From Gabe’s Mouth

GT.TV went behind the scenes at Valve recently and delivered its glimpse today on it’s latest episode.  This episode is almost 100% focused on the visit to Valve’s studio and talks up many of Valve’s upcoming projects.  The episode begins with a short interview with Gabe Newell where he mentions ”we should have Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly”.  He goes on to mention “I would really like it if Windows 8 is a blow-out success”.  So, for those of you who think that Valve’s new favorite mammal is a penguin, you can think again.  Gabe Newell is a business man and wants to do what is best for Valve.  If that is Linux then great.

Maybe Not Its Biggest Investment

Gabe also comments on the possible failure of Valve’s new Big Picture feature and availability for Linux, saying  ”customers will say this is really great or, they’ll say another interesting, but not valuable contribution fairly quickly.”

With that in mind, it is clear that Valve’s biggest goal moving forward has nothing to do with what operating system you are using, but whether or not they can deliver content to it.  Steam for Linux is the first major step in making Steam a platform agnostic delivery platform.  With that said, does it really matter what operating system you’re using if your primary directive is to play games?  No, it doesn’t.  But for those of us who use Linux as a tool for productivity, we would rather not have to reboot to have a good time.  We would love for our systems to pull double-duty.

So, we must prove to Gabe Newell that we are willing to consume on Linux.  If we don’t, Steam will surely fail for us and Valve seems to be willing to cut the cord as soon as the platform fails to prove itself.

Source | GT.TV