Recently, Valve announced their upcoming ‘product’- a Free Operating System called SteamOS.

Steam OS is the culmination of a year or so of complete and utter cluelessness by Gabe Newell on Software products like Windows 8. Remember how he said that Windows 8 was a “catastrophe” and would be a “launch failure”? You might have expected him to change his tune when his very own Steam showed that 8% of Steam users were on Windows 8; whereas every non-Windows OS barely broke a single percentage point combined. He still stands by his ignorance. This ignorance included a completely misunderstanding of pretty much every single thing about Windows 8. His claims are that it is encouraging a closed gaming marketplace. It’s not. Desktop Applications still run. Desktop Applications still install; in fact you can even have installers to install Modern UI applications. Most games aren’t going to be using the WinRT APIs, though, so any and all argument about a “walled-garden” is entirely specious.

The problem is every “argument” against it starts with the postulation that you [i]want[/i] your games on the Windows Store. Why? That’s stupid. You can still use the same traditional digital distribution you do today. The Windows Store is only useful to you if you happen to have a WinRT Application that you would like to deploy to WinRT and Desktop platforms. Some simple games may fit this, but most games do not. And as a result, the argument about the Windows Store being closed is completely tangential. THhy argue that they need to actually have their Windows Store links point to another retailer. Well, my first question is why do they have a Windows Store link to begin with? Windows 7 doesn’t seem to suffer from the lack of a Windows Store and completely ignoring the fact that [i]the standard Desktop still exists in the Desktop versions of the OS[/i] I suspect is almost done entirely on purpose.

so, with the above out of the way, based on Gabe Newell’s various quotations on the subject, I can safely say that he has practically no understanding of Windows 8, the Windows Store, or any of those related technologies and his “concern” over it in regards to the gaming industry is based entirely on a castle of FUD he has built himself.

But to bring this circus act together, we have SteamOS. Apparently, SteamOS is Gabe’s answer to Windows 8; it’s more or less a crappy HTPC that runs some Valve Software and is based on Linux, and might be able to play almost 4% of Steam titles. Wow. Colour me impressed. I can totally get behind them working on this game company working on an [i]Operating System[/i] instead of actually starting any sort of development on the most anticipated game sequel ever. For somebody who throws their weight around in Gaming development circles they seem to be doing very little actual game development.

The fact that people are hailing Steam OS as some good thing that everybody in the gaming community needs makes me sick. Steam is still as awful a platform as it was ten years ago. The irony is that back then the complaints about a new closed gaming marketplace were directed at Steam. How can they throw those exact accusations at Microsoft when they very clearly are [i]running their own closed gaming marketplace[/i]? Steam decides if or if not a game get’s listed. That’s the very definition of a closed system.

With any luck Valve will either wisen up and get rid of the clearly incompetent Gabe Newell who has used his position almost either maliciously or stupidly for spreading idiotic FUD based on so little research the fact that he is still chiming the same old song and dance makes it difficult to consider him cognitively capable of being a circus clown, let alone running one of the biggest software distribution empires in existence today.