Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

At LinuxCon North America 2013 in New Orleans, Gabe Newell from video game–maker Valve delivered a keynote talk explaining the company's interest in Linux. Although Valve does not expect Linux games to outsell those on proprietary operating systems in the near term, it sees several valuable side effects emerging from its Linux support efforts, and it predicts that in the long term, open systems built on Linux represent the future of gaming.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin introduced Newell by observing that for many years critics had said that the thing holding back Linux adoption was the lack of good games. Now, however, they can no longer say so. Valve is one of the gaming industry's top players, and it has offered its Steam game-delivery platform for Linux since February 2013.

Newell opened his remarks by pointing out that Valve has produced games for a variety of device platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, the XBox, the Playstation, and so on. The Steam service is best known as an online content-delivery mechanism (to buy, download, and update games), but it also incorporates a suite of tools for game developers and users to create content. Valve has always recognized that as a company it will need to adapt to structural changes in the technology marketplace, he said, including the declining costs of computing and networking. The drop in these costs has led to a number of changes in the gaming marketplace, increasing the relative value of game design and decreasing the value of marketing and distribution.

Those changes have made digital distribution systems like Steam the new norm, but they have had unpredictable effects as well, such a the emergence of "free to play" games. At some point, he said, the marginal cost of adding a new player to the game falls below the marginal benefits that a new player adds to the game community, so it no longer needs to charge. Another example is the "electronic sports" phenomenon, where sites like Twitch.tv have arisen that operate as a game-driven economy that does not rely on game sales. While it would be nice to assume that this evolving marketplace will stop now that Valve is doing well financially, he said, the company realizes that things will just continue to change, which is why it feels Linux is important in the long run. Eventually, games themselves will become nodes in a connected economy where digital goods and content are created by individuals in the community.

Valve has had a long history with Linux, Newell continued. It first deployed Linux game servers (handling the back-end of multiplayer online games) in 1999, and Linux now accounts for the majority of all game servers. Internally, the company uses Linux in its development infrastructure, where it manages 20 terabytes of game data in version control. 20 terabytes sounds like a lot, he added, but the company moves around one exabyte of game data every year (not counting game servers), which accounts for two to three percent of global IP traffic.

Nevertheless, he said, Linux game players still account for less than one percent of Steam's users, and are insignificant by any metric. But the company has seen multiple knock-on effects since it first started working on Linux support in Steam. Working on Linux has improved graphics driver quality and has increased developer interest in Steam. But the openness of Linux is the factor that Valve considers the most important.

Several years ago, Newell said, the company became concerned about the direction that the PC industry was moving. Platform vendors rolled out systems that could be locked down, so that vendors could exert control over customers' machines. "If you didn't like Google, you could keep Google from installing on your platform." That line of thinking was seductive to platform vendors, but the result was a significant drop in year-over-year PC sales.

On the other hand, while PC sales have dropped, PC game sales have risen steadily. Ironically, this success in the gaming industry has been led by how much more open the PC platform is than the console industry—at least, on the hardware side. Proprietary hardware used to dominate game consoles, but commodity PC hardware based on open standards has evolved much faster and has displaced it. It is at the point now where gaming consoles re-use graphics hardware from PCs on the inside. PC gaming is where the real innovation happens, from social gaming to free-to-play to massively-multiplayer online games (MMOs)—and the rate of change is increasing.

The most significant innovation from Valve's perspective is the democratization of the gaming ecosystem. The "power" has shifted from console makers to game developers and now to end users. For example, he said, the Team Fortress community creates ten times the amount of code that Valve's paid developers do. "We're pretty cocky about how well we could compete with Bungie or other game makers," he said, "but the one group we can't compete with are our own users."

The community of users can already outproduce the company by an order of magnitude, he said, but if that is the trend, then proprietary systems are a problem because they create way too much friction in the process of creating and releasing content. For example, it can take six months to get Apple to approve an update to an existing iOS game; that is at odds with innovation. The company has concluded that closed systems are not the future of gaming: Linux is.

Of course, if Linux is the future of gaming as Valve had decided, the next logical question is what the company should do about that fact. It decided it had to put its efforts into making Linux a good solution both for gamers and for game developers. Initially, that effort was distressing, since there was so much work to be done. So the company decided to tackle it in stages, planning each stage with partners and customers.

The first step was getting its first game (Left 4 Dead 2) running on Linux, which Newell described as a "sweater thread of issues": there were problems with the NVIDIA driver, which revealed problems that the distributions needed to solve, which led to user experience problems. "'Just compile it yourself'," Newell said, "does not count as a solution for users." But the company persevered, and eventually it got Left 4 Dead 2 running on Linux, and running faster than it did on Windows. It discovered that many of the solutions it crafted for that game solved problems for its other games, too.

When Valve shipped its Steam client for Linux in February, Newell said, as much as anything, the action was a signal to its partners that the company was serious about Linux. It has since added to its stable of Linux games (totaling 198 as of now), but it has increased its Linux operations in other areas as well. It has committed engineers to Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) development and to the Khronos Group (which manages OpenGL and related standards), and it has started work on a Linux debugger—independent of the LLVM debugger effort, in which Valve also participates.

Newell closed by remarking that something the world has learned from the recent explosion of cloud computing is that once you abstract away certain particular problems, you recognize that the same abstraction should serve you everywhere. That is true of gaming as it is for other forms of computing, he said. Nobody thinks they should have to buy separate copies of games for the living room TV set and for their PC. Likewise, game developers do not think they should have to write separate input stacks for the different controllers found on the PC, the mobile device, and the living room game console. Valve thinks that Linux—and not proprietary platforms—can solve that problem. He promised to talk more about it "next week."

Game-industry watchers saw that final remark as a hint that Valve will be announcing a Linux-based console shortly. Whatever form such an announcement takes, Newell made it quite clear that the company sees Linux not just as a community of game-buyers to target, but as a technological platform on which it can develop products—and develop them faster and better than it can on the alternatives.

[The author would like to thank the Linux Foundation for assistance with travel to New Orleans.]