John Carmack laid out his thoughts about SteamOS and Steam Machines in Nvidia’s Montreal event just three days ago. Carmack is skeptical the company can pull it off.
To be clear, John Carmack is the first to tell you he was completely wrong in his initial assessment of Steam the first time. Valve approached id when the platform was still starting out to ask about getting Doom 3 in, and the id people were basically telling them they were nuts to think they could get into this digital distribution business themselves. Now, Carmack credits Valve for having played the long game very well, building the platform up very slowly but effectively.
If one were to make a cursory review of Steam’s history, it was a genuine risk when it came out in 2003, and took until 2005 to actually become profitable. Steam has also come up against and survived several major competitors, including GameTap, Direct2Drive, and most recently, Games For Windows Live. Now, many of the more notable Steam alternatives thrive not from taking them head on, but by differentiation. Some are storefronts of other AAA developers, such as Origin. Others offer completely different value propositions, such as Desura and GOG.com offering DRM free downloads, or RICE Digital offering their own localizations of Japanese games.
Getting back to the topic at hand, Carmack admits he sees history repeating himself when he says SteamOS and Steam Machines don’t look like they can be pulled off. His main contention here is Valve may not be able to push things forward on the Linux end of things, and here I would have to agree.
People have been asking if Linux is ready for the mass market since 2004. No, really. While I personally don’t think the impediments from taking Linux mass market are insurmountable, Microsoft and Apple have just too much of a commanding lead to catch up to, and none of the companies currently making Linux OSes and forks, including Canonical, Red Hat and the like, are ready to take the next step, for so many little reasons beyond the scope of this website.
This all, ultimately, goes back to Valve: they will have to pull off something the FOSS community has struggled for ages, this is in a completely different level. Even now, Valve has yet to show us their full hand, so the verdict is still out.
Still image is of John Carmack from id Software's Quakecon 2013.
Source: The Verge
