The creator of Doom and Quake, John Carmack, has called Valve’s SteamOS concept “dicey.”
Doom and Quake were two seminal PC game series back in the ’90s, so when the co-founder of developer id speaks up on PC gaming’s immediate future, people tend to sit up and take notice.
When asked at an Nvidia conference what he thought about Valve’s plans to launch a console-like PC gaming platform, SteamOS, and accompanying Steam Machines hardware, John Carmack was a little hesitant in dishing out the praise.
“It still seems a little bit dicey to me,” said Carmack, “getting everything moved over to Linux, pushing from that side of things.”
Of course, Carmack had similarly gloomy thoughts when Valve approached his company to feature Doom 3 on the Steam online store at its launch 10 years ago.
“We basically said, ‘Are you crazy? This would be nuts to try to kind of tie yourselves to this little, notional digital distribution platform,’” recounts Carmack. “But clearly, Valve has played a good, strong, long game.”
Despite having his predictions scuppered by the huge popularity of the Steam distribution network, Carmack admits to having similar misgivings with SteamOS. “I’m afraid that I may be at that same point right now where I’m like, ‘Making your own sort of little console OS? Are you crazy?’” he admitted, before accepting that “maybe 10 years from now, they’re going to look like brilliant prophets again with it.”
Carmack admitted that he would have been “pseudo-scornful” of the whole SteamOS concept if it have been any other company. So we’ll just attribute the above musings as ‘slightly-scornful,’ then.
Next, read our Xbox One vs PS4 comparison feature.
Via: PC Perspective
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
