It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux!

[ZedDB]

That is only from those who visited the w3c schools website, so that skews heavily techy, so Linux will be disproportionately represented.
The one I gave, OTOH, is gathered from around 30 000 sites, IIRC.
Still, that 4.5% really looks nice

What I wanted to point out that statistics isn't really that reliable :P
The one you linked for example seems to be mostly US based so you'll get a view how the usage is there. And as it doesn't include all US sites you can't really be sure if you miss a group of people.

[yotambien]

Tech people are often in the position of making decisions that affect thousands of users.

From time to time in these discussions this argument comes up, and I'm not buying it. I think it's more often used when arguing that providing OSS Linux drivers is wise of hardware vendors because that pleases tech dudes, who in return recommend those parts to their Windows friends...

What I wanted to point out that statistics isn't really that reliable :P

What you did was pointing to an obviously flawed piece of statistics (if applied outside the scope of the observations). Do you really conclude from it that all statistics are rubbish?

The one you linked for example seems to be mostly US based so you'll get a view how the usage is there. And as it doesn't include all US sites you can't really be sure if you miss a group of people.

Firstly, the OS usage in the US seems to me a far more interesting case than the OS usage of the visitors of...w3schools. Secondly, you don't need to include all the sites to have meaningful results, as you don't have to ask everybody what do they plan to vote to have an idea of the outcome of the elections. And thirdly, I didn't find information regarding where those thousands of sites tracked by w3counter are based in, or the demographics of their users. I would think it extends beyond the US to a good part of the english speaking world, but this is just a gut feeling.

[ZedDB]

yotambien, What http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php presents in most likely the average western joe. Not the average western gamer joe Nor does the w3school present that.
If you take a look at http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ you'll see that the results in web browser and OS differ by quite much. Windows 7 is the most used OS there. But on w3counter not even when windows 7 is combined with Vista does it have more users than XP.
So I don't think you can say that the w3counter gives a fair estimate of how many gamers there are out there using a specific OS.

However I'm not trying to say that it doesn't provide a good estimate in other areas.

[yotambien]

Ah, I see. I was thinking about the most general case, not about the gamers niche.

On the other hand, I would think the current figure of Linux gamers isn't very relevant-and I would assume it to be very low. The important thing would be to know the potential number of gamers that could be brought to this platform, not the ones using it right now. A bit like what I imagine Sony or Microsoft did when launched their consoles. Before that nobody was using them, for obvious reasons, so I guess they did their market research duties before embarking into what could be a horrible failure. For Linux the situation could be somewhat similar, in that there may be a good amount of people holding on their transition from Windows because of the lack of commercial games. Those are the numbers that count, if I'm making any sense.

[Julius]

Ah, I see. I was thinking about the most general case, not about the gamers niche.

On the other hand, I would think the current figure of Linux gamers isn't very relevant-and I would assume it to be very low. The important thing would be to know the potential number of gamers that could be brought to this platform, not the ones using it right now. A bit like what I imagine Sony or Microsoft did when launched their consoles. Before that nobody was using them, for obvious reasons, so I guess they did their market research duties before embarking into what could be a horrible failure. For Linux the situation could be somewhat similar, in that there may be a good amount of people holding on their transition from Windows because of the lack of commercial games. Those are the numbers that count, if I'm making any sense.

Yes , but if you are not selling Linux, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from catering to that demographic (Unless they are actually not buying a game because they are thinking about switching to Linux and don't want another reason not to switch).
It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

Thus all that makes sense it to cater to the existing Linux users (or those that have already decided to switch), and it can make sense to cater to a niche market if you expect it to grow in the long run, and by supporting them early you get a lot of loyal customers.
A big player like valve has little reason to do so however.

[Naib]

Valve has taken a Left 4 Dead-style shotgun to rumours that it is working on a Linux compatible version of its Steam platform.

The studio is opening Steam up in terms of formats this year - promoting Steamworks on PS3 and transferring the service to Mac.

However, the firm has quashed any suggestion that it may be looking at another windows rival.

When asked if it was working on a Linux version of the digital game sales platform, Valve's Doug Lombardi told GI.biz:

"There's no Linux version that we're working on right now."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=261191

[Remco]

Yes , but if you are not selling Linux, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from catering to that demographic (Unless they are actually not buying a game because they are thinking about switching to Linux and don't want another reason not to switch).
It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

Thus all that makes sense it to cater to the existing Linux users (or those that have already decided to switch), and it can make sense to cater to a niche market if you expect it to grow in the long run, and by supporting them early you get a lot of loyal customers.
A big player like valve has little reason to do so however.

It would still make sense to consider a possible move to Linux in strategic decisions. Valve will not be the only factor in Linux adoption. At the moment, it isn't any factor. If Linux starts to grow exponentially for some reason, Valve will want to be the leading game company on that platform.

[Svartalf]

It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

Actually... If you want to get the "Games for Windows" label, yes you do.

If you want to sell in venues like Wal-Mart and elsewhere, you'd better be one of the big players or have that label on your box.

[Svartalf]

Yes , but if you are not selling Linux, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from catering to that demographic (Unless they are actually not buying a game because they are thinking about switching to Linux and don't want another reason not to switch).
It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

(And now actually addressing your remarks...)

It's kind of like a balancing act, really- miss the window or execute anything other than nearly flawlessly, you typically cease to be as a company.

There is a threshold at which you start considering the possibility of catering to a certain crowd. If you've not been about there was a threshold for Windows gaming versus DOS that happened about around Win98's heyday- which is actually very similar to the one we're discussing now. There was a handful of BIG game studios that were ahead of the game (no pun intended) on Windows that just didn't execute as well as they ought to have and died. 7th Level being one of them from that era. There were quite a few DOS era winners that missed the boat and weren't ready and now are no-more, either shuttering their doors or being absorbed into EA, Activision, etc.

If you bet against Linux, you might end up in the latter boat- and even EA and the lot of that size aren't invulnerable to that. If you bet on it and fail to execute right, you could end up like the former and flame-out like Loki Games did.

It's because of THAT thinking that many studios and the publishers are sitting on the fence. It's a possible sea-change moment in the industry and they're trying, mainly in vain, to augur which way the seas are flowing on them with Linux.

You're at the usage threshold that they can see that is leading them to start thinking about what they might/might not do- it just doesn't always go the way we'd like for it to, or in the timeframe we'd like to see it.

[madrang]

Hi Guys today I browsed in the new Beta GCFs from CS Source Beta. It
seems Valve planed to use the OSX Engine for UNIX (Linux). I found in
the "counter-strike source beta engine.gcf" a file named "hl2.sh".

This is the Code from the "hl2.sh"...

#!/bin/bash

# figure out the absolute path to the script being run a bit
# non-obvious, the ${0%/*} pulls the path out of $0, cd's into the
# specified directory, then uses $PWD to figure out where that
# directory lives - and all this in a subshell, so we don't affect
# $PWD

GAMEROOT=$(cd "${0%/*}" && echo $PWD)

#determine platform
UNAME=`uname`
if [ "$UNAME" == "Darwin" ]; then
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="${GAMEROOT}"/bin:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
elif [ "$UNAME" == "Linux" ]; then
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${GAMEROOT}"/bin:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
fi

if [ -z $GAMEEXE ]; then
GAMEEXE=hl2_osx
fi

ulimit -n 2048

# and launch the game
cd "$GAMEROOT"

STATUS=42
while [ $STATUS -eq 42 ]; do
${DEBUGGER} "${GAMEROOT}"/${GAMEEXE} "$@"
STATUS=$?
done
exit $STATUS

Update : This is not just in the GFC files, it is also in the CSS
beta folder in Steam apps.