A little bit of hyperbole here.
It’s hard to predict what is going to happen here. The last time we had major API wars between 3dfx and Nvidia, Nvidia chose to abandon proprietary standards and supported MS DirectX, which in spite of being a favorite whipping post has been a very good thing for gamers.
If we go back to API wars between Nvidia and AMD, gamers won’t win.
SteamOS is a good idea. I’m no Linux fan specifically, but if MS continues down the path of making their OS more and more cloud based and less localized it will only get consistently harder for a gaming PC to be an island unto itself that runs our games.
So in short, I vote for unification behind an open OS platform with SteamOS = good in the long run. Separate APIs right at this time in Windows = bad in the short and long run.
competition is a good thing
My the better product win