What do the three announcements from Valve this past week mean for the gaming industry? My guess is potentially a lot, and certainly little, depending on the segment of the industry you are considering.
The announcement of the Steam Machines and SteamOS are the two most important announcements from the week, with the third, the controller, being interesting, but perhaps not very important in the grand scheme of things. I doubt the regular PC gamer is going to adopt the controller, unless they are using it with a Steam Machine. No, the OS and Machines are what may affect the industry, in my opinion.
The perhaps largest impact according to some people, beyond the existence of a Steam console and/or OS, is the fact that the OS is based on Linux. Some will say that this is the catalyst needed for Linux gaming to grow. Currently it is rather uncommon to see a game written for Linux because it is simply too uncommonly used by the people. The majority of computer users are running Windows, so that is what most software is written for. In the case of games, you also have the exclusivity of DirectX and the superior driver support that make it harder to develop for Linux (though the driver support issue may be better now than when I last booted Linux). Now that Valve is offering a platform for gaming, and with the might of Steam supporting it, perhaps Linux gaming has a chance... but not with the whole industry.
Indie developers, that develop for the art and not for a franchise or deadline, are likely going to love this. Some smaller teams with supportive publishers (I suspect this is the case with 4A Games and DeepSilver, as Metro Last Light is getting a native Linux version) may also support Linux. For those situations, there is great potential for change in the industry due to these announcements. For the larger development teams and larger publishers though, I strongly doubt we will see much Linux support. Why do I think that? Consoles.
The console versions of games make a lot of money for the bigger publishers, and they will want to keep supporting them. None of the current or next-gen consoles run Linux. Well, Sony may be using a heavily modified form of Linux, I don't know, but the xBoxes use a form of Windows and DirectX. It would certainly appear the PS3 does not use a normal version of Linux, because if it did, why would we not see games for it coming to Linux? Some of the work has already been done, so why not do the bit more, for those additional sales? Two reasons that I can think off: one, it has been determined not enough Linux gamers exist to make the investment worth it; two, the initial assumption of the PS3 running Linux is wrong. Either way, the larger publishers that invest hundreds of millions of dollars into their games, and expect more than that back, are not going to support Linux just because Valve does. Not at first at least, because they can focus on the consoles and Windows, as they have been, to make their money. Maybe in the future they will experiment with it, as more dev teams want to support Linux, and more Steam Machines are used, but that is going to be years, if ever.
I guess the quick summary of this is that for the larger publishers and developers, SteamOS and Steam Machines will mean next to nothing (besides that PC gamers will be able to stream games to TVs, which will not really affect them much, as it is still the PC version of the game being sold). For the smaller publishers and developers though, those two announcements could change a lot, by giving a good, economical reason to build for Linux. Assuming the new platform is going to be a success, and I think it will be. Perhaps not a great one (depends mainly on the hardware partners Valve has at the Steam Machines' launch) but one nonetheless.
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