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A comment on Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix. Parent comment

Re:Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel... by glassx on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @08:23AM (#3888767)
Well, it can help OpenGL and other cross-platform frameworks become even stronger. Studios will have more incentive to make games portable from the get-go, instead of relying on Windows/Direct3D. Even mobile, console and OS X users could benefit from that.
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Re:Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel... by danssig on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @09:43AM (#3889067)
>Studios will have more incentive to make games portable from the get-go

What incentive? 1.5% of the desktop market? If the ~13% Mac market share isn't enough to get most of them to consider it, why would a group nearly 10 times smaller matter suddenly?

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Re:Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel... by outworlder on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @12:07PM (#3889652)
Who cares about the desktop market? For games, what matters is the gaming market. Grandma's $100 after rebate machine doesn't count.

Gamers are rather picky about their machine and spend a significant amount of cash. They usually tinker with their machines a lot, to get a couple FPS boost. Give them an OS which will let them tune it and make it run all their games, possibly even faster than the alternatives, and they'll switch.

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Re:Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel... by hollerith on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @11:56AM (#3889610)
And that ~13% of the market that have a Mac are willing to spend money on apps whereas most of the 1 or 1.5% of the market on Linux have a philosophical objection to proprietary applications and to DRM.
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Re:Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel... by jiggy2011 on Wednesday April 25, 2012 @05:14PM (#3891138)
Do they? There are of course Free Software fundamentalists who will not touch proprietary software but I don't think the majority will fit into that.

There are already a number of companies selling proprietary software for Linux.

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