seen Lenovo starting selling some flagship devices with Linux, System 76 and Purism doing well and expanding their products, with the latter, together with Pine, releasing a Linux based phone, Microsoft being Microsoft at heart, but at the same time putting efforts on WSL2, now commiting changes to the kernel to propose a new virtualization stack with Hyper-V, Stadia working from Debian servers, and let's not forget Valve with Proton, Gamescope, DXVK plus all the community projects I might be forgetting. This, if things go well, will eventually show in our share and numbers. One step at a time.
Overall, the state of Linux is fantastic, and when seeing the bigger picture I think we should have enough hope to see even better results in the future. Sure, the road won't be empty of bumps and a lot of the above mentioned does not directly relate or help us as gaming Linux users -Stadia- or dubious practices might tamper with our hopes in the future -Microsoft- as community as a whole.
Talking about the gaming industry in particular, I think the market is adjusting slowly to current COVID situation, general economic issues pre-covid and imminent market saturation. Not ideal, but not an issue only for us Linuxers.
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In short, Gabe wants Steam to be effectively independent of Windows and not reliant on Microsoft technology. The easiest way to do that is have an open layer that translates everything Windows can do. Valve doesn't need to make money out of that, because the value is inherent.
This is in much the same way as Apple (yes, really) rescued the internet by open-sourcing WebKit. They made $0 in doing so, but ensured that no-one could ever 'own' the web.
It's no coincidence that Gabe has been begging Tim Cook to take gaming seriously on MacOS
Meanwhile, I'm paying close attention to Big Navi, and the extent to which RDNA2 being on both new consoles will affect PC gaming. 2021 (assuming the world doesn't literally burn) is going to be a fascinating year for games.
But who did they "rescue" the internet from? IE still dominated, but we already had several free and open source web engines and Mozilla's Firefox was steadily gaining market share.
Exactly.
Another relevant thing (or not), is concerning the state driven chinese OS based on Linux (Deepin/UOS).
If this OS became really massively used in China (it will take some years if it happens), Linux-ready stores may dominate the game.
The commercial war with US may (must?) have a huge impact on leveraging the adoption of this OS country wide.
And China is a very big juicy market.
Pure speculation here, but definitely possible IMHO. Wait&See...
Last edited by DebianUser on 18 September 2020 at 2:07 pm UTC
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I am in agreement with you about what our options are in regards to Linux gaming, I just don't like the options. I have also chosen option 2 myself. I'm trying to migrate over to more of option 3 than 2 but it will be a slow migration and still not be a total conversion as I still enjoy many closed source games. I'll continue to buy what Linux games I can from Itch.io/Game Jolt/GOG etc in order to support DRM free and/or open source clients/stores. I'll continue to donate to FLOSS distros; and open source games/engines. I have no illusion that my steps are largely not going to have any impact but maybe things will get better over time.