Comment Re:Two sides to this coin (Score 1) 236
On one hand I do like the fact that this has potential to bring games out to the linux market that haven't been there, and to eliminate the viewpoint that there are no gamers on linux. On the other side of the coin, I'm not sure how useful this will actually be for current linux fans. Almost all valve games have gold or platnum wineHQ ratings, as do a huge portion of games on steam. Running steam on wine I can play left4dead, half life, portal 1+2, magika etc... As well as quite a few non-valve games, Skyrim etc... Now assuming valve fully devotes to the project and makes native linux versions of all of their games, it is unlikely that half of the games that can be played via wine, will be ported, making the official linux client, less useful than valves port. As a result many linux users will still be identified as windows users (since wine will identify as windows XP), the numbers for linux will still show as low, and linux support will stay very weak.
Wine is fairly simple to detect on Valve's end, at least as far as the hardware survey goes -- Wine will, for instance, report its audio drivers as something unique to Wine users. In the past Valve even shared hardware survey data about the percentage of Wine users on the Wine mailing list (something like 0.4%, but this was maybe 4 years ago). Unfortunately at one point in the recent past Wine started crashing during the hardware survey. While this bug has been fixed it's quite possible Linux users have learned to not accept the survey and are thus systematically under-counted.