Valve have hired another developer to upstream SteamOS driver changes, including Xbox One S rumble support

This is probably also useful for Valve as well, since it's one less thing they will need to maintain themselves for SteamOS directly.

My thoughts exactly, if they do the leg work and get it into mainline then they can refocus on other tasks and improvements and let the community tweak it was needed.

The whole Linux platform stack seems like it's in a pretty good place save little quirks or snags here or there.

Every little bit helps.

All this Valve Linux work is so good. I love how they are upstreaming their changes as well.

It's all nice, but I still prefer Xpadneo a lot over the Valve driver, since it's the much better one. The Valve driver doesn't even has Battery indicator support or DPAD Axes to buttons, pfff.

I simply love it to see Valve so dedicated to Linux.

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

Wasn't there also work to add Steam Controller support to the Linux Kernel?

I 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.


Last edited by Creak on 12 August 2018 at 4:00 pm UTC

I 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 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.

Yeah but those are games that lets be honest very few care about, when you heard valve was back developying your mind went straight to Portal 3, Left 4 dead 3 or Team F 3 or maybe csgo 2 not crappy card game

The development they are doing sounds good I would love for Steam to actually be able to update to latest graphics drivers for amd/intel/nvidia with a tick of option in steam overlay. I know they tried it in windows but feature never worked properly. I know some want them to incorporate dxvk into steam client for windows games but that will not happen they would need permission from the games companies and more importantly licence fees for that.


Last edited by Whitewolfe80 on 12 August 2018 at 4:15 pm UTC

I am not sure they would need rights for that, since they would still be distributing the same stuff they already were, they would just slap a wrapper on top. The problem becomes though that they would have to be the ones who had to cover support costs. Let's face it, probably a large majority of the reason we don't get all the games is due to support issues at this point as opposed to actual technical limitations.

I 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

I 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.

I 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

I 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.