Gabe Newell is going to support Linux, because Windows 8 is a “disaster”

At the Seattle video game developer conference, Casual Connect, co-founder and head of Valve Corp., who worked for 13 years at Microsoft, Gabe Newell, called Windows 8 "a disaster for everyone in the PC industry." Gabe also said that during the downturn after Windows 8, several important brands of hardware manufacturers will be lost, and for many users, the boundaries of software platforms will be erased.

Usually, Newell, whose desktop freely travels around the Valve office to projects of interest to him, does not demonstrate his opinion about the tendencies of the movement of Apple and Microsoft giants towards closed ecosystems, but in an interview with Ed Fry he expressed some interesting arguments.

Gabe says that the undervalued factor that repels market interest from the Linux platform is the presence of a small number of video games. Valve is currently working on porting Left 4 Dead 2 and other Steam games, which is a preparation for the move, which Newell himself called the “insurance strategy”. If the predictions of the head of Valve on Windows 8 are confirmed, the ports will serve as a good alternative.
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Newell’s negative opinion about Microsoft’s new operating system was known a long time ago: in April, after his visit to Valve headquarters, Michael Larabel stated that he was struck by the negativity of Gabe’s recall of Windows 8 and of Microsoft’s future.

Valve is not only a well-known video game developer whose every game becomes a hit, but also the owner of Steam, the largest digital video game distribution store whose sales commission is an indispensable source of existence for the entire corporation. For this reason, it can be difficult to consider Newell to be objective in these matters, since the paid application catalog built into Windows 8 and especially integration with Xbox Live can serve as a serious competitor for Steam.

However, Gabe said that he was worried about another feature of the Windows 8 app store — closeness. Newell connects the success and even the very existence of Valve with the endangered openness of the PC platform. Gabe feels that some companies have a “serious temptation” to close the platform, since developers always have a desire to limit their direct competitors' access to their own platform.


_{Gabe Newell plays World of Warcraft}

Speaking of games for Linux, Gabe said that Valve is going to make the maximum possible launch of 2,500 games from Steam. And, as you know , the work has been going on for a long time, and the corporation is constantly looking for new employees who have experience in porting games to nix-systems.

Newell suggests that touch-oriented games will last only a decade: the mouse and keyboard have been around for 25 years and will not go anywhere. He also mentioned the wearable computer being developed at Valve : apparently, the cost of the prototype is 70 thousand dollars, and Gabe already put it on as a test.

Gabe talked a lot about changes in the industry and blurring the boundaries between the developer and the player: for example, a young man from Kansas earns $ 150,000 a year with hats. Newell gave an example with Adobe, talking about a fictional dialogue with a company in which Valve offered to make Photoshop free as free-to-play, which would create a global market for user-generated products and increase the value of the product as a whole. But such a move does not give a quick income, and Adobe in the story of Gabe refuses it.

In March of this year, the head of another igrodel Brad Wardell (Stardock) criticized the new Windows 8, calling the main problems of system usability and simultaneous focus on both the desktop and tablet computers. Should we expect after the release of Windows 8 escape some developers of video games on the Linux platform, while it is too early to say.