You're right, and I also wouldn't trust anything he says about Windows 8 since he has a vested interest in keeping easy distribution restricted to Steam. He will face no such competition on Linux.
The headline is misleading. He was talking very much, from his vested interest point of view. He was not dismissing the quality or value of win8 for consumers.
But he is allowed to be a bit upset: Steam is effectively not allowed on Metro.
And there was loyalty between Valve and Microsoft. In general, he dislikes the verticalisation in the market; how consumer devices will all be (media,game,app) consoles. But to see Microsoft make this move, just hurst more, when your company has invested so much in the windows ecosystem. And lets not forget that without Steam, pc gaming would have died completely 5 years ago.
Personally, i dont like it either. I think its anticompeteive in nature, and bad for innovation. Appearantly operating system vendors are becoming the new cable companies, charging for access to consumers.
But unless one of them (apple, google, microsoft, amazon) has a monopoly, its not illegal to operate in this manner.
Nitpick:
without Steam and without any equivalent of it, PC gaming would have (probably) died 5 years ago.
Your sentence is like saying that without Internet Explorer, we would still be paying for internet browsers. It's praising Microsoft for what it did and mysteriously assuming that in absence of it, no one else would bring the cost of browsers down.
This is my nitpick with "what if X didn't exist" scenarios: people imply that nothing would fill the vacuum.
Another example I just made up: "If Linux didn't exist, we wouldn't have a free, open source OS". I'm pretty sure FreeBSD or something like that would grow like Linux instead. Not saying it would be better or worse, because, frankly, I don't know.
Linux brought a large new demographic (hobbyists, students) to Unix at a time that it was expensive, little used and dying. The Linux movement, as opposed to the Linux software, was a true revolution and not easily replaced. Effective movements are a lot harder to build than effective software.
Another counterexample would be the internet itself. It could very easily have gone wrong and we would have been stuck with the likes of Compuserve and AOL.
If anything he risks footing a lot of the effort to get developers onto Linux (see: Valve openly talking about working with GPU manufacturers to improve the quality of Linux drivers) only to have it benefit people that choose to distribute outside of Steam.
I was going to reply that UBC doesn't support paid apps, but apparently now it does.
That said, Valve appears to be going for a play based on being a cross-platform app store (Windows, OS X, Linux). It's not obvious to me that they can add much value that way (after you've gone to the work to implement support for three platforms, submitting to three app stores is not a lot of overhead) but we'll see.
If you're using multiple platforms, I could see the benefit of not having to enter your credit card multiple times. But honestly, if you're going to buy a program on your PC, then walk over to your Mac and buy it again, do you really care if you're buying it from the same store both times?
I know that Steam lets you take your games from one machine to another, but I don't expect that to be the norm for most app stores.
This is not how that works -- if you buy a game for windows on steam, the mac version is free. I've tried this personally, and I expect the same will be true for linux as well. In other words, pay once, get the game for all OS', updating automatically, and all connected to the same account so you can chat to windows and mac players through the steam client
There are actually some pretty decent alternatives on Linux, most obviously distro package management, some of which is now a platform for proprietary software too, but there are other competitors. Additionally, Steam works great with WINE and most Linux gamers use it without issue -- the main benefit from a native version would be inclusion in package managers or first-class distribution as a pre-installed app in e.g. Ubuntu or "Ubuntu's Gamer's Edition" or something like that.
I see no reason to infer that Newell's comments are limited specifically to app platforms. I also wouldn't be surprised if there's more to this than just a Steam-for-Linux download; they could be working on something like the old Phantom project to really bridge the gap between console and PC, and take advantage of Windows 8's almost inevitable initial poor reception to gain marketshare.
