Here’s hoping Valve's Ubuntu move can disrupt the PC game market

If you follow news about Linux, you've definitely heard about game company Valve's push to bring its popular games and its client Steam to Ubuntu.

For Linux fans, the turn of events has been fun to follow. Valve CEO Gabe Newell made a ton of headlines when he proclaimed Windows 8 to be a catastrophe and promised to “hedge his bets” with porting Steam and its games to Linux.

Since then, the news of Valve's progress has been even better for Linux users. Tests of Steam's Left For Dead 2 showed its speed on Linux was trouncing Windows by a healthy margin. Valve said they found working with open source drivers to be really great and Nvidia decided to work with Valve on Linux drivers for its GPUs.

If you're the kind of Linux fan who dual boots into Windows 7 just for the game compatibility, this is probably good news for you. If you're like me and don't really play PC games at all, you might shrug the whole thing off. But the more I think about it, the more I think this might be the single most important development in user adoption in recent memory, if not for all of Linux, at least for Ubuntu. And it's potentially a really good thing for non-gamers, too.

Long-time Linux users have heard it all before. There's one “Year of the Linux Desktop” after another. And there's the Death of the Linux Desktop. Proclaimed again and again.  It has no apps. But with the cloud who needs apps? It's not readily available to average users who can't install their own OS. But it's secure and some distros are really more user friendly than Windows. Yadda yadda yadda.

Through all these changes and upheavals, through flame wars over desktop environments and package management preferences, Linux has always been discussed in relationship to Windows — as a system that might, if given a chance, compete on the desktops of consumers and enterprise users. But that market is a tough nut to crack. In fact it may be impossible.

A niche in need of disruption

The Valve development changes that conversation and has given Ubuntu, in particular, an opportunity to build a market, or maybe disrupt a market, and carve a PC niche out of the Windows monopoly with an audience that's most receptive to change and just plain old good computing. And that's with games.

PC games for at least the last 20 years have been a big part of the Windows market. Nearly $20 billion is made on sales of PC games every year. Yes, Microsoft's bread and butter is Office and then its iron grip on the so-called enterprise market. Gamers go with Windows because that's where the games are.

A migration of big game houses and their wares to Linux, or let's just say Ubuntu going forward with the understanding that Ubuntu is where Valve is aiming and compatibility with other distributions is likely but not guaranteed, is a big opportunity to disrupt Microsoft's gaming market. And it's a market that's much more ripe for disruption than the enterprise or even the average consumer user.

First, it is possible to build a pretty good business in a niche PC market.

Apple first got success on the desktop by building smartly designed machines that appealed to artists and other users who liked them. It built its reputation with designers and video studios who weren't turned off by the manufacturer's higher prices. These weren't student who needed budget machines. With the introduction of the iPod and then the iPhone, the company grew to a respectable 10 to 12 percent market share in the US, though it remains at roughly 5 percent worldwide. It's no where near Windows on the desktop, but no one would call OSX “dead.”

With games, Valve can carve a nice chunk of the PC gaming market by delivering a Linux product to customers who are far and away the easiest to Windows users to convince to swap operating systems. Gamers know their hardware. They won't be sacred off by Linux or by tweaking GPU drivers and getting their hands dirty. Unlike business customers or regular consumers (you know, your mother in law or your Uncle Joe), gamers won't be flummoxed by a menu in a different spot or some buttons on the left instead of the right. They won't shake their fists in rage at a moved panel or a missing menu. They're a great market for new technologies. They want the best system on which to run their games. Period

A Valve PC is good for more than just games

Here, Valve, with its rumored move into hardware, just might be able to deliver. Instead of a console, I think Valve is likely to enter the PC space. Definitely with a desktop and maybe a gaming laptop (good for portability). They could easily make images that users could install themselves, too. Because they are developing on Ubuntu, it would only make sense that any hardware they make would run Ubuntu or at least a tweaked version (Vubuntu? Stubuntu?).

Such a device – or Ubuntu spin – could be a lot easier to sell to gamers than a gaming console. PC gamers like their PCs. And with access to the Ubuntu software center and its applications, a single gaming rig will let them use the machine for other things, too. Picture the college student who wants a great gaming PC and can easily buy one from Valve that also runs Chrome, LibreOffice and other applications. Valve can offer that student a really compelling option.

So why should anyone who doesn't play games care? Because a bump in Ubuntu adoption will lead to other developers to Ubuntu as a market they can't ignore. And that threshold is not terribly high. Apple attracts developers with a small piece of the desktop OS pie. If a Valve system can help push Ubuntu towards five percent market penetration, a figure Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has put out there as a reachable goal, non-gamers will likely get to enjoy the benefits of more applications ported to Ubuntu and Linux.

Sure, we might finally see the big-ticket commercial apps like Adobe CS (though I'll keep GIMP and Inkscape, thanks), but we might also get really good and well maintained versions of other free software that right now doesn't work well — a bug-free Spotify client, maybe. Wunderlist, an easy-to-install Plex server. The trick is for Ubuntu to cross a threshold that will finally make developers treat it as a priority, not a distant third for which a buggy, beta version of their application will do.

I'm don't need games on Ubuntu. And I don't need Photoshop. But I'm really rooting for a Valve / Ubuntu partnership that will expand the software choices I can make on my home computers. It don't think it will require a “Year of Linux”, but just a good chunk of dedicated gaming geeks to dent that Windows market and put Ubuntu on the desktop radar in an even greater way.

Are you a PC gamer? If so, would you migrate from Windows in favour of Ubuntu and would you buy Valve hardware?