FEATURE STEAMOS AND THE DEMOCRATISATION OF GAMING Discover how Valve singlehandedly changed the future history of games on Linux. alve is a video games company with some One to become its proxy for home entertainment, and serious history. It created genre-defining its changing attitudes to core technologies such as Vgames with its Half-Life series. It built a DirectX and .Net have left many developers looking to cutting-edge games engine used by its own titles, and broaden their asset pools and experience. then went on to dominate digital games distribution And then there’s the emergence of independent with Steam, long before Apple thought about walled development studios, many of which are now gardens and app stores. accustomed to developing for consoles, tablets, But none of this history has been played out on smartphones and PCs using cross-platforms tools Linux: until relatively recently, Valve was entirely and APIs. For them, Windows is just another platform. wedded to Microsoft Windows, the master system of PC gaming. This was due to several factors; Windows Next-gen gaming had been able to maintain a position it held since The next generation of gaming consoles have also the end of the DOS gaming era, thanks to its DirectX helped shift priorities. The PlayStation 3, for example, games API. Almost was notorious for its use two decades of intense of proprietary competition between “Valve’s future, and potentially technology, forcing the accelerated graphics the future of PC gaming itself, developers to learn hardware manufacturers techniques specific to a had dropped prices and is now dependent on Linux.” single (complex) boosted performance, platform, rather than the and the Windows drivers for them worked well. cross-platform approach taken by most studios. Now Windows was actually a pretty good gaming platform. that both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are But all that has changed with Windows 8, at least based on what are essentially standard PC for Valve. Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder and components, the only differentiators are their managing director, has said that Windows 8 is a operating system and development environments “catastrophe”, which is somewhat ironic considering (and performance, of course). On the one hand you that he worked for Microsoft for 13 years before Valve, have the PlayStation 4 running an operating system and was, according to one interview, “the producer on based on FreeBSD and using all kinds of open source the first three releases of Windows.” But users are also tools, and on the other you’ve got Microsoft with its reconsidering their commitment to Microsoft’s latest incarnation of DirectX. The result is that it operating system in the face of both user-interface makes sense for most games development, for most and community challenges. Microsoft wants the Xbox games studios, to be cross-platform, enabling studios 34 www.linuxvoice.com STEAMOS FEATURE Valve and open source Valve isn’t a natural Linux company. It rarely responds to emails, and its approach to the Linux community is somewhat detached compared with that of some other companies or distributions. However, it has given the complete library of all Valve-produced games to both Ubuntu and Debian developers in recognition of the work they’ve done to build the basis of SteamOS, and Valve’s own team are beginning to have an effect on the open source tools that they themselves are modifying. Its biggest contribution is the DirectX To OpenGL translation layer, which it uploaded to GitHub under the MIT licence (https://github.com/ValveSoftware). This neat bit of software helps developers migrate from Windows-only games, and could even help games for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console be ported to SteamOS/Linux. The latest update to the Valve has also sponsored work on the Mesa project, competitive third-party publishing on Windows and the open source libraries that implement OpenGL with Steam client includes game OS X and forced Valve to come up with a dramatic hardware acceleration, to help improve shader compilation streaming for everyone and time. The improvement should help the launch time of change in direction. Until then, Linux hadn’t been part less OpenGL lag. games using those shaders, and patches have already of its history. But Valve’s future, and potentially the shaved 20 seconds off the launch time of Dota 2. Valve has future of PC gaming itself, is now dependent on what also been helping make improvements to the XPad kernel was an outsider and an underdog: Linux. driver. This is the driver used by many Xbox and Xbox-alike controllers, which have become close to being a standard on Linux and whose button mappings are the default Steam client in Steam. Valve’s own Steam Controller uses the same The first whiff of Valve’s changing direction came in driver, and the patches so-far submitted help with dynamic early 2012. Some users reported that their Windows wireless device creation and LED feedback. Finally, despite and OS X Steam clients included references to a their not being open source, Valve has been working with non-existent Linux port, along with a few vague Nvidia to improve its proprietary drivers. configuration files for the game Left 4 Dead 2. Most people cast these Linux appearances aside, as the to release games for many platforms without the rumours used to surface every few years regardless corresponding ramp in resources. of fact. And until that point, the popular consensus Valve has watched this shift in development had been that without obvious desktop growth, there priorities, and also watched Microsoft become more was little advantage in a Linux port and only potential single-minded and controlling. It must have also seen pain for Valve when it attempted to troubleshoot 200 the launch of Apple’s app store and games portals, different Linux distributions. both on iOS and OS X, and noted that it will never be But those original rumours were confirmed on able to compete on a level playing field while in 16 July 2012, when Valve wrote a blog post called someone else’s walled garden. The same could also ‘Steam’d Penguins’. It was used to straighten out the be true, to a lesser extent, of Microsoft, and it seems rumours, announce an 11-strong Linux Team (initially likely that for both operating system vendors, the ideal formed in 2011), and to finally confirm that they were situation would be one where their users could only working on both a Steam client and a port of Valve’s install software (including games) through their own Source games engine. Left 4 Dead 2 would be the first authenticated systems. And when your own app game. The blog also explained that Gabe had been ecosystem is dependent on someone else’s operating interested in a creating Linux versions for some time system, what can you do? and that after conversations in the hallway sometime The perfect storm of a new generation of games in 2011 those conversations led to the creation of a consoles and the dawn of more restrictive and less new team. Valve has a rather unusual employee hierarchy because there isn’t one. It describes this arrangement as a ‘flat organisation’ where employees don’t report to anyone and are free to choose to work on whatever projects they think are interesting. In answer to the question “Why do I need to pick my own projects?” in the infamously leaked 2012 ‘Handbook for New Employees’, the answer simply states “We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At SteamOS isn’t about improved performance, as there’s very Valve, that percentage is 100.” Even Gabe Newell is little difference. It’s about controlling the ecosystem and himself described as follows in the handbook’s competing with Sony, Microsoft and Apple. glossary, “Of all the people at this company who aren’t www.linuxvoice.com 35 FEATURE STEAMOS mainstream alternative to the proprietary alternatives of OS X and Windows. That blog post also outlined that initial support was going to be for Ubuntu only; which we all understood, because you don’t want to deflect valuable resources from making a port to working out whether broken audio on Arch is down to ALSA, PulseAudio or OSS. All hail the new gaming overlords By December 2012, there was an open beta version of the Linux client, and while there were very few games – around 30 initially and growing to 50 by the time of the first official release in February 2013, Valve was having an effect on independent games developers. Many had started to consider creating a Linux port, as long as their cross-platform tools were able. But over the following summer, there was something more significant brewing. In the shadow of new console announcements from Sony and Microsoft, it seemed likely to most of us that Valve would attempt to enter Steam and Linux are your boss, Gabe is the MOST not your boss, if you get the console market, and that perhaps its recent Linux spreading the excellent Sir You Are Being Hunted what we’re saying.” manoeuvring would form part of a bigger plan. across the world. We’d imagine there was a constant background The news eventually came in two slices at the Good show! noise of Linux chatter at Valve. They already used it end of September. The first was the announcement for their servers, and Gabe was probably vocal about of SteamOS – a Debian-based cut-down Linux where he wanted the company to go.