Comment by saghm
3 months ago
My theory for a bit now has been that Valve is playing the long game in trying to make SteamOS a mainstay gaming platform as an alternative to Windows, and that the hardware products are essentially a way of breaking into that market. Even a few years ago, the idea of a custom Linux distro based on Arch Linux with both a built-in full desktop mode and a lower-powered gaming mode that you could switch between on a handheld device would have sounded kind of crazy, but now we're at the point where it's fully supported on more than one vendor's hardware. This seems like it could be a similar play in the traditional desktop space; if they can prove that the concept is viable, maybe other vendors will come out with similar products that come with SteamOS by default. All of this insulates them from having to worry about the long-term sustainability of making money from game sales on Windows, and if it works out, they wouldn't even necessarily have to continue making hardware indefinitely.
I don't pretend to have any insight into whether this theory is correct beyond that it seems to track with what they've been doing lately, or any expertise to make claims about whether it will work or not. In a lot of ways, this might just be a projection of my desires as a gamer who enjoys not having had to boot into Windows to play something for quite a few years at this point. I do hope that maybe they're just crazy enough to not only try this, but pull it off though!
I don't think this needs to be a theory. Valve regards Microsoft's flirtations with walled gardens (MS Store) as an existential threat. They see their investment into linux gaming as a hedge against future locked down windows OS, which is at this point probably inevitable.
Absolutely. This is a long term strategy stemming from the moment Microsoft spawned their app store.
A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space.
With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a platform was a problem. And thus they broke it wide open, developing web technologies, investing in Firefox initially, releasing Chrome, and ultimately delivering Android.
In mobile, Microsoft came too late to respond to Apple and Google.
Meta and Apple have identified that VR is one of the next gold-mines in terms of a similar app-store and experience rich ecosystem potential comparable to PCs, web, and mobile, and have poured billions into development of hardware and software. It's documented that Meta attempted to create a proprietary OS for their VR headsets (and has debatable success).
Valve, while having fewer resources than any of the behemoths above, decided to hedge their bets with Linux and entering the market first through their well established brand built with video games. It would not surprise me if the Steam Frame begins their entry into other entertainment experiences and app opportunities. Microsoft has reasonable success weaving their ecosystem together (PC + Xbox), but they're foolish to think that their dominance would continue into VR because they have the PC space... They made that mistake with Windows Phone.
> A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space.
It is their third attempt.
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VR has so far failed to reach an amount of people to make developing games for it really worthwhile, and the metaverse really doesn’t have much going for it either.
I don’t really see much momentum in that space, and the consensus among my friends is that it’s a gimmick to try a few times - with their vr headsets collecting dust since.
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> With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a platform was a problem. And thus they broke it wide open, developing web technologies, investing in Firefox initially, releasing Chrome, and ultimately delivering Android.
That story ended up with Google supplanting Microsoft as the top market abuser. So I'm holding all my fingers crossed that it doesn't turn out the same with Valve, especially since by the time they get to have a shot at that top position Valve will very likely be under different leadership and maybe with different ideals.
This is 100% it. In addition to MS Store, MS is trying to converge Xbox and Windows, which definitely had the potential to lock out Steam. SteamOS and hardware is 100% a hedge against that. And thankfully for us, Valve is moving quicker than MS.
Gabe is a former MSFTy, left in 1996 to found Valve, he saw games as more popular than Windows. It wouldn’t surprise me if he got into games in order to compete against his former employer which would suggest to me that this plan has been in motion since before 1996, almost 30 years. At least from my point of view, if I wanted to take on Microsoft, doing what he did for the past 30 years is how I would go about doing that.
Gabe gave a talk at my college like 12 or 13 years ago. He explicitly called out the unbelievable number of downloads for Doom as a sign that games were going to be huge.
Fun non-sequitur: the other speaker at that talk went on to become the finance minister of Greece.
Yanis Varoufakis?
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but games are a niche, nobody in my circle or extended circle plays video games.
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I don't think it was explicitly to compete with Microsoft. Gabe explicitly said when the Windows 8 App Store was announced that Valve was going to ensure Microsoft couldn't lock them out of the desktop market. He said Valve benefitted for PC's openness (up until it was threatened).
Microsoft also had Games for Windows Live at the time, which provided similar functionality to parts of Steam (friends, multiplayer, voice chat, achievements), so with that plus the App Store, one could easily see it as Microsoft coming for their market.
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> He said the success of Valve, known for its Half Life, Left4Dead and Portal titles, had been down to the open nature of the PC.
> "We've been a free rider, and we've been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the internet," he told the conference. "And we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms."
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377
If I was going to take on Microsoft I would say a lot of things that were not “I’m going to take on Microsoft,” best not to wake the sleeping giant. You can fix a lot of orgs by attacking them. Also I think Valve is set up as a bit of an anti-Microsoft, a flat(ish?) org structure as opposed to the matrix org structure. Having worked at MSFT I was definitely thinking that these people are going to fumble and a getting into position ready to pick up the ball when that happens might be a good strategy - though clearly a long term one.
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Not much of a theory when everything you described has already happened.
Didn't Gabe Newell basically confirm 13 years ago already that they were aiming for that ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377
I'd love to be confident that the company's strategy is sound enough to keep the same long-term goals from that far back, but I don't think I'm sure enough to make strong assumptions about what the overall motivations of products launched in 2025 are from his comments in 2012. I do think that it's a plausible explanation, but there's plenty of room for humility in attempting to interpret whether intent has changed in the light of over a decade of new circumstances that may or may not have been expected.
That’s how privately owned companies with BDFL founders still running them operate.
No shareholders. No dopey stock market magazine articles. No quarterly “did you make the line go up? why not?” reports. You can execute on a 10 or 20 or 50 year vision when youre beholden to only your customers, your staff, and yourself and not a pack of rabid wolves.
2013: "Linux and open source are the future of gaming" https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-linux-and-open-source-ar...
SteamOS was released in that year as well: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/commit/0aad7085a1a9...
All of their hardware released since then seems to be aligned with this concept and they have clearly put a huge amount of R&D and funding into this approach.
> maybe other vendors will come out with similar products that come with SteamOS by default
It's already happening. Lenovo released a SteamOS variant of the The Lenovo Legion Go S.
Turns out the problem with mobile was windows all along!
And the legion go 2 is windows 11 only so they did not learn anything
Lenovo loves to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
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I for one eagerly awaits Lenovo to release SteamOS versions of their ThinkPads
They generally run Linux without issue already... that said, pre-installed options would be nice, not sure if SteamOS is the most appropriate. Probably Pop, Cachy or Bazzite, and given that Pop comes from a competitor, unlikely.
This t470 on ubuntu 2404 runs steam just fine.
The main issue with modern games is the lack of gpu, but gpus in laptops are never great.
I mean most thinkpads run linux jist fine. So they already are SteamOS machines.
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I still remember when Valve first showed an early alpha unreleased version of Steam running natively in Ubuntu for the first time in the early 2010s. It blew my mind that a major company, especially an entertainment company, was targeting Linux at this scale.
Of course, Wine was very lackluster in those days, and for a while I was worried they'd eventually give up with the monumental effort that would be involved in getting it up to snuff.
It's now over a decade later and they're still at it and have made monumental leaps. Valve truly was and still is playing the long game here.
Imagine if Microsoft had never threatened their business with the Windows 8 store and the anxiety of Microsoft locking down their platform.
Halflife2 ran perfectly under WINE. At the time I assumed that it was a win for WINE but with hindsight — and typing this out makes me feel so naive! — was HL2 optimized for WINE in order to make WINE more successful? Of course it must have been!
It’s a shame the connotations are negative because this ironic comment otherwise works quite well: This large wooden horse is such an extravagant gift, it has to have some subversive purpose, right?!
It ran fine as in not crashing, but you were limited to dx8 or maybe dx9a feature set which limited many visual effects and there were significant performance issues originating from wine's reliance on translating dx to opengl, lack of offloading cpu grpahics "command lists" (or whatever it's called) to a deditacted thread and the disjointed state of linux graphics at the time... It took until about 2013 for wine staging to run hl2 properly with multi core rendering and with all bells and wistle, but performance was still inferior.
I think linux graphics were only good when paired with the right version of red hat and nvidia drivers on a supported workstation dedicated for running proprietary 3d/vfx software packages as an alternative to the aging SGI workstations. Every other use case was pretty rough... until about 2017 when things began to change massively, and finally now, where you can actually get better experiences than freaking windows on most use cases.
> "All of this insulates them from having to worry about the long-term sustainability of making money from game sales on Windows..."
The weak link in your theory is that Microsoft is in control of the future of the DirectX API, not Valve, and it is Microsoft who is working with nVidia and AMD and game studios to evolve DirectX to take advantage of the latest GPU features. SteamOS can at best follow closely behind but can never take the lead without Valve developing their own games API that games developers an GPU makers are willing to target.
Did you forget about Vulkan? Valve and AMD are Khronos members and active contributors to the Vulkan spec. Games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Civ VII use Vulkan on Deck. There's a complete graphics ecosystem with full participation from the games industry that doesn't have Microsoft as the gatekeeper.
Vulkan has become the same extension mess as OpenGL, it is only taken seriously by Google, Samsung and Valve.
Vulkan?
Hardly has any major adoption by game studios outside Android.
it would be a really bold move on microsoft's part, as it would be direct monopoly abuse
it would be interesting to see how or if they were punished for it in the current political environment or even the next one, but i hope we don't find out
i suspect long term it would just be a foot gun that drives vulkan's popularity anyway though
When his business depends on Microsoft, which has shown untrustworthy behavior time and again, this is a great hedge.
Nice theory and it would make sense with how unstable Microsoft has been in their all encompassing quest to make AI a thing people use by cramming it into everything (along with their other shitty practices)
Though not necessarily the case since selling steam devices also will make steam the default even more which could also be a primary reason it could also be both, who knows.
there is a lot of evidence for this. this isn't a hypothesis, this is what's going on.
why else would Valve spend so much time and money on Proton? To eliminate the dependency on Windows. Windows is still the OS for gaming. Valve doesn't like that and they are successfully slowly changing that.
Now, if they would just build their 1st party titles for arm64 macOS. I would love to play Portal 1, Portal 2, and Half-Life 2 et al on my decked out MacBook Pro, but I can't. Why can't I? Well, MacBooks are such a slim slice of the market. Yeah well it would be slightly more of the market if I could play Team Fortress 2 on this thing.
If that is their goal they need to contribute _a lot_ more than a custom Arch distro with a custom Wayland session changer and Proton.
Because while Proton is nice there are many things in KDE that fall down because of how contribution works.
Until they get rid of their dependency on Windows, they can come with whatever alternatives they feel like, Microsoft has the last word.
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