Comment Re:Unveiled Too Soon (Score 1) 151
... then he would have ported Half-Life to something other than PS2 (and only after the Dreamcast - Microsoft's console - became an apparent failure...
Irrelevant, the Dreamcast was Sega's console not MS, and they stopped making it two years before HL2 was released. What were the other console options at the time? An under-powered Gamecube or Wii? Remember, HL2 struggled on the original Xbox, porting it to the Wii would have been silly, and now you can get HL2 on the Xbox360 and PS3.
... Newell's last minute support of OS X and Linux reeks of desperation....
You need to decrease the hyperbole, they had a Mac OS 9 port of HL1 that was never released. Obviously they realised that there was no profit to be made in it. Likewise it's only since OS X has grown in popularity that is it worth their effort to port HL2 to it. It doesn't sound like an act of desperation, rather a smart move to gain some extra customers, or old ones with shiny new macs.
... Linux geeks are the ideal market for Valve products,...
Linux geeks are not the ideal market to Valve, we're too small compared to the main Windows market and most of us dual boot or use Wine where we can. Carmack could never make money out of us, but I am hoping that Valve can.