Postulations

As a "small" aside whilst you are working eagerly away on your entry for our swag(-errr)-bag giveaway here is some food for thought.

It has long been speculated that Valve is working away at porting its Source engine to the linux platform, and before the nay-sayers post anything, if they were not doing so why would they post a job advertisement for a senior developer to port games and applications to linux? The dedicated server is already there and doesn't need to be tweaked.

A cry of "Why would they do this?" is what most Windows users (cf. fanboys) will spit out, and the answer is money. Out of the ~2million steam installs in the last fiscal year 0.25% of those were on linux via some kind of emulation, and this number hides those that have linux but can't abide the emulation so dual boot windows purely to play games and those who refuse to install windows (at a cost of roughly 100GBP) to play a game made by a different company again (read: me). With the Steam client available for linux Valve can certainly expect their annual installs to increase and that percentage to greatly improve.

There is also a performance boost with using linux, provided that Valve, Epic et al. can optimise X11 (the thing that draws the graphical interface on the screen) and openGL to somewhere close to DirectX. Currently it is a much faster operating system but the 3D acceleration isn't quite as good as that of MS (but is still better than the Cocoa currently used in MacOS).
Linux is also a community led, open source (and free, as in beer) product which no doubt would lead to people writing their own optimisations for the engine and generally improving it (Valve would need to hire some kind of operative to read through all the proposed mods and to try to implement those decided to be of worth). It is a LOT of work to do these things.


Okay, enough of me gushing about my OS, what does this all mean for you? Those of you who have Windows PCs, are happy with them and play games mainly on their consoles - well it runs like this.
If Sony were to give Valve a free license to their developer tools, the PS3 has a unix (linux is the kernel - unix just has a different way of managing the hardware and the hardware calls, but they are very similar and the software available for both is nigh-on identical) backend with (no doubt) a proprietary openGL, the APIs for which would be in the developer tools, and so Valve releases could become available as ports to PS3 instead of eulations. The PS3 development licenses are generally very expensive but for Sony to have games made by Valve would be a big fingers up to MS and its rival console, and this would make an excellent free gift to Valve provided the linux client's existence can be substantiated.

Would being able to play Gabe Newell's latest and greatest provide you with more impetus to purchase a Sony product in the next iteration (or when you RRoD)? For me, I think the answer to this is yes. Despite most of my friends being on XBL and not wanting a PS3 currently, I think that having my favourite software house (from whom I am yet to see a single duff game and who proactively support their mod community) release games on it, as well as the bluray player (I do love jRPGs but I do not love a lack of japanese language/subtitles track and having to change discs - read Final Fantasy XIII [in figuring out which release number it actually was I found out that XIV has its own website!]) would be too much to pass up. I would however have to sell my X360 arcade stick and get a PS3 equivalent, but that is not such a problem.

Where Valve lead others will follow and the Xbox exclusives could be a thing of the past, but PS3 ones would continue to grow as the hardware differences begin to become known. We shall see where this takes us, if the PS3 would become the gamer's console and the 360 the casual option (project natal = not for me, I'll stick with a pad or stick thanks), despite MS offering a better Indie game package (the XNA is excellent) for those interested in homebrew. Although Sony could counter by offering 'homebrew' editions of their tools with a legally binding contract (i.e. not a EULA) that the software will not be passed on or used to steal information etc.

If I had the money to sway Sony and Valve into doing these things I would be a very content person and would happily give all of it up for this to happen.

So, what Valve developing its client for what some still see to be a hobbyist OS (those who clearly have not used it in the last two years) means is that the whole future of gaming is in the balance. Please Valve, don't let me down.


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A quick addendum: the PS3 version of The Orange Box was put out by EA and I would bet a fair sum of money that it has the aforementioned emulation libraries combined with the original MS compatible games on the disc.