Actually I don't see how jockey-common is a dependency, since Steam works fine without it. Maybe it should be rather in Recommends section?
This is by design. jockey-common is required for the video driver detection. But we cannot put a dependency in the steam.deb because we need the 64-bit version on x64 systems. And you cannot have a 64-bit dependency in a 32-bit package. Thus the steamdeps.txt hack which will install the 64-bit version on x64 systems and the 32-bit version on 32-bit systems.
Admittedly it's a bit of a mess but I don't know what else we can do about it.
Ideally the jockey-common:i386 and jockey-common:amd64 packages should provide the jockey-common name.
This would be similar to what is happening with the wine virtual package, and wine-bin:i386 + wine64-bin:amd64.
Maybe you could ask Canonical to do the switch. Then you could recommend the jockey-common virtual package. This is important for us on other distro, like Debian, where jockey-common is not available.
Reported on Launchpad as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/jockey/+bug/1128964
Please change jockey-common into a recommended package, rather than a dependency! I can't upgrade steam:i386, since its dependency steam-launcher:i386 depends on it.
Nothing extracted yet.
This is pretty much the same as bug #753, but with the jockey-common package