I don't, but let me talk louder and slower in case I'm being unclear.
The goal is to sell subscriptions and in-app upgrades to game softwares of exceeding depth and breadth that are operated primarily with a keyboard and mouse.
The Windows PC has arrived at an unsubsidized price floor of about $300-$400 and is unlikely to go lower with Microsoft charging perhaps $40-$80/unit depending on who's licensing. This market sells ~350M units a year with a total installed base of 1.25 BILLION, yet unit sales are declining, desktop Linux is doing nothing to change this, and Blizzard's flagship title is in decline.
The Linux PC cannot go lower than $300-$400 despite essentially $0 licensing costs because virtually nobody is selling or buying raw Linux PC hardware. So the platform is drafting on boutique sales, whitebox sales, and repurposed Windows PCs while still offering no benefits above and beyond standard Windows PCs. At best, it's (currently) worse.
The classical consoles are off limits. Nintendo has no coherent Internet strategy evolving and a severe lack of onboard storage. Sony has allowed a single third-party platform which has no billing support, subscription or otherwise. Microsoft has no third-party platform support. All of these consoles come with significant licensing expenses and do not support software subscriptions. All of these consoles require major rework when porting existing PC titles due to custom CPUs, GPUs, and input frameworks.
Mobile as we understand it is either completely off limits (iOS) or unaccustomed to keyboard and mouse input (Android).
So if you are in the business of selling subscriptions and in-app upgrades to game software that requires keyboards, mice, and untrammeled billing pathways, what are your options for addressing new markets?
There is one: quasi-consoles. Stationary (TELEVISION OR MONITOR OVER HDMI) Android (LINUX) Consoles (MOUSE, KEYBOARD, CONTROLLER SUPPORT) with untrammeled billing pathways (BATTLE.NET) at dramatically lower price points than the existing options ($100) that will enable less-engaged gamers (ME) easy one-click access to pre-existing titles (WORLD OF WARCRAFT).
And in order to do that you first need your titles running on a Linux stack, addressing OpenGL hardware.
Which is what Blizzard Activision is (allegedly) doing.
I'd imagine that Valve would use their own Linux Distro for their Linux Steam client. When they make the GabeCube or whatever, it will run Linux with the Steam Client for Linux and play in TV mode for TV sets. I'd imagine it would also have Netflix, Hulu apps and other stuff added as well to compete with other video game consoles.
Since a lot of classic video games are DOS based, they'd just have to use the Linux version of DOSBox to run them, which shouldn't be too hard. In Windows games like Doom, Dark Forces, etc run in the Windows version of DOSBox when bought from Steam. I'm imagining Steam would also port their Sega Genesis emulator to Linux and other things as well.
I'd really like to see the Linux based GabeCube or whatever they call it (SteamTV?) that doesn't require a Windows license and can play most video games from Steam.
It has been nicknamed "SteamBox" by the rumormill.
Also, I hope they don't roll their own distro. Customizing an existing distro seems like a much better idea. Considering Steam Linux is currently targeted at Ubuntu, I'm guessing that's the distro of choice.
Will Canonical be in the firing line of Microsoft's lawyers in the same way as some manufacturers selling android phones are? Microsoft make $10 for every android phone. How will this be different?
I visited Bletchley for the first time less than a week ago and believe me, they waxed lyrical about the 3 polish mathmaticians. I've seen the memorial they have there. I came away feeling that it was a joint effort, but you have to remember that there were thousands of people working at Bletchley and Turing was key in the SPEED at which they were able to break the code by inventing the Bombe. If there's any mis-appropriation, it's not Bletchley's fault.
The first Bombe was built by the Poles and its design later given to the Brits. It was called the "Bomba Kryptologiczna", i.e. the "Cryptological Bomb" because of the amount of noise it made. Turing didn't invent the Bombe, his contribution was the improvements he made to vastly speed the process up.
And adding to the notion of teamwork and the critical importance of people in general and not just Turing we have the oft overlooked William Thomas Tutte [1], and Tommy Flowers [2] to remember. People seem to focus entirely on the Enigma decrypts and overlook the Lorenz cipher "Ultra" intelligence.
