Steam Client for Mac Launches, Linux Client On the Way

CyDharttha writes with news that the Mac version of Steam went live today, along with Mac versions of Portal, Team Fortress 2, and many other games. Valve plans to make more games available every Wednesday. Several publications are also reporting that a Linux version of Steam has been confirmed, and is expected within the next few months. Quoting Phoronix: "Found already within the Steam store are Linux-native games like Unreal Tournament 2004, World of Goo, and titles from id Software such as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Doom 3. Now that the Source Engine is officially supported on Linux, some Source-based games will be coming over too. Will we finally see Unreal Tournament 3 surface on Linux too? Only time will tell, but it is something we speculated back in 2008. Postal III is also being released this year atop the Source Engine and it will be offering up a native client. We have confirmed that Valve's latest and popular titles like Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2 are among the first of the Steam Linux titles, similar to the Mac OS X support. The released Linux client should be available by the end of summer."

Comments

I am happy.

[CasualFriday]

AWESOME. If CS:S and HL2 run well in Ubuntu, I now have no reason to keep my Windows partition.

Re:I am happy.

[e2d2]

I hope it runs better than previous attempts. I ran Cedega for years on Debian and yeah it "worked". Just like a sickle "works" for cutting grass. Kind of a let down to be honest compared to windows gaming. Maybe this will change that but pardon me if I don't hold my breath.

Re:I am happy.

[mejogid]

Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope it runs better than previous attempts. I ran Cedega for years on Debian and yeah it "worked". Just like a sickle "works" for cutting grass. Kind of a let down to be honest compared to windows gaming. Maybe this will change that but pardon me if I don't hold my breath.

Sickle

A sickle is a hand-held agricultural tool with a curved blade typically used for harvesting grain crop or cutting grass for hay.

So you're saying that it's going to work perfectly?! Nice.

Re:I am happy.

[DarkKnightRadick]

A sickle, while made for that, is rather inefficient for cutting grass. It requires the grass to be of a certain length and doesn't work as well on green (wet) grass as it would on dryer grass. If you think about it, while convenient, gas/electric powered mowers are pretty inefficient as well (look at how sharp the blades have to be as well as how fast they rotate to achieve what they do). But what do I know. I've only been mowing yards for 15 years now.

Re:I am happy.

[jandrese]

The problem is that a lot of official Linux ports are just the game running in Cedega! Since the Source engine is derived from an engine that has been ported to Linux natively however, I would be surprised if Valve went that route instead of just providing a native client.

Re:I am happy.

[mejogid]

Right, but the same applies to Mac ports - they're generally treated equally since they both essentially require similar technologies for graphics/audio/networking - and the new Steam for OS X is exclusively native games (if you consider the handful of Flash games to be native I guess).

That, and if there's one thing we know about Valve it's that while they may take their time, it's generally pretty polished by the time they're done with it.

Re:I am happy.

[_Sprocket_]

Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.

Because Transgaming is making a business out of (essentially) providing Cedega as a way for publishing houses to offer cross-platform tittles. Key words to investigate this might include Cider, EVE, and Electronic Arts. It might also be interesting to search on how Sony's SecuROM works in to all this (Transgaming claimed they would include SecuROM on all Cider tittles).

Re:I am happy.

[mrsteveman1]

Are there any Cedega games in Steam right now? If not, i see no reason why they would start including them, especially after doing all this work to build a cross platform system like they have.

Re:I am happy.

[Jaysyn]

Like Civilization 4? Like desktop wallpapers? Check out my blog. http://civliquote.blogspot.com/

Is your sig a weird joke, or a typo?

Re:I am happy.

[xgr3gx]

I agree, but ever since I found smokin guns and Urban Terror, my Windows partition has seen no activity in months.
It would be nice to get the big name titles on Linux though. COD anyone?

Re:I am happy.

[Blakey Rat]

Fixed now.

Re:I am happy.

[Jaysyn]

Evil :D

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Well...so they say.

Re:I am happy.

[Shadow of Eternity]

Personally I just verbally abuse my lawn and tell it how fat and ugly it is.

Re:I am happy.

[MBGMorden]

Right, but the same applies to Mac ports - they're generally treated equally since they both essentially require similar technologies for graphics/audio/networking - and the new Steam for OS X is exclusively native games (if you consider the handful of Flash games to be native I guess).

And that's one of the few benefits I see in the uptick in Mac popularity. You want to make your game work on Mac OS X, then you have to write it to be able to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D, and write it with a Unix environment in general in mind.

Now, that doesn't mean that a Linux port is merely a recompile away, but it DOES SIGNIFICANTLY cut down on the amount of extra work you'd need for a Linux version of the game. The publisher still might not put one out (ie, Blizzard puts out MacOS clients for all it's games, but still no Linux versions - shame, because the ONLY thing I'm switching to my Windows machine for now is the Starcraft 2 Beta. Everything else is on Ubuntu), but it increases the likelyhood by a lot.

That said, this might mean that I finally have to start buying "real" graphics cards for my Linux machine. Previously my position was "buy the slowest version of the latest generation" for features alone (VDAPU for example), but if games actually start coming out I'll need to rethink that.

Re:I am happy.

[Hatta]

Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.

Good thing Wine doesn't emulate anything. It's a reimplementation, not emulation, and there's no reason in principle that it can't perform just as well as the real thing. Many games, if they use libraries that Wine has implemented well do work just as well as the real thing.

Re:I am happy.

[init100]

look at how sharp the blades have to be

Do they really have to be that sharp? I faintly recall that the blades on my parents' old lawnmower were pretty dull, despite being good at cutting the grass. And grass trimmers, used to cut grass where a lawnmower can't reach, are usually just using a rotating steel wire, with a circular cross-section. So I'd guess that speed is much more important than sharpness when cutting grass.

Re:I am happy.

[BitZtream]

You want to make your game work on Mac OS X, then you have to write it to be able to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D, and write it with a Unix environment in general in mind.

Except ... as has already been found out by myself and others, they didn't write it with unix in mind. It requires a case insensitive filesystem and write access to the steam application by normal users.

That is in no way anything anyone would do on any sane unix unless they happen to still be in a highschool programming class.

Re:I am happy.

[MrNiceguy_KS]

I have an emo lawn. It cuts itself.

Re:I am happy.

[jandrese]

The City of Heroes port uses Cedega for one.

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite a few games will, in fact, perform better (speed-wise) under Wine than under Windows, assuming the graphic card drivers are up to par (nvidia's usually are).

Wine isn't an emulator in the sense that emulators use more resources from a more powerful system in order to emulate a lesser, incompatible system.

Re:I am happy.

[VGPowerlord]

Except ... as has already been found out by myself and others, they didn't write it with unix in mind. It requires a case insensitive filesystem

That's strange, as the server versions work fine on a case sensitive filesystem.

and write access to the steam application by normal users.

One of the things the Windows version does is change permissions for the Steam directory during installation so that any user can write to it. While not the perfect solution, I'm surprised the Mac version doesn't do this.

Re:I am happy.

[VGPowerlord]

Good thing Wine doesn't emulate anything.

Yes it does. Specifically, WineD3D emulates Direct3D, translating those calls to OpenGL calls.

Re:I am happy.

[pyster]

The why is simple. Some 'ports' may be hacks. Hard to tell what will happen. A lot of old stuff is going to be wedged/shoe horned, and not really ported.

Re:I am happy.

[TheRaven64]

When they say WINE is not an emulator, they mean WINE is not a system or CPU emulator. It is an implementation of the Win32 APIs, but it implements them on top of the equivalent *NIX APIs (complete with some ugly hacks to get around impedance mismatches), rather than implementing them on top of the lower-level functionality that those *NIX APIs use. For example, when you run a Direct3D game on WINE, the Direct3D functions call OpenGL functions, which call low-level driver functions. When you run a Direct3D game on Windows, the Direct3D functions call the driver functions directly. With a modern game that uses shaders, you are often doing a source-to-source transform of the shader (or a bytecode-to-bytecode transform) before then JIT compiling it for the target GPU. This means that, theoretically, there is more overhead when using WINE. In practice, if the WINE code or the low-level implementations are slightly better optimised then this overhead becomes irrelevant.

Re:I am happy.

[e2d2]

I speak my mind, with my own experience, and I get modded a troll. I'm sorry, did I offend your tender sensibilities? I swear some people here think they're Sir Walter Fucking Raleigh.

 

Re:I am happy.

[h4rr4r]

Which is not what emulation is. It implements the Direct3D api by translation to OpenGl.

Words have meaning.

Re:I am happy.

[Gordonjcp]

Yes, but lawnmowers provide little mushed-up grass clippings. A sickle leaves you nice big long stems of grass, such as you'd use for making hay. A scythe is better, though - you don't have to bend down.

Re:I am happy.

[e2d2]

Yeah sickles work. So does blacksmithing your own tools. Not exactly a fun time though.

Re:I am happy.

[BitZtream]

GNU is Not Unix ... except when everyone calls Linux UNIX and spends countless hours arguing about it.

One thing OSS is good for is ... the worst possible names on the planet, ones which they think are 'witty' but are often just retarded.

WINE is no exception. It is most certainly a emulation layer, regardless of what they want to call it.

Re:I am happy.

[smisle]

Actually - a scythe works surprisingly well for cutting grass.

Re:I am happy.

[BitZtream]

Which is what emulation is.

A ARM emulator on a PC is translating arm instructions and registers into something used by the x86 chip.

Words do have meaning, one day you'll figure them out.

WINE doesn't emulate a PC, but it is a emulation layer that translates Win32 (and friends) api calls into ones for X. That is emulation. Just like MAME and every other 'emulator' you can find on the planet.

Re:I am happy.

[Peach Rings]

The server is a different application altogether.

Re:I am happy.

[DarkKnightRadick]

true, true.

Re:I am happy.

[DarkKnightRadick]

steel wire? What century are you living in. All weed eaters (grass trimmers) I've encountered have plastic/nylon line.

True enough I guess. Still, as much energy is put into electric and gas mowers and trimmers, the net gain in efficiency is a lot lower than the power put into it.

Re:I am happy.

[DarkKnightRadick]

old joke is old :p

Re:I am happy.

[Shark]

When you run a Direct3D game on Windows, the Direct3D functions call the driver functions directly. With a modern game that uses shaders, you are often doing a source-to-source transform of the shader (or a bytecode-to-bytecode transform) before then JIT compiling it for the target GPU.

Wouldn't something like Gallium3D eventually eliminate that sort of problem?

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic and @BitZtream. Man, everytime I read one of your posts, while I often agree with you and you no doubt are knowledgeable, you always come across as being super cranky. Perhaps you are doing your best to live your life in the BOFH style, if so, congrats. This isn't really directed at this single reply, but at most of your posts I come across. I wish you many great steak dinners with accompanying blow jobs.

Re:I am happy.

[node 3]

AWESOME. If CS:S and HL2 run well in Ubuntu, I now have no reason to keep my Windows partition.

What I'd be interested in is to see how well Linux ports do on Steam if/when it comes to Linux.

I have a suspicion that Valve and other games that launch today for the Mac will see a notable spike in sales. Mac users are known for being willing to pay for software. Linux users, not so much. Games, however, are one of the areas where the anti-proprietary sentiment is at its weakest, so it'll really be interesting to see how well Steam would do on Linux. A successful Steam launch has a lot of potential upside for Linux in general. Either way, it will tell a lot about the Linux market as a whole. I hope it does well, but I'm not terribly optimistic. I know there's a good deal of desire for games among Linux users, but X11 OpenGL drivers, audio libraries, different package managers and repositories, etc., do pose technical challenges that are mostly absent on Windows and Mac. Fortunately, by going native with OpenGL, the Mac launch has covered the most significant hurdle, which is breaking reliance on DirectX. WINE/Cedega/Cider are far from being a sufficient solution to this (as the no doubt countless "I can finally ditch my Windows partition" posts to come from Linux users will attest to).

On the Mac side, I can't see how this will be anything but a success. There have always been more Mac games than people commonly make it out to be, but having a single "iTunes for games" type of thing is huge. This should make native ports much more numerous, as this will do a lot to allay fears that a developer might have about putting effort into porting a game yet failing to recoup the costs.

Re:I am happy.

[LordNightwalker]

You kidding? Blacksmithing is loads of fun!

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine which is itself an incomplete and buggy implementation of Windows APIs on linux - why would you have similar expectation of Valve's official ports? Running portal on a Mac right now, it's infinitely superior to anything achieved through emulation.

Moron. The ports are openGL, we have many that already run natively.

Re:I am happy.

[node 3]

I hope it runs better than previous attempts. I ran Cedega for years on Debian and yeah it "worked". Just like a sickle "works" for cutting grass. Kind of a let down to be honest compared to windows gaming. Maybe this will change that but pardon me if I don't hold my breath.

Sickle

A sickle is a hand-held agricultural tool with a curved blade typically used for harvesting grain crop or cutting grass for hay.

So you're saying that it's going to work perfectly?! Nice.

Actually, you inadvertently described Linux gaming via WINE (Cedega, Cider, etc.) quite well. Sickles are easily made by anyone with a few tools and some know-how, are dirt cheap, but require somewhat continual maintenance, are far more manual and more of a pain to use, and don't tend to get things done as nicely or cleanly as a lawnmower, which is more expensive, costs money to operate, but gets the job done with less effort and better results.

Steam has a lot of potential to help here. If they can solve the issues of drivers and the various distros with various libraries and such, this has the potential to be more like a combine, although I suspect will end up more like just a mechanical sickle (which is often the sort of solution Linux users tend to prefer, it's just that games are somewhat unique in not being very well suited to the DIYer style).

Re:I am happy.

[Tynin]

Do they really have to be that sharp? I faintly recall that the blades on my parents' old lawnmower were pretty dull, despite being good at cutting the grass. And grass trimmers, used to cut grass where a lawnmower can't reach, are usually just using a rotating steel wire, with a circular cross-section. So I'd guess that speed is much more important than sharpness when cutting grass.

I'd have to disagree on the dull blade comment. I used to cut lawns as a means of getting some spare cash when I was younger. Yes, a dull blade will cut a regularly kept yard rather easily, as there is only a few inches of grass to cut through. However, if you don't take care of your yard and it becomes overgrown, you won't succeed with a dull blade, but it isn't strictly because of the blade. If the grass is too thick it will build up additional friction and fight against the blade which in turn puts more of a load on the engine which will ultimately slow it down enough to cause a stall. If you have a sharper blade, the same engine will handle much thicker grass because it will cut much more effectively and not cause as much friction. That said, perhaps your parents old lawnmower had a monster engine. Get a big enough engine and you could use baseball bats for the blades.

Now, as for the weed eaters, I've never seen any with steel wire. However I personally would replace the line it comes with and use steel ty wire. I believe it works so well because of how hard and thin it is, and it is that thinness that makes it sharp when it is moving at speed. I was always concerned that the steel line would snap and come for my legs... thankfully that day never occurred.

Re:I am happy.

[smash]

Minor problems to fix. OS X uses a case preserving, but case insensitive filesystem by default, however...

I can see why it needs write access to the steam folder by users - multiple users probably want to run steam and be able to share its cache for downloaded content. To do that they need to write to it when they download.

Not really very elegant, but if you've got console access to the machine you've got root if you want it anyway....

Re:I am happy.

[smash]

I just don't water it so it doesn't grow, thus solving the problem permanently.

Re:I am happy.

[negRo_slim]

That is in no way anything anyone would do on any sane unix unless they happen to still be in a highschool programming class.

You said it; what a pathetic and ignorant method to use! But don't worry I'm sure it will never see widespread acceptance and your way, the "right" way will surely come to dominate on PCs across the land.

Re:I am happy.

[drinkypoo]

Just to be a dick, I think I should mention that you could use unionfs-fuse to union mount something else (a file? a directory, with -o bind? dunno what works) over the steam dir in a chroot and run Steam there to simulate directory write access.

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

"superior to anything achieved through emulation."

"Cedega is a hacked up fork of Wine"

read---WINE = Wine Is Not An Emulator

source: winehq.org

Re:I am happy.

[somersault]

And I finally have a reason to actually buy something more powerful than my netbook! Every now and then I get distracted by shiny gaming laptops and have to remind myself that I have no reason to purchase one. Counter-Strike and the rest of my old Steam titles running natively on Linux is definitely a worthwhile reason :) If they'd brought out CS:Source for PS3 I likely wouldn't care, but they for some reason stopped after they made that poor port of the Orange Box.. I'm guessing MS paid a lot of money to have it as an XBox exclusive?

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to post this as well... I am so excited that Linux is finally getting some love. I hope the fact that Linux users paid double for the humble bundle will help. Now I just want Photoshop...

Re:I am happy.

[TheRaven64]

Yup, with Gallium3D WINE could implement a Direct3D state tracker and have it live alongside OpenGL. You still have to translate HLSL to TGSL, then TGSL to whatever the GPU uses, but it's probably better than translating HLSL to GLSL, GLSL to TGSL, and then JIT compiling the TGSL. Of course, this only applies to the 3D API part of WINE, not to any of the other APIs.

Actually, with some of the Gallium3D drivers, you're compiling HLSL to TGSL, TGSL to LLVM IR, optimising the LLVM IR, and then compiling the LLVM IR.

Fortunately, any 3D program that wasn't either written by monkeys or designed as a tutorial will load the code once, compile it, and then run it thousands or millions of times per invocation. This means that the overhead of the multiple conversions is actually very small compared to the amount of time spent actually running the shader code. You might notice a very slightly longer startup time, but that's about it. Most gamers would happily sacrifice a few seconds of startup time for higher framerates, so spending a bit more time optimising the shaders at load time is often worthwhile. If the code is really well designed, then this happens in the background anyway, so it's just going to peg the CPU at 100% for a bit while you're in the menu and not add any delay to the UI.

Re:I am happy.

[CyDharttha]

Mac users are known for being willing to pay for software. Linux users, not so much.

This may have some relevance to the above comment.

Re:I am happy.

[ChienAndalu]

I am mainly curious on how they solved audio. They can ignore the packaging issue and provide statically compiled binaries that are packaged by the repository maintainers. OpenGL seems is fairly robust on Linux, but I wonder how they tamed the beast that is ALSA. Maybe they used SDL?

Re:I am happy.

[node 3]

Mac users are known for being willing to pay for software. Linux users, not so much.

This may have some relevance to the above comment.

Not really. It's not indicative of the norm.

It's worth noting that you didn't include my very next sentence, which reads:

"Games, however, are one of the areas where the anti-proprietary sentiment is at its weakest, so it'll really be interesting to see how well Steam would do on Linux."

In other words, games are one of the few things which might buck the trend of Linux users be averse to buying software.

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

By that logic, Windows also uses emulation to run games, since it uses a layer to translate Win32 api calls into ones for NT. Is that emulation? No, and nor is WINE.

The only way you can compare MAME and WINE is by disingenous reductionism; the same kind of argument that allows one to prove that black is white and up is down.

Re:I am happy.

[Mr. DOS]

I'm guessing MS paid a lot of money to have it as an XBox exclusive?

You're guessing wrong. Valve got a third-party developer to do the PS3 port; after it turned out poorly, they ditched. They did the Xbox 360 port in-house. AFAIK, Valve currently has no platform-exclusivity deals with anyone.

Re:I am happy.

[wisty]

I wouldn't think that the filesystem is a huge problem. An emacs / vi / bash guru could probably change all the file names in a code base to lower case in thirty seconds flat.

Graphics and sound will be the issue. OpenGL fixes graphics, leaving only audio. Linux audio has a bad reputation (too many platforms). Are there any work-arounds? An OSX audio emulator maybe? I have no idea.

Whatever the case, it will be a huge win for Linux.

Re:I am happy.

[dougisfunny]

It had been using OpenAL, but they rewrote it to use a different library because Apple's implementation of that had bugs.

Re:I am happy.

[MokuMokuRyoushi]

Words have meaning, but amusing names might not. Despite the identifying acronym, WINE does in fact provide an emulation process.

Re:I am happy.

[Atomic Fro]

You must be too young to remember Loki Games.

Re:I am happy.

[bar-agent]

I can see why it needs write access to the steam folder by users - multiple users probably want to run steam and be able to share its cache for downloaded content. To do that they need to write to it when they download.

That is what the "/Library/Application Support" folder is for.

Re:I am happy.

[Drinking Bleach]

Steam won't be able to do anything about issues of drivers or "various distros with various libraries" (whether that's even a problem, I don't think so, but the statement is so vague...), short of making deals with ATI and NVIDIA and requiring their own special distro to use (which would be massive FAIL). Plus I dunno, I can just click some Doom 3, Prey, and Quake Live icons and be running those games in a few short seconds. Not exactly a painful experience ya know.

Re:I am happy.

[somersault]

But it would be so easy to port CS to PS3.. I know the reasons that the PS3 port is not meant to be as good, but it's still playable, and I think it's a waste to have all the rest ported and not CS - especially since CS is on the simpler end of the scale when it comes to Source games :/ I'd still play it even if it didn't have as fast frame rates as the XBox version.

If they're bringing it to Linux then that kinda makes up for it though because presumably I won't have to pay for it again (since I already own the HL2 "Silver" set or whatever on Windows), and it's a reason to once again buy/build a kickass gaming rig :)

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I interned at a fairly successful Windows-only software company that was doing fine, but recognized that Mac was growing in popularity. One of the senior software engineers argued that a Mac port would help make the overall codebase more robust and standards-compliant. Many of the Windows bugs would be fixed just by porting because compiler-specific hacks would have to be worked out.

He argued that after porting to Mac, a Linux port would be a fairly small investment away compared to porting from an old Windows-specific codebase to Mac, and it'd just further the standards compliance. While the market share is still comparitively small from Windows to Mac to Linux, I think he had a point in saying that porting from one to the next will still pay off in further stability and robustness in even the Windows version.

Re:I am happy.

[DarwinSurvivor]

Says the guy with the most hated sig on the internet!

Re:I am happy.

[L4t3r4lu5]

I've recently moved from Windows to Linux, and I've found myself buying less software. Not because I don't want to buy it, but because I can't guarantee it will run. I still play a lot of games (WoW, older games which run under WINE) and would like to play more recent titles.

If Steam becomes the way to do that, then I'm glad I've bought so many games on Steam so far. My only concern is how 3rd-party DRM will fare.

Re:I am happy.

[Zancarius]

Either way, it will tell a lot about the Linux market as a whole. I hope it does well, but I'm not terribly optimistic. I know there's a good deal of desire for games among Linux users, but X11 OpenGL drivers, audio libraries, different package managers and repositories, etc.,

I tend to agree. I do have a few points:

1) I'm thinking this whole fiasco with World of Goo and company was something of a market probing attempt to see how various flavors of OSes fare against each other insofar as games are concerned. Whether or not this really provides anything meaningful, as you alluded to, remains to be seen. If nothing else, it suggests that Linux users might be willing to fork over cash for games, too.

2) The technical challenges are a pretty big problem. I think Linux users are of the mindset that they're willing enough to muck about with something until it works, so even if the technological hurdles present something of a difficulty, they're not likely to be a huge burden since the Linux market is more willing to resolve them. It's sort of a mixed blessing: on the one hand, these difficulties are proof that the notion of "Linux on the desktop" to where Grandma could do everything she wanted without having to know anything about the underlying system is still rather far off*, but on the other hand we've got countless pioneers who are willing to spend time on excursions into new territory (popular gaming on Linux!). It's fantastic, either way.

3) There's a lot of games that have moved much of their code over to OpenAL/SDL and other related libraries which are already fairly well supported on most flavors of Linux. As another poster mentioned much farther up the chain: there's still work to be done, but the amount of work is reducing.

I confess that, like you, I'm not going to hold out much hope. I suspect we'll be favorably surprised, though.

* Note to anyone who might address this specific notion: Yes, Linux-on-the-desktop is a little closer. I'm aware of that. There's still a whole mess of difficulties, so take my sentiments as is. And yes, my mother has used Ubuntu before without *too* much difficulty (she absolutely LOVES KMahjong and the Windows port isn't too bad, either), but it's still something of a stretch.

Still, this is promising. Here's hoping Valve sticks with it!

I've had a long day, and it's kinda late. Apologies if some or all of this post is incoherent and or rambling.

Re:I am happy.

[Jaysyn]

Whatever did my sig do to you?

Re:I am happy.

[electrofelix]

By that logic, every API ever written is an emulation layer that translates calls from one form to run on a different layer, be it hardware or software.

My personal definition of an emulator is the replication of the functionality or behaviour of a computer or electronic system where software executing under the emulated environment does not have access to the environment external to the functionality provided by the emulator.


Given that WINE does not restrict software executing on it's stack from calling to libraries outside of WINE (i.e. native system libraries), I think the developers are quite justified in describing it as an API compatibility layer and not emulation software.

Re:I am happy.

[Jesus_666]

Got any further info on that? I'm involved in a cross-playtform game project and we wanted to use OpenAL. If Valve has found some critical issue I'd really like to know more about it.

Re:I am happy.

[e2d2]

That's a funny coincidence. I've actually been looking at "home brew" blacksmithing on the internet lately. It does looks like fun to be honest. It was a bad example for geeks.

Re:I am happy.

[kv9]

good thing the world doesn't rely on your PERSONAL DEFINITIONS

Re:I am happy.

[kv9]

a lot of midgets probably got modpoints today and you hurt their little feelings.

Re:I am happy.

[sayu]

just so you know, the SC2 beta works flawlessly in wine after a few minutes of setup. feel free to fully abandon windows whenever. ^_^

Re:I am happy.

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

If they can solve the issues of drivers and the various distros with various libraries and such, this has the potential to be more like a combine

Have you not played Half-Life 2, man!? WE DON'T WANT THE COMBINE!

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Words have meaning.

Wow. You're new on the Internet, aren't you?

Re:I am happy.

[harlows_monkeys]

According to the people who developed WINE, it is an emulator. The "Wine Is Not an Emulator" means its not a hardware emulator.

According to the Bob Amstadt, the first name he considered was "winemu", but he didn't like that, so shortened it to wine.

The first use of "WINE Is Not an Emulator" was suggested in a 1993 Usenet post, prompted over concern that "Windows Emulator" might run into trademark problems with Microsoft. This suggestion was not adopted, however, and the release notes each month continued to announce new releases as new releases of "Wine, the MS Windows emulator".

It wasn't until 1997 that the "not an emulator" phrase started gaining widespread use, as an alternative interpretation of the name. The WINE FAQ said that WINE stands for WINdows Emualtor or Wine is Not an Emulator, and said both were right and you should take your pick.

The 2008-12-11 release was the first to drop emulator. It announced a new release of "Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix".

As far as I've been able to tell from old mailing lists, and digging through Usenet archives, there were two reasons for stopping calling it an emulator.

First, WINE was useful for more than just taking Windows binaries and running then on Unix. If you had source for a Windows program, you could recompile and relink on Unix, linking with the WINE libraries, to get a more native Unix port of the application. Just calling it an emulator would tend to deemphasize that aspect of WINE.

Second, there was an explosion of hardware emulators, emulating both old systems (such as old gaming consoles, old 8-bit personal computers, and the like), and emulating new hardware (e.g., x86 emulators). Some of these were slow (especially the x86 emulators). When people heard the word "emulation", they would tend to think "slow". Most people were not aware of the distinction between emulating hardware and emulating software, and so WINE, which emulates software, would get tainted by the slow reputation of things that emulate hardware. Given the choice between trying to educate the general user on the distinction between hardware and software emulation and the performance characteristics of the two, and just not saying the "emulator" word around WINE, they chose the latter.

Note that this was purely a name change, not a technology change. WINE was an emulator before December 11, 1998, and so remained an emulator afterwards. The "not an emulator" stuff is essentially marketing/PR. On a technical forum like Slashdot (pause for the laughter to die down) it's probably best to stick with the technically accurate description, and call it an emulator.

Re:I am happy.

[init100]

That said, perhaps your parents old lawnmower had a monster engine.

Or they simply kept the lawn pretty neatly trimmed, at least during the summer (it's pretty hard to mow the lawn when it is covered by four inches of snow).

The two motorized lawnmowers they have owned have been one gas version with a 3.5hp four-stroke engine, and one electric version (when they got tired of the gas fumes and exhaust) with a ~1200 W motor.

Now, as for the weed eaters, I've never seen any with steel wire.

And I just guessed that it would be steel wire. We never had any grass trimmers ourselves, so I never really have the chance to take a closer look.

Re:I am happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

My only concern is how 3rd-party DRM will fare.

No publisher invested in using DRM will be bringing their titles to Steam for Linux, I assure you. It will be almost exclusively Valve's own titles and some indies who are already quite liberal with their policies.

Seeing is believing

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing is believing. When it's released, that is.

But, for now..

[NervousNerd]

But for now, do the Windows version of Source games support OpenGL? I would think that'd make them run better in WINE.

Re:But, for now..

[binarylarry]

No but they obviously wrote an opengl backed for Mac OSX.

Since that's done, it's trivial to port the renderer to Linux (which also uses OpenGL for native 3d hardware access). The renderer is probably the most complex part of the engine, so that means adding Linux support is much cheaper than it would have otherwise been.

Re:But, for now..

[BitZtream]

Apparently the really complex part is dealing with case sensitive file systems since they couldn't actually pull that off.

I know, I would have expected the hard part to be graphics, sound and input, but no, it looks like the hard part is not using hard coded file names in different places within your source that have different capitalizations on them.

I guess no one told them about #define

Re:But, for now..

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

They also need to code audio. Audio on Linux nowadays means audio on Ubuntu. Ausio on Ubuntu means having to use Pulseaudio. Valve are not releasing anything on Linux.

Re:But, for now..

[TyFoN]

I think they will use OpenAL or SDL.

Re:But, for now..

[zwede]

Just because the system has PulseAudio doesn't mean applications have to support it. You can play ALSA sound just fine on a system with PulseAudio. Even old OSS apps will have sound (ALSA supports OSS).

Re:But, for now..

[smash]

I second that. OpenAL is freely available and already used by a bunch of Windows games as well. Either option works pretty well, is cross platform, etc.

Re:But, for now..

[Anonymous Coward]

They could be calling SDL or OpenAL and leaving the mixing up to the backend.

Re:But, for now..

[Zancarius]

The ironic part is that sometimes it's the simple stuff that bites you in the ass.

Also, I hope this isn't going to be a duplicate comment. I hit submit and it appeared to take it, but I don't see it under my account comments or in the generated content. Here's hoping... (maybe this is a sign I should go to bed?).

Re:But, for now..

[Jeremy Visser]

Mac OS X optionally includes a case-sensitive file-system, so as with OpenGL, once ported to OS X, it should be trivial to port that area to Linux.

That said, one of the Adobe CS versions crash when installing on a case-sensitive file system (find a link yourself -- I can't be bothered at this time of the morning), and Haiku won't build unless you build on a case-sensitive file system.

Wanted linux games..

[Janek Kozicki]

Games that I want to buy, linux versions: democracy2, another world, portal, civilization IV, sim city 3k, starcraft, system shock 2

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough shit. You can have tux racer.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Shoe Puppet]

There is a Linux version of SimCity 3000, created by Loki. Don't know where to get it, though.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Jaysyn]

I've never tried it, but I thought I read somewhere that StarCraft worked smashingly well via WINE.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[binarylarry]

Most blizzard games run very well under wine. I'm not sure why exactly, I assume it's a combination of developer excitement over the game and Blizzard devs writing good code.

I've been playing Warcraft III on wine for 3-4 years now. People have the Starcraft II beta running already.

I wonder if Blizzard is cool enough to compete with Valve and get a proper Linux client out for SC2? Sadly, I doubt it. :(

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you try to connect to battle.net and then the menus are just messed up, if you can get it to connect at all.

Granted, with the way battle.net has been sucking the past year (just randomly grinds games with more then 2 people to a jittery halt half the time) not sure you want to bother with battle.net anymore.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[VGPowerlord]

Until you try to connect to battle.net and then the menus are just messed up, if you can get it to connect at all.

You sure that isn't just WINE emulating Windows Vista/7?

No wait, that's the StarCraft main menu that's messed up in Vista/7 and you can't connect to Battle.NET at all without running SC as Administrator.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[hansamurai]

Democracy 2 runs in Wine

http://www.positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2303&sid=7e6a0845a38b5d76ae7f2e18fffc7581

Not surprising as I played through Gratuitous Space Battles in Wine too.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Anonymous Coward]

I meant messed up as in it is not possible to use the menus in Battle.net with Wine. Messed up in Windows Vista/7 is the colors are a bit wacky and that's just the menus, nothing else. Completely possible to work around them. And having to run Starcraft in admin to connect to b.net? Never heard of that one before. Played a game just last week in my own profile with no issues.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[MBGMorden]

I wonder if Blizzard is cool enough to compete with Valve and get a proper Linux client out for SC2? Sadly, I doubt it.

I doubt it'll happen for Starcraft II or Diablo III. Just too far along in development right now. I suppose there's a possibility of them releasing a client LATER, but I doubt it.

I think though, that EVENTUALLY they'll end up doing it. Maybe for their next unannounced MMORPG. Linux, slowly but surely, has been gaining ground. It's also a more more stable platform that it used to be. Let your product install to the user's /home directory, and statically compile your libraries in, and it'll install/run on virtually any Linux system out there.

The Heroes of Newerth install was just a perfect picture of what installing a Linux game should be like. Double click installer, go through prompts, let it finish, and I get an item added to my games menu. Just as easy and seamless as any Windows game install, and the game runs great.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[pwnies]

Give Heroes of Newerth a try. It's a dota clone++ that runs on linux/osx/windows. Was released today publicly iirc.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you'll never get any of these. You might get some half baked clones, though. Or, if you're willing to suffer through configuring Wine for a day or two, you might get a few of those titles to work.

Realistically, there just aren't any good commercial games on Linux (and no, Doom and Quake 3 don't count!), and you can only play Tux Racer for so long before you're booting into Windows to play some *real* games. As long as fragmentation and incompatibility among distros - and the celebration of this as a good thing - continues, Tux Racer and Battle of Wesnoth is all the gaming that the Linux community will be doing.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[TheRaven64]

Most blizzard games run very well under wine. I'm not sure why exactly, I assume it's a combination of developer excitement over the game and Blizzard devs writing good code.

Blizzard tends to have good Mac support, which means using OpenGL. That means that WINE is only needed for input handling, context creation, window management (trivial, since the games tend to just create a single window), sound and a few other less-complex things. The OpenGL, OpenAL, and so on, stuff is just passed straight through to the native version. They use a very small cross section of the Win32 APIs, so it's pretty easy to make them work correctly, compared to something like MS Office.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[sheph]

It works. I wouldn't say smashingly well though. Even in single player the video is screwy and it glitches every now and then locking up the game. Hopefully steam works better than that.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[godrik]

Even better supertuxkart !
(seriously, have a look at it and tell me in which world it is a clone of mario kart)

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Steauengeglase]

We all want SS2, for anything.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[boxwood]

Let your product install to the user's /home directory, and statically compile your libraries in, and it'll install/run on virtually any Linux system out there.

Why would you do this? its really trivial to build a package that installs to the proper locations and set the libraries you need as dependencies. You don't have to support that many different distros... you could support just one and linux users of other distros would soon figure out how to make it work with alien.

Just annoying that linux has really awesome tools for installing stuff but some developers are too caught up in the windows "double click setup.exe" mentality to use them.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[smash]

I suspect that it is just "good" code - written with an eye to portability, just in case, in mind.

Blizzard were one of the few developers who supported running their old directX games (like, diablo 1) on Windows NT4.

None of their games really push hardware that hard (they rely on gameplay a lot more than "oh so pretty!!!") - so they can probably afford to write more "safe" code without using ugly performance hackery.

It would not surprise me in the slightest if they are testing stuff on Wine / Cedega in house already (and have been for years), but just haven't officially "supported" it because they don't want to deal with the support calls just yet.

If steam on linux takes off (and I reckon its going to be a huge boost to linux/OS X, and succeed) - then expect other developers to follow suit in the next couple of years. Blizzard will likely be one of the first, given the compatible nature of their games.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[MBGMorden]

Simple: because it works, works well, and is simple.

Screw with dependencies and in 5 years when everyone is running version 5.0 of the library that you coded against the 2.0 version of, then things are going to break.

Put the install files in /home/user (or at a MINIMUM /opt) and they are easily trackable, contained, and not likely to be misplaced.

And you CERTAINLY don't want half or more of your potential customers having to hit Howto's and archaic command line tricks to get the thing working.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[AntiDragon]

I remember seeing a post from one of the devs on the WoW forums (can't seem to find it atm) - they basically said that although they have no intention to create Linux native ports at this time they do acknowledge that a proportion of their fans like to run their games on a Linux based OS. So they try to keep their software Wine friendly/OS agnostic where they can. That and their codebase is probably already port-friendly by having to support OS X and Windows simultaneously as mentioned above seems to keep their software running with little to no trouble on WINE.

I suspect we'll see the same for Source games. Even more likeley we already have - they've been developing a Mac version for sometime so it's safe to assume that the Windows version already benefits from similair OS agnostic design considerations, D3D reliance asside.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[Jesus_666]

That's exactly why OS X's application bundle model is so great: The bundle contains pretty much everything the application needs to run. There are only very few external dependencies, which are guaranteed by the operating system. That means that (assuming there won't be another platform switch) any application I write now will run much further down the line simply because it contains almost everything it needs.

Yes, you waste storage having ten copies of libvorbis around. Hard drives are big, though, and libraries represent a shrinking part of a game's storage needs. Things like TeX are still installed system-wide even under OS X.

You also get the ability to trivially have various installations of the same program around. Just put them in different directories or rename them and you're set.
Per-user installation is also trivial since for the usual bundle-only program there literally is no installation procedure. There's the recommended procedure of moving it to /Applications but you can also run it from ~/Downloads or even right out of the disk image it came in.

Of course you don't get the comfort of a package manager. That's the price you pay for the comfort of app bundles.

Re:Wanted linux games..

[MBGMorden]

Of course you don't get the comfort of a package manager. That's the price you pay for the comfort of app bundles.

Back when I was using MacOS most programs self-updated pretty reliably. No problem there.

Personally I am of the opinion that not EVERYTHING needs to be part of the package manager. I'm on Ubuntu now, and PPA's and such are nice, but there are some applications (anything big and 3rd party like this) that I'm fine with updating myself or having them handle their own. New version of the kernel? Xorg? CUPS libraries? Sure, let the package manager update all that. I don't care.

New version of World of Warcraft? I don't exactly feel like waiting for the next Ubuntu release to play online. These are the types of programs that SHOULD be outside of the scope of the package manager.

for your convenience, the URL they didn't give you

[FooAtWFU]

the download page.

What to do

[quadrox]

I am torn apart - show my support for linux games and make linux game purchases with steam once that is possible, or keep boycotting it because of the evil DRM that it brings...

I just don't know anymore...

(FYI: sadly, I already have plenty of steam games on my account, from a time before I realized the true extent of the DRM danger)

Re:What to do

[Diantre]

Awww come on now. Steam is, IHMO, the only gaming platform that does DRM well. You simply have to register your game to your account and you can play anywhere afterwards (even in offline mode). The only time you have to connect to the internet is when registering your games (that you likely bought over the net anyway). Non-intrusive and practical; I can download my games on as many computers as I want and play them whenever I want.

Re:What to do

[amicusNYCL]

Show your support for a model which not only works, but is actually being done correctly. Companies like Ubisoft and EA are great examples for how to completely ruin a distribution platform like this. Valve is, and has been for many years, an excellent example of how to do it right. This type of protection is no more "evil" than requiring the CD to be in the drive (that being said, I still refuse to purchase GTA4 even over Steam because of the additional DRM added by Rockstar). Show companies like Ubisoft and EA that you reject not the concept of online distribution, but their specific implementation of it, by supporting a company like Valve which is committed to a good experience for its customers. Just as companies who make terrible decisions against their customers deserve to be boycotted, companies who prioritize a good customer experience also deserve to be rewarded.

In other words, help Valve prove that Linux is a viable market for games, and that even free software folks are willing to pay for high-quality games. It will give companies like Ubisoft a lot to think about.

Re:What to do

[emkyooess]

EA? You mean The Sims 3 -- DRM free?

Re:What to do

[Amouth]

Steam really has matured to a very nice product.

I personally like using it as i don't have to keep track of all my install CD's .. and i can have them installed on my laptop and desktop.. remove as i need space/

even for the net only and DRM part - Steam has put out notices in the past that in the event that the steam network was to go away they would push an update removing the need to auth on the client so that it wouldn't stop working..

now many people can argue that they say that but woln't do it BUT out of the different publishers and networks Steam seems to be the only one actually doing GOOD work - and i have YET to see them re-nig on something, and there for will give them the benefit of the doubt and my money - until they give me a reason not to.

Re:What to do

[DCstewieG]

Steam is pretty much DRM done right as far as I'm concerned. Obviously it would be preferable not to have it, but if you must, Steam ain't bad. I am still amazed they're going with a buy once, play any platform model for their games. I was fully intending to buy Half-Life 2 all over again to play on Mac but I won't have to. Valve rocks.

Re:What to do

[amicusNYCL]

No, that's not what I mean.

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=ea+drm&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Re:What to do

[danieltdp]

Note that you can't lend, sell or give the game away to other people. It is stuck to you forever

Re:What to do

[Piata]

Honestly... steam's DRM is pretty unobtrusive. I had my concerns too, but the service is just too damn convenient.

I wish there were better channels to handle disputes as I would hate to lose all my games and have no recourse, but otherwise it's one of the best implementations of DRM I've ever seen. It's so convenient and affordable that I have a very hard time buying anything that's not on Steam.

Re:What to do

[binarylarry]

True but that could easily change. Steam used to be Windows only as well.

Re:What to do

[lidocaineus]

So? It's still DRM. Getting screwed nicely is still getting screwed.

Re:What to do

[Korey Kaczor]

If your steam account is disabled, tough luck getting your games to work unless you can find a Steam emulator.

I had my account disabled for pretending to be a l4d2 developer. Granted, however, it was only done as a joke while talking to one person and that person was aware I was not really a developer. It was just done for comedic humor.

Apparently valve spends a lot of time looking for reasons to disable people's accounts, and mine was disabled like an hour after I got bored of the joke.

I had to bug them by constantly sending help tickets until my account was reenabled a few hours later. Of course, they wouldn't have reenabled it had I done anything wrong, but you'd think at least they could give a warning for me to stop instead of disabling my account with no reason given whatsoever!

Re:What to do

[danieltdp]

Your reply sounds more like a hope than a fact... I don't have hope to see this changing

Re:What to do

[harl]

How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM? How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?

You have to judge DRM by it's fail state. What happens if Steam goes offline? What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access? You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed. You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.

Steam is the worst possible DRM.

Re:What to do

[Sancho]

They can still take away access to your legally purchased games. This is actually one of the most unreasonable DRM schemes in existence.

Spoken by someone who is waiting to hear if they disabled his account, if his account got hacked, or what, since he's unable to log in with the new client.

Re:What to do

[jtownatpunk.net]

I'm also torn. On the one hand, I hope this gives gaming on Mac and Linux a boost. On the other hand, I've had my steam account suspended without warning or explanation. Crazy thing is I'd only set me up the Steam to get Counterstrike because my new roommate played and said I just HAD to join. I played it maybe half a dozen times then stopped. Then Bioshock was released and I figured I'd get it thru Steam. Unable to log in. Unable to log in. Finally, I found out my account was suspended. Nobody ever told me why, despite a number of requests for an explanation. I went through the process of unscrewing my account (take a picture of your key with this code written above it) and my account was turned back on with all content available but they still refused to explain why it was shut off in the first place.

So I'm very wary of online distribution. Of course, now games require online activation and verification every time they start and some require a constant connection to a validation server even for single-person offline play so it's not like buying physical disc makes any difference. Pretty soon it'll get to the point that I don't even bother to open the box. I'll buy it then download the pirated version that just lets me play the damn game already. Then I'll wonder why I'm paying $50-60 to be treated like a criminal and I'll skip the purchase altogether and just steal it.

Re:What to do

[Monkeedude1212]

Don't get me wrong, I like Valve, and I support Valve, I buy most of my games through Valve, but it erks me when people proclaim Valve's DRM Scheme as "How to do it right".

The only reason its the right way of distributing is because they haven't abused it for DRM purposes. One person can share a steam account as much as one can copy a CD. Multiple people can even play online should it be a non-valve game. They've tied their own titles into Steam so well that their DRM is tight for Multiplayer Valve Titles. Not that thats a bad thing, gotta protect their games and all.

I've committed to them because, as you say, they deliver a good customer experience.

But it is still completely within their power to take away every game you've purchased through Steam. When you use Steam, you agree to the EULA, which basically states that you are not buying the game, you are purchasing a license through Valve. Valve may at any time at their discretion close your steam account, or stop their servers, with no obligation to deliver you a working copy of the game. This has happened to severe hackers on their more popular titles, such as Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, though I like and support Valve's online distribution method, and Valve as a whole, their implementation does leave one paranoid, since you can lose hundreds of dollars worth of games at the sole discretion of someone else.

Should something happen to cause new management at Valve, their system is set up perfectly to screw you over worse than game you could buy in store. Just saying.

Re:What to do

[EvanED]

This type of protection is no more "evil" than requiring the CD to be in the drive...

Except for the fact that Valve can disable your account and prevent access to your games, you can't loan or sell your games, and you're depending on Steam's servers for access. Other than that, it's perfectly reasonable.

(I have quite a few games through Steam, and don't mind it too much most of the time. That said, if it's the choice of Steam vs "you must have the CD" (like Mass Effect 2), in my mind it's not even remotely a question which is more consumer-friendly -- CD all the way.)

Re:What to do

[thetoadwarrior]

You can lend a game buy giving someone your account details (if you dare) and to be honest seeing how I haven't paid more than £5.00 for most of the games I've purchased I'm not that bothered. What could I possible get trying to sell old Lucas Arts titles and I'd never sell my source based games.

Maybe Steam isn't for you but it's a much better solution than we've seen from a lot of others and works very well for me.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

So? It's still DRM. Getting screwed nicely is still getting screwed.

You say this like it's a bad thing... Only on Slashdot and certain fetish forums, I suppose.

Re:What to do

[MrHanky]

Getting screwed with automatic updates is better than having your non-DRM'ed game stop working when you upgrade your OS. IMHO, of course.

Re:What to do

[vux984]

One person can share a steam account as much as one can copy a CD. Multiple people can even play online should it be a non-valve game.

I'm not worried about copying a CD, but i do like being able to move them from PC to PC. After I finished portal, I'd like to *give* it to my brother. But unlike a normal game, that's not possible. Either I give him my whole steam account (which is against the ToS), share it with him (which is against the ToS), or create a separate steam account for each steam game i buy (which makes steam a hassle, is frowned upon by valve, and may even be against the ToS, and then give him that... which is against the ToS)...

Steam kills the right of transfer and resale. They do it by claiming you are entering into a perpetual rental agreement instead of a sale in the fine print. (Despite advertising that you can "buy" games.)

I'd rather just get a CD.

I don't want to live in a world where the rights of property ownership have been subverted by making all purchases perpetual rental agreements with onerous terms and conditions. How long before you go into a store and buy a pair of ice skates with fineprint that you are entering into a rental agreement, and that you aren't allowed to lend anyone the skates, or give them away, or cover the sponsored logos, and that they've been implanted with sensors and rfid tracking technology to enable them to enforce these rules... and you aren't allowed to tamper with it... not because of a DMCA... but simply because its just a rental after all. You don't even really own them.

Re:What to do

[__aasqbs9791]

Only on /. would someone say that like it's a bad thing. ;^)

Re:What to do

[danieltdp]

I friend of mine gave me his HL2. He doesn't owns a desktop anymore. If he gives me his account details, he won't be able to play the other games that he owns and that runs well on his notebook.

Besides, the game is not cheap, and even if it was, this is about the principle of things, not about money (at least to me)...

Re:What to do

[mrchaotica]

now many people can argue that they say that but woln't do it BUT out of the different publishers and networks Steam seems to be the only one actually doing GOOD work - and i have YET to see them re-nig on something, and there for will give them the benefit of the doubt and my money - until they give me a reason not to.

The trouble is, if that situation were ever to occur it means that Valve was going out of business... and who knows if the ethical people would still be there at that point?

I see no reason why Valve can't write that guarantee into the Terms of Service. Then we'd really (officially, legally) be assured of it!

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, teach, I know these ones!

How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM?

One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.

How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?

Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.

What happens if Steam goes offline?

You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.

What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access?

Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid.

You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed.

Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?

You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.

Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

Steam is the worst possible DRM.

Spoken like somebody who does fuck all gaming these days. Ever hear of Securom? You know, the DRM that keeps getting front page articles here on Slashdot? Yeah, I think that'd win a poll of 'Worst DRM' by a landslide.

Re:What to do

[init100]

How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM?

Well, there is a reason it's called Steam.

Re:What to do

[MachDelta]

When you use Steam, you agree to the EULA, which basically states that you are not buying the game, you are purchasing a license through Valve.

How is this different than any other physical copy of a game? They all have EULA's that must be accepted before you can install/run the program, and they tend to amount to "You have no rights and never will, ha ha thanks for the new yacht." too. If their DRM breaks (see: Assassins Creed, Settlers), or your dog decides that shiny CD looks a lot like a frisbee, or whatever, you're just as screwwed. Whoever you bought the game from has no obligation to sell you a working copy of the game either. The only difference is with steam, all your eggs are in one (virtual) basket. It's like keeping all your games in a single CD wallet and entrusting it to someone elses care (someone who happens to have a pretty good track record, mind you).

Unfortunately, for all parties to be happy there has to be some kind of accommodation to everyone's desires. Otherwise we'll just see more and more horrid DRM schemes and ever expanding piracy. Steam does a pretty good job of keeping almost everyone happy... I think it deserves our support, even if it's not ideal, for the sole reason that it focuses the market on more reasonable DRM & distribution schemes. God help us the day truly draconian DRM becomes successful.

Oh, and as for cheating and being banned... my viewpoint is that if you cheat in a multiplayer game, you're disrupting someone elses legitimate copy of that game - you have no right to complain when someone disrupts yours.
In other words, if you kick someones dog, don't bitch when someone bigger and meaner comes and kicks YOU. :)

Re:What to do

[amicusNYCL]

The only reason its the right way of distributing is because they haven't abused it for DRM purposes.

That's correct, the single largest reason why Valve is "doing it right" is because they don't abuse it. They could, but they don't. Like you point out, that can change overnight, and if it did I think they would see their customer base shrink faster than a nutsack in ice water.

This has happened to severe hackers on their more popular titles, such as Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.

Well.. I have no sympathy for people whose idea of fun is to intentionally and specifically harm the experience for 31 other players. I've been in several CS games where you've got a guy with a speed hack plus an aim bot, and it's absolutely no fun to be on either team. On the opposite team you can't even shoot before you've been headshotted, and on the same team you just feel like a dick. There's no reason to let those guys play the game, and Valve is the only authority to stop them.

Re:What to do

[EvanED]

Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

Well, technically the TOS say you can't transfer your account. You'll be clear, but the person you're selling to might not want to give you as much money because of the risk of you losing it.

And besides, who wants to sell their entire game library? Usually you just want to sell or give away one or two games. With Steam, you can't do it. Even explicitly contacting customer service didn't help me give away one of two separate Portal licenses I have.

So that's more than "technically correct," it's a very real problem.

Re:What to do

[X0563511]

How about Starforce, the one that (used to, anyways) actually brick drives?

Steam, if you can call it DRM (I don't, I consider it a purchase library and content distribution system) is far from the worste, you definitely win there.

Grandparent is fail.

Re:What to do

[X0563511]

As soon as this is released, it will be installed by me. All my future Steam purchases, should the purchase itself be platform specific, will be for the Linux port/version.

If the purchase is NOT platform specific (and this is what I'm hoping for) then well... hrm, play in Windows, or play in Linux. Wow, what a silly choice! (Linux, for you neanderthals out there)

I'll be showing my support :D

Re:What to do

[X0563511]

Valve may at any time at their discretion close your steam account, or stop their servers, with no obligation to deliver you a working copy of the game. This has happened to severe hackers on their more popular titles, such as Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.

I do have to say though, I don't lose any sleep over this. You 'signed' the ELUA, and you went and acted like a jackass ("hacking" in a multiplayer game is nothing but being a jackass) and the consequences for such an act was meted out. It's not like they were innocent.

Re:What to do

[lethalwp]

i bought the orange box on ps3, so, does this mean i'll be able to play portal, hl, or whatever comes out on linux?

Re:What to do

[Smelly Jeffrey]

and i have YET to see them re-nig on something

The word you are looking for is renege.

Re:What to do

[Monkeedude1212]

I mostly agree. I think the best way of putting it is that Steamworks isn't perfect, but its the best out there.

I keep holding onto the faint belief that Ubisoft is trying a new DRM Scheme, and after they discover there are better working alternatives (there have been other Ubisoft Titles on Steam I believe, GRAW maybe?) - I'm hoping they'll turn around.

The whole hacking thing - Yeah I don't feel much sympathy for the hackers. Some might say that it's going too far to lock them out of the entire Orange Box for exploiting one game, but there isn't a better way to send a message.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

You'll be clear, but the person you're selling to might not want to give you as much money because of the risk of you losing it.

Well, that's kinda how it works for the sale of any used item: It's less desirable than a shiny new version, so you pay less.

And besides, who wants to sell their entire game library?

Well, yeah, but I was responding to a poster making absolute statements, unlike you. You could still sell off your entire library, get a new steam account, and only buy the one or two games you wanted.

Even explicitly contacting customer service didn't help me give away one of two separate Portal licenses I have.

Try harder, and be sweeter. You'd be amazed what you can achieve with a little social engineering. Also, why two? Did you forget?

it's a very real problem.

Imminent hyperbole alert! No, it's not. It's an annoyance or a quirk at best, when everything else is taken into context.

Re:What to do

[Lord Ender]

This is not correct. Steam recently had an outage which locked you out of all your games, even in offline mode. Steam also prevents you from moving your games to a new computer without being registered online.

If Steam goes away, so do your games, eventually.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.

Ok, Auto VAC bans which you cannot appeal come immediately to mind. Are you seriously telling me that it is your belief that this program is perfect, free of errors and never bans someone without cause? Just google around and you'll see lots of people complaining about being banned (Valve was forced to reverse some of these bans). Note that you will never know the reason your account has been taken away from you since Valve will not tell you exactly why you were banned (i.e. what program was running or even generally the reason you were banned).

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_cat.php?id=10&t=qanda#7849-RADZ-6869

Before accusing others of of "wild rantings", why don't you do a little research first?

Re:What to do

[Lord Ender]

When Steam goes bankrupt, you will never be able to take your games with you to your new PCs. When Steam has an outage, it can disable your Steam client, meaning you can't play your games even in offline mode. This happened a few months ago.

If you get your games through Steam, your are subjecting yourself to some nasty DRM that will eventually lock you out of everything (no company lasts forever).

Re:What to do

[EvanED]

You could still sell off your entire library, get a new steam account, and only buy the one or two games you wanted.

Right, because every time I find someone who would want one game I want to give away, or wants to buy one game I'd like to sell, they're also willing to reimburse me for my replacement library.

Got any more realistic suggestions?

Also, why two? Did you forget?

I bought Portal, then later I bought the Orange Box.

Imminent hyperbole alert! No, it's not. It's an annoyance or a quirk at best, when everything else is taken into context.

What "everything else"? As far as I'm concerned, I get two main benefits from Steam:
- Sweet sales (e.g. KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect for $20 total between post-Thanksgiving and post-Christmas sales)
- The ability to play games like HL2 and Portal that aren't available not through Steam. (Okay, there are console ports, but those have several other problems.)

I don't consider the second thing a very big benefit from Steam to be honest; rather I view it more as Valve having my balls because their games are just so good that the problems I have with Steam are overridden.

Re:What to do

[DragonWriter]

If you get your games through Steam, your are subjecting yourself to some nasty DRM that will eventually lock you out of everything (no company lasts forever).

Yeah, but neither does my interest in any particular game. As long as there is a overwhelming probability that Steam will outlast my interest in the Steam-linked game I'm buying, there's not a whole lot of reason for me to be concerned by this particular concerned.

Re:What to do

[h4rr4r]

No, because you are a silly person.
You get tons of autoaim and thumbsticks to make up for it though, oh and less shiny graphics.

Re:What to do

[Draek]

Getting screwed in exchange for getting a few perks you wouldn't otherwise have, on the other hand, is called "prostitution" and is accepted as a valid profession in most of the world ;)

Re:What to do

[devent]

But it is still completely within their power to take away every game you've purchased through Steam. When you use Steam, you agree to the EULA, which basically states that you are not buying the game, you are purchasing a license through Valve.

How is that different for any other EULA for any other proprietary software you bought? Check your EULA for WindowsXP/Vista/7 there is the same crap that you only got a license to use and that Microsoft reserve the rights to cancel the license at any time for what ever reason.

Re:What to do

[Dan667]

Steam is really more of a service. You are giving up your complete and total control of your games for convenience, but IMHO it is worth it. I can move to any computer, login to Steam, download, and play games. It also keeps them patched. It is a trade, but one where I get something I want.

Re:What to do

[brkello]

Why did you not bold the "to severe hackers" part as well? Most people would view that as a good thing and another reason why they would want to go through Steam.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.

Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

Wow, this is possibly the most flawed line of logic I've ever seen on /.

And THAT is saying something.
So, when you decide to hold a garage sale, instead of being able to just sell that old microwave, you HAVE TO SELL YOUR ENTIRE HOUSE AND EVERYTHING IN IT.

The one aspect that the majority of steam users i've talked to like most is the ability to register all your games in a central location, with convenient installation management, and no fear of losing the game if your CD/DVD gets broken/lost.
However, if they are going to market games as something you BUY, rather than something you RENT, they need to start honoring first sale rights. I'm frankly astounded that the FTC hasn't intervened yet to force them to offer the ability to sell games you no longer want.

They can't advertise it as "purchasing the game" if they aren't going to honor first sale rights. Instead, they will have to advertise it as "renting the game" or "subscribing to a service."

Re:What to do

[melikamp]

The DRM is not even the only issue. If you run anything that is binary and closed-sourced on your GNU/Linux machine, with your user privileges, you are basically asking for a punch in the gut. Keep doing it, folks; with so many willing targets, all of us who actually give two shits about security will be that much safer.

I came to realize that I do not particularly want proprietary games to leave Windows. This way, I have my Windows machine, which is basically a dedicated game device and a public-terminal-level-security Internet appliance. With native GNU/Linux ports, I would still have to have two separate machines, and still treat one of them as a rogue, although I would be able to save a few bucks on OS.

Re:What to do

[Monkeedude1212]

Yes, and people Bitch about Microsoft for it, not praise them like they do Valve.

Re:What to do

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Steam has put out notices in the past that in the event that the steam network was to go away they would push an update removing the need to auth on the client so that it wouldn't stop working..

Notices where, exactly? In the terms of service? In the license agreements? Is the source code in escrow?

Re:What to do

[7-Vodka]

Why were you a sarcastic asshole when the GP was trying to make valid points?

In case you don't know; and I'm assuming you don't in good faith, Your games will stop working if they don't talk to the verification servers.

Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property. You rent it.

Makes it hard to do what you want with them and when the companies get bought out, go out of business or just change their minds and shut off the verification servers you're SOL.

Don't forget what happened with the kindle.... I want to shit on people when I hear them bragging about their kindles.

As much as players might enjoy the convenience being brought in with this new model, giving up your other rights isn't necessary. There's also the related debate of having the right to run servers yourself and playing at lan parties.

Re:What to do

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

Are you sure about that? Steam themselves say:

You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account.

Re:What to do

[BitZtream]

but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

So in order to give or sell ONE of my steam games I have to give or sell ALL of my steam games, or create entirely different accounts for every game I buy.

Lets not forget that once I've transfered it to someone else, it will be nearly impossible for the new owner to get Valve to let them back into the account after its been transfered (since they aren't me and valve will do their best to ONLY deal with the account creator unless you trick them into not realizing you aren't that person) if they get locked out.

Ever hear of Securom?

Thats what they remove from all the games I download from piratebay after I buy them so I don't have to use the CD anymore isn't it?

No, secure rom doesn't bother most of us because we've already accepted we have to pirate our software in order to get a decent value out of it.

In case you haven't noticed, steam is regularly on the front pages of slashdot ... due to its DRM or in the recent couple of posts, the Linux port, but its rather retarded to pretend Steam is the holy grail of DRM.

DRM sucks regardless of how you look at it and it hurts no one but legitimate customers. Anyone who is okay with stealing the software is just going to get it from someone already cracked and thats not something you can overcome.

Gabe wants you to stop browsing slashdot now and get back under his desk, you have work to do.

Re:What to do

[zach_the_lizard]

Funny, I gave one of my friends a copy of HL2, because I had a second one from buying the Orange box. I did it straight through Steam, no customer service needed. Perhaps you haven't fully investigated the GUI.

Re:What to do

[JonnyAwesome]

I had that problem too. Have you tried deleting clientregistry.blob from your Steam install folder? That seems fix it for me whenever Steam decides I'm not welcome.

Re:What to do

[carton]

the writer of the EULA must defend it in court, so it leaves us both legal and political options for weakening the EULA.

DRM is defended algorithmically, so provided that it's solid, there's no legal or democratic recourse against the terms it enforces.

In addition, the EULA is fixed on the page at time of sale, and DRM can alter the terms of the deal after sale *kindle* *cough* *cough*. Pray I don't alter it any further.

In addition, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions bootstrap the algorithmic defenses into the legal realm: if I *say* that you cannot resell your CD-ROM and you do it, you would likely prevail against me in court because of the first-sale doctrine. If I write a program that prevents you from reselling your CD-ROM among other things and defends against copyright violation as well, and you break my program so that you can resell the game but you do not violate copyright, I will likely win this time because of DMCA anti-circumvention.

This is all really basic and probably shouldn't need repeating on slashdot. Although I'm glad to go over it, honestly I think you need to catch up with the overall debate a little.

Re:What to do

[carton]

Yes, of course, in any arena, retaliation is one of the most effective ways of shutting down a debate.

Don't confuse effective with correct. Don't confuse ``has a motive to'' with ``is justified in doing.''

Re:What to do

[shutdown -p now]

That said, if it's the choice of Steam vs "you must have the CD" (like Mass Effect 2), in my mind it's not even remotely a question which is more consumer-friendly -- CD all the way.

It depends on how much of a rootkit the "you must have the CD" check really is. We've seen how bad that can get in practice.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

I don't consider the second thing a very big benefit from Steam to be honest; rather I view it more as Valve having my balls because their games are just so good that the problems I have with Steam are overridden.

Oy gevalt, I can see why it's so vexing. Must keep you up at nights.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Before accusing others of of "wild rantings", why don't you do a little research first?

Call me crazy, but since I wasn't making any claims, just asking GP to clarify his, I didn't think I had been placed in the rhetorical position to have to do that.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

When Steam goes bankrupt

Good God, what intense fantasies you pudgy fucks in your basement can concoct! It's like a goddamned paranoid episode of 24 in here!

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Why were you a sarcastic asshole

I guess, in all our years here, I haven't come across your radar before. Now I have.

the GP was trying to make valid points?

The GP was one giant [citation needed]. Let's not rewrite history.

In case you don't know

Whoopdeefuckingdoo. The difference here between you and me on this isn't that you're better informed and care more about your rights than I do, it's that you still have illusions. I guarantee you that the current Steam model is probably about as good as DRMed games are going to get for a long, long time, so all this bitching, all this worry, all these tenuous 'what if' scenarios are just noise.

Stop being a geek, and wake the fuck up: the world will never march to your little idiosyncratic beat, no matter how right you are.

I want to shit on people when I hear them bragging about their kindles.

See what I mean? Who the fuck has time to care about fucking Kindle users, let alone the stupid, degrading stuff they want to do to them?

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Yes, I know this, GP even mentions as well in his post. But unless you're retarded, it's not exactly an uber-hack.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

No, secure rom doesn't bother most of us because we've already accepted we have to pirate our software in order to get a decent value out of it.

Bullshit. You're just cheap. You don't have to pirate the games, just crack 'em, you asshole.

In case you haven't noticed, steam is regularly on the front pages of slashdot

And in case you haven't noticed, I'm enjoying the shit out of my Steam games. They're so worth every penny, they could disappear tomorrow, and I'd buy 'em again.

What was your point again, apart from being a hypocritical cheater? 'Cuz mine is: I, and millions of others, are getting value for money and laughing at all you prissy little queens.

Re:What to do

[smash]

If valve were to fuck people over and remove access to the software they have licensed, you could be sure that there would be a class action suit and it would be pretty suicidal for the company and its management.

They "could" do what you say, just as much as a government could up their tax rate by 60% in one hit to fuck over the citizenry. COULD... but it would be suicidal.

Re:What to do

[s73v3r]

True. But you know that going in. If you value that, then you don't buy it on Steam. Personally, for PC games, I don't care about that, so I tend to get stuff on Steam when I can.

Re:What to do

[smash]

So what happens when the industry moves on and CD drives are no longer available, and future optical drives do not support the bastardized CD copy protection used? Before you laugh - it already virtually happened with floppy drives (certainly 5 1/4" floppies already).

Your games requiring physical media will either:

• not work
• require a patch from the publisher - if they're still around
• require a hack from the community - which is a DMCA violation

In short, you're potentially screwed.

Physical media protection (CD) is just as bad, or potentially worse than online protection these days.

Re:What to do

[aleph42]

Well, a completely wrong post which is actually well written does deserve an answer. Here goes:

>>What happens if Steam goes offline?
>You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.

Then my guess is steam was not offline. If you can't ping steam servers, you certainly can't log in, and thus play. And offline mode you say? You have to go online to activate it. I'm not kidding. Basically, if you can plan that you will be offline, that's okay; but if your connection dies for a day (or you end up stuck on the train), you can't play.

>>How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?
>Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.

It is the same thing as asking permission because they can refuse. For example (as already stated) if the internet is down, or if your country or account suddenly ends up on their naughty list for whatever reason in 5 year.

>How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM?
One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.

Ok, he should have said "at any time for any reason". "Any reason" includes a lot of bad ones. Wether they already did or not is an other story (I'm pretty sure they did), but you would have to trust them a lot about the future.

>What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access?
Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid.
Screw ups happen. It's a risk you should prepare for, by not accepting useless locks (so you can't loose the keys).

>You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed.
Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?

Only the actual points need a rebuttal.

>You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.
Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

Good luck with that once you have 20+ games on the same account, which also has friends, counter strike clan, etc. Also the contract may forbid you to have more than one account (if it doesn't, it certainly might in the future).

>Steam is the worst possible DRM.
Spoken like somebody who does fuck all gaming these days. Ever hear of Securom? You know, the DRM that keeps getting front page articles here on Slashdot? Yeah, I think that'd win a poll of 'Worst DRM' by a landslide.

I agree on this one: steam is not the worst. It might be the one with the worst effect though, because of its widespread adoption (and the direct binding of the DRM with the game store).

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

Yes, steam and valve may be very nice, it's true.

But I object to the principle of DRM itself. Even knowing that they will never fuck with my account, I know that they can, and they do hold all of my steam games hostage.

Consider a stranger copying the key to your house - he may claim that he'll never abuse it and he may seem a very nice person - but in the end its still a needless and creepy proposition.

Furthermore, by supporting steam you show that you don't object to DRM, and that gives other companies more crazy ideas.

I know I'll never change you instant-gratification people minds, but I sure as hell will protest as loud as I can, because DRM sucks.

Re:What to do

[dangitman]

there's not a whole lot of reason for me to be concerned by this particular concerned.

Yeah, I don't worry about being adjectived by particular adjectives, either.

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

Which perks wouldn't you otherwise have? being able to redownload your games? You certainly dont *need* DRM for that, you could easily create a solution without.

Maybe they won't provide that service without DRM, but that is just extortion (yeah yeah, nobody is forcing you to buy, I get it. That is precisely why I stopped buying on steam).

Re:What to do

[DerKlempner]

re-nig

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Re:What to do

[aleph42]

You still don't have the right to do it. Meaning, you can't start a buisness centered around it, you can't advertise it on their forums, admins could ban you for mentioning this in-game, etc, etc.

Basically, what you're saying is that it's not a bad thing to loose a right if you can cheat your way around it. I disagree.

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

"How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?

Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'."

Sorry, but just because they say yes every time (mostly anyway) you still have to ask permission. The fact that the steam client handles it quite transparently for you does not change that fact. Unless in offline mode, you have to ask permission every fucking single time you want to play.

I paid for my games, I don't fucking have ask for permission to play. Otherwise I see no point in *buying* a game, instead it's renting.

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

By your reasoning, lets give the government/police/whatever unlimited powers, because you can't stop them anyway and the world will never be perfect, so it's quite ok to let it go to hell.

hell yeah.

I'll fucking give you a piece of my mind if you do something stupid, and if you just want to enjoy your life pretending it doesn't matter that certain things are wrong in the world, you're part of the problem.

Re:What to do

[magus_melchior]

Spoken by someone who is waiting to hear if they disabled his account, if his account got hacked, or what, since he's unable to log in with the new client.

I got into a rut where I couldn't log in with the beta client, and the problem went away when I uninstalled and reverted to the standard client (which is impossible now, but a clean reinstall may fix your woes).

The "unable to log in" problem can be caused by many things, some of which survive through uninstalls; I don't think they've completely solved this particular bug. I wouldn't attribute this to a disabled/hacked account unless you can't log into your account from any computer.

Re:What to do

[Vahokif]

Steam is the best DRM you're going to get that publishers will accept.

Re:What to do

[pilot1]

The DRM is not even the only issue. If you run anything that is binary and closed-sourced on your GNU/Linux machine, with your user privileges, you are basically asking for a punch in the gut. Keep doing it, folks; with so many willing targets, all of us who actually give two shits about security will be that much safer.

This is absurd. Unless you have personally audited the source* for every open source binary on your system and compiled it from that source yourself to verify that your binary came from it, adding a proprietary binary into the mix isn't going to change anything. * Or trust someone that has, which is still implausible.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Holy fuck, how do you get to twist what little I think of a GAME COMPANY into what I think about everything else?

Take you delusional butt-hurt somewhere else.

Re:What to do

[Sancho]

Thanks for the suggestions. I was trying it on my Mac, so it was a brand new install. That said, when I got home and tried it on my PC, I couldn't even connect to Steam. I'm wondering if there are just some sporadic problems going on.

If I manage to connect in the next few days, I'll close the ticket and stop worrying. :)

Re:What to do

[Shikaku]

I registered for Steam just because of the free Portal and run it in Wine through Playonlinux. When the native client is out I plan to buy the Valve Pack.

Just to let valve know they have $100 guaranteed from me at least when the native client is released :3

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam seems to be down right now... that's right, their servers went down so I can't play.

Also can't play if my internet connection goes down...

Re:What to do

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

So... you're staying that if I want to sell a game I bought on steam, I should lie to valve or beg them really hard to let me sell something I bought, or jump through hoops creating new accounts for every game before I buy them, and then absorb the reduced resale price from the risk of getting "caught", and ignore those ToS terms with a wink and a nudge...

Ok, ok, I think you've convinced us, steam isn't so great. I get it. Take it easy.

Re:What to do

[Maury Markowitz]

> the evil DRM that it brings

There are degrees of evil. Speeding is evil, but not much. Resetting your country to "year zero" through mass murder is also evil, much more so.

Steam's DRM is less evil.

Maury

Re:What to do

[mjwx]

Awww come on now. Steam is, IHMO, the only gaming platform that does DRM well.

I once heard a battered wife say "My husband is the only husband who can beat me properly".

There is something so very, very wrong with your statement.

No DRM implementation can be considered good because the concept is fundamentally flawed. DRM treats the attacker and receiver as the same person (customer) which defeats the entire purpose of encryption (which is what DRM basically is) as you have to give the receiver the encryption key whilst attempting to obfuscate it from the attacker. Seeing as they are the same person you end up giving the attacker the key so ultimately it's self defeating.

The only DRM system that has ever been implemented well is no DRM.

Re:What to do

[TheRealMindChild]

Turn off Caps Lock

Re:What to do

[Sancho]

I was trying from a new installation (the Mac client.) And last I tried from Windows, their servers will down.

Re:What to do

[trawg]

Excellent post. DRM is still DRM and I have the same problems as you. The true test of how good Valve's system will be is when things start to go wrong.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like a good place to put in a plug for www.gog.com. Saw it mentioned on Slashdot in the comments after the last story about Steam DRM, and was dubious, but now it's the reason that I'm freshly-addicted to Jagged Alliance 2. They sell assorted old games, cheaply ($10), and without DRM - they even make it a selling point, advertising it on the front of their page.

Sorry for the advertising-style post, but seriously, I'm just a happy customer. I just wish they ported these games to Linux, too.

Re:What to do

[Diantre]

What I meant is that I don't even feel it's a burden. I like using steam more than free illegally downloaded games for the practicality of it. I never feel my rights are stepped on, and I'm usually the whiny guy on this issue.

Re:What to do

[mjwx]

What I meant is that I don't even feel it's a burden. I like using steam more than free illegally downloaded games for the practicality of it.

I prefer buying games that I like (I make no apology about pirating crap games, the market must adjust to the level of poorly coded shovelware clones out there). Thus most of my games are purchased but DRM is a serious issue with my legitimately purchased games. It's always a burden, Steam starts up before my network connection does so it always fails to log in (I just turn it off in the end), the simple fact that I cant play my steam games unless steam is running is a huge burden.

Re:What to do

[EvanED]

Funny, I gave one of my friends a copy of HL2, because I had a second one from buying the Orange box. I did it straight through Steam, no customer service needed. Perhaps you haven't fully investigated the GUI.

Maybe you haven't fully investigated Steam's policies. The fact that you could transfer duplicate HL2 and HL2: Ep1 licenses from the Orange Box was a special feature of those two games with the Orange Box only. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, they've since done it with a couple L4D packs. However, transferring a double license is decidedly not a generally-implemented feature.

Re:What to do

[Polo]

I think your post is inaccurate, but I may be wrong.

I haven't heard of people losing their games, but they do prevent cheaters from playing on servers that have anti-cheat enabled.

There's a whole faq on their support website: check out VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat)

"Your connection to this secure server has been rejected. Because of past cheating violations, you have been banned from playing on all secure servers"

Valve seems to have done lots of reasonable things to make gaming a lot more fun on the PC.

I think one thing would be taking away a game you paid for, but it would be another to stop providing a service to someone who hurts the community. Protecting the community is a reasonable thing to do, because online gaming is basically unplayable (and VERY UNFUN) with cheating.

Re:What to do

[EvanED]

That's true, but I would consider stuff like that beyond "you must have the CD" DRM. Once you get into stuff like SecuROM and StarDock the win of CDs definitely decreases if it isn't overtaken by Steam.

Re:What to do

[EvanED]

So what happens when the industry moves on and CD drives are no longer available, and future optical drives do not support the bastardized CD copy protection used? Before you laugh - it already virtually happened with floppy drives (certainly 5 1/4" floppies already).

As I mentioned in another reply saying something similar, if I had to bet on whether I could read my CD-based games in a decade or whether Steam would be around at that time (at least giving access to my current Steam games), I'm betting on the CDs without much hesitation.

5 1/4" drives are hard to find, but you can still easily find 3 1/2" ones. You can get a USB-based floppy drive off Newegg for $25. Game companies more-or-less ceased distributing games on floppies over a decade ago; given that they're still distributing games on DVDs, it seems likely that CD drives will still be easy to come by a decade from now.

Re:What to do

[Rockoon]

I'm not worried about copying a CD, but i do like being able to move them from PC to PC. After I finished portal, I'd like to *give* it to my brother. But unlike a normal game, that's not possible.

"Unlike a normal game", you paid less, or at least should have.

Take the blinders off.

Re:What to do

[vux984]

Unlike a normal game", you paid less, or at least should have.

I've 'bought' exactly 2 and only 2 steam games. I've 'purchased' portal, and lost planet.

Both were 'bought' in brick and mortar stores. (EB Games, and Best Buy). They were in game boxes, on shelves, next to all the other games that really were for sale.

From what I can tell, these both were just as tied into the whole steam account as had I bought them online through steam directly.

If I can't buy a game outside the steam system then arguing I somehow paid less for it to compensate me for my reduced rights is meaningless.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I like Steam, be aware that several Ubisoft games (and likely others) have added layers of DRM as well. Several Ubisoft games on Steam actually do require an always-on connection; Steam's offline mode isn't allowed. I own lots of games from them myself; just know what you're buying. YMMV.

Re:What to do

[Lord Ender]

You expect a software company to never fold? To never discontinue a product? Really? Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not a happy person, are you?

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me crazy, but since I wasn't making any claims, just asking GP to clarify his, I didn't think I had been placed in the rhetorical position to have to do that.

convenient, don't you think?

Re:What to do

[CSMatt]

even for the net only and DRM part - Steam has put out notices in the past that in the event that the steam network was to go away they would push an update removing the need to auth on the client so that it wouldn't stop working..

Right, like how Microsoft patched the Xbox 360 so that Xbox games could now work over Xlink Kai as compensation for axing the original Live service. Oh wait...

Yeah, I know. Valve is not Microsoft. But I wouldn't put so much faith in what ultimately seems to be nothing more than an unenforceable promise. And besides, if Steam's ownership changes hands, there's no guarantee that this promise will remain.

Re:What to do

[CSMatt]

Except when you try to exercise your right of first sale.

If I recall correctly, Valve's games are tied to the Steam platform even if they come on a physical disc, and there is no way to "unregister" a game. I could be wrong, or they may have changed that, but given that only two of the seventeen eBay results for the Windows version of the Orange Box are used, I'm guessing they haven't.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference, Steam has the power to shut you out. MS cannot easily disable my single copy of XP, but Valve can pull the plug on my Steam account if they want to.

Re:What to do

[CSMatt]

("hacking" in a multiplayer game is nothing but being a jackass)

I would tend to disagree. Hacking a multiplayer game only crosses the line when it is done without the consent of everyone who would be affected by it. Certainly those who use hacks to give themselves a personal advantage at the disadvantage of everyone else are scumbags who take the game way too seriously, but starting a game where the explicit purpose (and this is stated up front to the other players) is to play around with the game and see what it is capable of is, in my opinion, perfectly fine.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

This has happened to severe hackers on their more popular titles, such as Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.

getting a VAC ban does not stop your games from working - you will not be able to play on a VAC-protected server, but you still can play on any non-steam Counter Strike server (and there are tens of thounds NS servers out there)

Re:What to do

[Pvt_Ryan]

Just watch, some games include 3rd party DRM.

Re:What to do

[L4t3r4lu5]

Should something happen to cause new management at Valve, their system is set up perfectly to screw you over worse than game you could buy in store.

The only way that would happen would be if Valve went out of business. If it was for any other reason, they'd be out of business pretty soon after.

Re:What to do

[williamhb]

Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property.

Although this is true (for instance they make it very hard to re-sell a game), in practice most of the customer base doesn't care even if you educate them about it. Why? Well, it really is only a game. While a few on Slashdot might care deeply about being able to play them in perpetuity, actually most game buyers never even bother to finish them. Not even the good games. That makes it very different to music or videos that people want to play over and over again. Why would a customer care that "they might not be able to play this again at some indefinite point in the future" if they don't even care to finish playing it once now?

Re:What to do

[melikamp]

What are you talking about? What popular free project is in need of auditing by the end user? No one will have desire or balls to write a magnificent game like FreeCiv or Wesnoth and put a backdoor into it, because (1) it will be elementarily found and removed (2) the name of the perpetrator will be marred forever. Look at what happened to NoScript: he flies completely straight now, and he didn't even jeopardize anyone's security, just did something people didn't particularly like. Why won't you give us some actual, established examples of backdoors, rootkits, or sneaky privacy breaches introduced in the popular free software, because I can make quite a list for the proprietary side.

Re:What to do

[williamhb]

The DRM is not even the only issue. If you run anything that is binary and closed-sourced on your GNU/Linux machine, with your user privileges, you are basically asking for a punch in the gut. Keep doing it, folks; with so many willing targets, all of us who actually give two shits about security will be that much safer.

I came to realize that I do not particularly want proprietary games to leave Windows. This way, I have my Windows machine, which is basically a dedicated game device and a public-terminal-level-security Internet appliance. With native GNU/Linux ports, I would still have to have two separate machines, and still treat one of them as a rogue, although I would be able to save a few bucks on OS.

That's a spurious argument. There's no guarantee that anybody has inspected code you download just because it is open source. Even in popular systems, significant holes have existed for a very long time (eg, the Debian key bug), and it is perfectly possible for a "rogue committer" to get nefarious code into an open source project and have it survive long enough that users download and execute it. So, in practice even for an open source product you would have to inspect the code yourself or still treat it as being "rogue". While you have the right to do that, I think it's a fair guess that you do not in fact inspect all of the code for every open source package you download, and even if you did you wouldn't spot 100% of the security flaws. While open source is an excellent strategy to develop secure software, that does not mean that a customer can treat software as being secure (or even "more secure") just because it is open source.

Re:What to do

[Tom]

Or, you could just make a user account for gaming, you know?

Could do that on OS X and windos, too. With fast user switching, it wouldn't even be any trouble.

Re:What to do

[Tom]

It depends on the price, doesn't it?

If you get less for your money, you expect to pay less. If I can buy a CD for 40, or rent it on Steam for 30, then I can decide whether the limitations on Steam are worth 10 to me or not.

It's only a problem when you don't have a choice.

Re:What to do

[jsvendsen]

You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property.

While I kind of agree with you on several points, I have to point out that physical ownership of games isn't really a walk in the park either. Through deterioration of physical media and hardware becoming obsolete, the vast majority of games purchased over the last 30 years are not in a playable state today [citation needed]. In terms of the odds of being able to pick up your game and actually play it in 10, 20 or 30 years, I think they increase rather than decrease as a result of systems like steam.

Re:What to do

[Aceticon]

CD check during installation only is DRM done well.

Anything which after I bought a game checks with a remote entity to see if I'm actually allowed to play it (said remote entity might reply with "No") is just a form of imposing arbitrary after-sale restrictions on my ownership rights.

Steam apologists sound like a man which, having been daily beaten up with a steel rod in the recent past, now says how good it is to be beaten up daily with a baseball bat.

Re:What to do

[Aceticon]

EULAs are not valid in most of the world - they are considered a one sided attempt at changing the terms of the implicit contract which is the sale and as such are not worth the paper they are written on.

Steam on the other hand is a software agent that remotelly imposes the will of a 3rd party after the sale. If they abuse it, it is you that now has to spend time and money seeking redress in the courts.

Re:What to do

[True Vox]

How is speeding evil? Illegal, yes. Evil? But I concur - Steam is WAY better then some other options out there - I personally enjoy the platform very much. YAY Steam on Linux!

Re:What to do

[danieltdp]

My case. Never bought anything from steam, wich is a shame. The concept, if done well, is rock solid and interesting.

Now I have a real problem. If steam comes to Linux, I will buy! :-) I'm thinking about getting one account per game.

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

So just because it is less important than freedom and survival I should not fight it with tooth and nail if it is wrong?

We do agree that it *is* wrong, don't we? You'd prefer to be in control of your games, wouldn't you?

Re:What to do

[Rockoon]

If I can't buy a game outside the steam system then arguing I somehow paid less for it to compensate me for my reduced rights is meaningless.

No, you are arguing that you DID buy them outside the steam system but still needed steam and THAT is your beef. Essentially, you picked the worst possible route to get a steam game.

When you buy a game FROM steam, you EXPECT to be able to pay less.. and that is the case.. there are always great deals on steam that you just don't find in B&M stores. You could have paid less, but you elected not to. Sounds like you are a moron.

Re:What to do

[Necreia]

I know you're trolling, but I'll give it a go...

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, teach, I know these ones!
  How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM?
One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.
  How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?
Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.

You can't install the game if you can't communicate with Steam server. You have to -Ask Permission- to install/'activate'

What happens if Steam goes offline?
You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.

If you're already installed and in offline mode, yep. But you surely can't reinstall in this situation.

What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access?
Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid.
  You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed.
Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?

I don't know where you're going with this. You don't own the games provided by steam, you rent them. So, GP is right.

You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.
Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

All-or-nothing. You can't buy 10 games and sell 1.

Steam is the worst possible DRM.
Spoken like somebody who does fuck all gaming these days. Ever hear of Securom? You know, the DRM that keeps getting front page articles here on Slashdot? Yeah, I think that'd win a poll of 'Worst DRM' by a landslide.

I'll semi-buy this. The difference is, you buy those games and battle DRM. You rent these games and battle DRM.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

So just because it is less important than freedom and survival I should not fight it with tooth and nail if it is wrong?

Well, you're the one categorizing it as 'less important' yet you still want to 'fight tooth and nail', so yeah, some perspective would help you out.

You'd prefer to be in control of your games, wouldn't you?

And I'd also like a pony and a million dollars. But unlike you geeks, I live in the real world.

Re:What to do

[Amouth]

Thanks - never was good at spelling, and the spell check was of zero help so i just made something people might understand in context..

Re:What to do

[brkello]

Except in this "debate", obviously things are always ignored or omitted that make the whole thing silly. Games I own 10 years ago can't even be played on my modern OS. So what do we do? Either buy them on the cheap from services that provide updates to the old game or get an emulator and download a copy of the game. By the time Steam shuts down (if it ever does in the near future) there will be plenty of work arounds. So yeah, you can say I am "renting" it, but in reality I'll still be able to play it no matter what they do.

Re:What to do

[HeckRuler]

Yep, came here for someone defending Steam. I am not leaving disappointed. I don't like DRM in any form, but by and large I don't really have a big beef with Steam or Valve on a fundamental level. Half-life kicks. But I tried to go pick up Portal for free yesterday. I opened up steam for the first time in a couple years. It asks for a password I don't remember. I try a few from that era, but have to do the recovery thing. And this goes to a address I still use, hurzah! But the damn thing doesn't work. Either they don't like their own temp code or I can't remember what city I was born in. So now I apparently no longer own any of the half-life games or counter-strike. I could probably call someone and jump through hoops to re-connect with what I had purchased, but that's just kind of a pain in the ass isn't it?

Re:What to do

[BloodyIron]

Actually there are games on steam they cannot take away from you. I myself have played the eve online demo with a full subscription, installed through steam, and even launched the steam installed version without steam installed. Your blanket conclusion is incomplete.

One thing you are however forgetting is what STEAM grants you beyond past methods of distribution, and that is infinite portability. I personally have gone over to my friends' house, logged into steam, installed a small game or even larger games at their place, without any coughs or issues. Why is this good? Because I installed without the disks, or even having to prove I was me beyond my account login. While this won't necessarily work for every game on STEAM, it works for a notable majority. This is simply one of the benefits STEAM offers you over conventional (store/mail) distribution.

Some other features which STEAM offers quite well is the community/group/achievment and other cloud systems. VALVe is trying to increase the titles which have cloud configurations enabled, with the intent of logging on other systems and having your personal configurations (ala config files for tf2) follow you around. Furthermore, you can participate in coordination with communities and groups in STEAM both with a STEAM client and through the steamcommunity.com website (with limited capacity).

The fact of the matter is STEAM is greater than a simple method of DRM. It is an improved method of distribution through portability. There are plenty of other benefits too such as granting developers a centralized forum to communicate directly with their fans, the ability to offer promotional offers such as gift passes, discounted weekends, centralized distribution of demos, and plenty more.

It is not fair to focus strictly on one element of STEAM without balancing it against the rest of what it has to offer.

I for one (heart) STEAM.

Re:What to do

[vux984]

there are always great deals on steam that you just don't find in B&M stores.

There were always great deals in stores. Sierra classics, 3-packs, entire series-in-a-box deals, etc.

But I'll grant that there are better deals available online, but those deals are the result of online distribution not the drm/rental situation. With a boxed game promo you still had to produce a master CD, box art, and warehouse and distribute the thing, and you had to project enough sales to cover costs. Online a promo its little more than adding a sku to a database with a description and some artwork. So its easy to do a "1 week promo", or make a 3-pack of games that wouldn't be commercially viable on shelves...

But that's not a feature of 'steam' that's 'online distribution'. They could actually SELL those games online just as well for the same prices, instead of dicking you around with this perpetual rental bullshit. Other companies SELL copies online, and have deals just as good as steam. Better actually... because you actually own a licensed copy, rather than having paid the same amount for a subscription.

Re:What to do

[harl]

One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.

It's clearly stated in the contract. That's not ranting. But hey attack the poster and ignore the post.

Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.

Then you don't understand how Steam works.

You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.

The net is filled with problems with "offline mode". Second could you reinstall if their servers were offline? If you have no net? Can you make a backup copy?

Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid.

Again simply a personal attack. Please discuss the topic and leave the insults at home.
People make mistakes all the time. Someone screws something up and you loose access. A clerical error. You have no legal recourse.

Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?

You signed a legal contracts this has been decided in at least 2 circuit courts. the cases are ProCD V Zeidenberg and Blizzard V bnetd. Would you like to talk about the details or just insult me some more?

Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

What about individual games? And yet more insults.

Re:What to do

[vux984]

It's only a problem when you don't have a choice.

Except that's where things are headed, and there are an ever increasing number of titles where you -don't- have a choice.

It depends on the price, doesn't it? ... If I can buy a CD for 40, or rent it on Steam for 30...

I'd agree if:

a) when i buy a CD in the store for 40 it doesn't sometimes end up being a rental anyway.

b) Most consumers don't read the 'haha your really not buying a license to a copy. instead your buying a non-transferable subscription to use a license to a copy, gotcha!' fine print. Of those who do, the subtle differences of which most don't even understand -- until they decide the game they bought isn't their thing find they can't return it, can't sell it for a few bucks towards another game, can't even give it away as a gift, can't lend it a friend,...

Most people think they bought a game for 30, and saved 10 bucks. They don't actually even know. That makes the whole transaction dishonest.

Steam exploits people not understanding what they are selling. Now you can blather on about caveat emptor and personal responsbility and I even agree with all of that too, but consumer protection laws exist so people don't have to have a lawyer on retainer just to go to the mall.

People understand buying. There are established norms for how it works and what rights each party has.
People understand renting. There are established norms for how it works and what rights each party has.

People don't really understand 'single-payment perpetual subscription' that's being passed of as if it was 'buying'. Inventing a new model, and then dressing it up in the terminology of a well established model ('buy this game!'), and making it feel like the same experience... right down to picking up a box and putting it onto a counter, paying for it in a brick and mortor store, and taking it home. That is quite frankly dishonest.

Re:What to do

[pilot1]

If you want any certainty, every free project is in need of auditing by the end user.

Nowhere did I argue that open source software is just as likely to have backdoors. It is, however, possible and ultimately your security still comes down to some 3rd party (my original point). Your argument seems to boil down to "software not audited by a trusted party is dangerous," but what you're saying is "proprietary software is dangerous." The two are not equivalent: there exist free projects which haven't been audited properly and proprietary projects that have. Calling lack of backdoors an inherent advantage of OSS creates a false sense of security and simply isn't true. At best being well-audited is an advantage of large and popular OSS projects, but even then it doesn't universally apply (e.g. OpenOffice) and there's no easy way to tell where it does.

(There is also the issue of accidentally introducing vulnerabilities, which your "many eyes" and "shame" factors don't necessarily preclude as evidenced by the Debian OpenSSL bug. Your original "proprietary software is dangerous" argument ignored this possibility.)

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

Well, I can only hope that your ignorant attitude will bite you in the ass one day so you'll know better. But we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out I guess.

Re:What to do

[Jesus_666]

Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property. You rent it.

Note that this applies to games distributed through physical media as well. You obtained a license for the game as well as the medium the game is on; the EULA will most likely tell you that the game is still not your property. Because it isn't.

Re:What to do

[Jesus_666]

Thats what they remove from all the games I download from piratebay after I buy them so I don't have to use the CD anymore isn't it?

In other terms, you're okay with Steam as well since Steam games can also be pirated.

Re:What to do

[Jesus_666]

In addition, the EULA is fixed on the page at time of sale, and DRM can alter the terms of the deal after sale *kindle* *cough* *cough*. Pray I don't alter it any further.

Note that this also applies to any game with a multiplayer component as they can just affix a new EULA to any patch they feel like. Since patches usually break compatibility with older versions you can choose between accepting their new EULA and effectively losing the multiplayer functionality.

Also note that while EULAs can be theoretically challenged in court it's extremely unlikely that any affected gamer is going to do so. Like patents, EULAs are theoretically attackable but practically too expensive to deal with. Even extremely obvious cases could cost you more than you can afford.

Re:What to do

[gotem]

So why can't you just create a separate user account for gaming?

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Well, I can only hope that your ignorant attitude will bite you in the ass one day so you'll know better.

Yes, it will be a sad day for all of us when i can't play some of my video games.

But we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out I guess.

One of the points I've been making all along. Glad you caught up.

Re:What to do

[kalirion]

Sure, but if Microsoft cancels your license, you can just purchase a new copy of Windows and reinstall all your applications.

If Valve disables your account, you have to repurchase all your Steam games.

There are people whose accounts have been disabled because one of the games they purchased got charged back by Paypal or whatever.

That's right, they have a problem purchasing 1 games, and lose all their games.

Re:What to do

[melikamp]

You know, this will probably work, as long as GNU/Linux is resilient enough against elevation via a local exploit.

Re:What to do

[X0563511]

Well, you have a point here... though Valve games (the ones that would use VAC, their "hacker catcher") are marked in the server browser and can be filterd inclusive or exclusive on the list.

If you (remember I'm not meaning you specifically) get 'caught' hacking on VAC server and hence banned, and lose your stuff... you have nobody to blame but yourself.

If it was NOT on a secured server, then yes, I would agree something is wrong. But that something is likely that the whole server did NOT agree, else who would have reported it (remember, there is an absence of an automated system at this point)

Re:What to do

[melikamp]

I am not an idealist when it comes to security, I am scared of probability rather than of possibility. I do not require certainty: like you say, it is not achievable in practice. I, however, see no reason to trust a proprietary software vendor or any of its auditors. They are all guilty until proven innocent. There is only one way to properly audit software (and here I am an idealist), and it is the same as with math: you have to let everyone to read and build the source. If I come to you and say: I've proven the twin primes conjecture, and hundred other people went through my proof and decided it was good, but no one else can see it, what do you say to me? You say: go fuck yourself. How is that different with software? People are lulled into thinking that because software seems to do, on occasion, what the docs say it should do, it must be correct and benign. The argument for that is every time an appeal to authority: it is a fallacy, it doesn't work in math, and it doesn't work in computer science. An even more retarded argument is that they won't be able to pay for development, unless the code is hidden: even if this was true (it is not), it would still prove nothing about what the software actually does.

The fallout is this: if the code is unavailable, I suspect foul play. The history fully justifies my attitude.

Re:What to do

[quadrox]

Well, if you don't care whether you get what you pay for, I suppose that's sort of your choice. Except that it creates an environment where companies that are hostile to customers thrive (since nobody wants to punish them), which also impacts me.

My wait and see remark was mostly about there being no point to continue this discussion, since we clearly can't convince each other. I'll speak out against DRM whenever I deem it necessary (always), since that is what I think is right.

Having clarified this point I will now withdraw from the discussion, as nothing further can come from it.

Re:What to do

[Captain Splendid]

Well, if you don't care whether you get what you pay for

But I do. And I have gotten my money's worth. It might be different than your calculus, but it doesn't make it less valid.

I suppose that's sort of your choice

With such wishy-washy language, how can I help but be impressed with your generosity?

Except that it creates an environment

Bzzzt, wrong. At best, I'm supporting it. This environment was created a long time ago, when the western democracies started trending towards caring more for corporations than people. I can safely say I probably hate that trend more than you, but I'm also aware how little power I (and we, the people) have remaining. Consequently, I fight my battles judiciously, and they certainly don't include the kind of bombastic hyperbole you and your siblings have come up with in this thread.

One more time: You're absolutely correct, but you're also a moron. If you learn nothing else from this, learn that.

Re:What to do

[BitZtream]

Really? I use images all the time without working cd/dvd drives.

Re:What to do

[smash]

Floppies being phased out is a CERTAINTY. Steam going off-line is a maybe. Give me steam content over physical media protection. If required, and a crack is needed, so be it - we're simply back to where we would be with the phase out of physical media.

Re:What to do

[smash]

By floppies, I meant physical media such as cd/dvd. Only had 1 coffee this morning...

Re:What to do

[Tom]

Dual-booting isn't security, either. There are windos drivers for HFS+ and most Linux filesystems, you know?

Re:What to do

[Tom]

Agreed, it should be way more clear what exactly this deal is.

Personally, I don't mind Steam. The renting model does have its advantages, too. For example, I can download the stuff again, so I don't have to keep a local backup copy. I can reinstall it on my next machine with no hassle. About the only thing I'd like to see is the ability to transfer the license, i.e. give it to someone else after I'm done playing.

But yes, we need a new word and mental model for what exactly software is. Owned? Rented? Neither, really.

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be easier to create a limited account and set the binaries to SUID to it on launch? Then they can't touch your users files. (though granted now all system users will share game settings)

Re:What to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you run it with your user privileges?

The whole point of Unix security is you run programs with the privileges they actually need. No game I can thing of has any reason to write/read to any of my documents. If you don't trust your user accounts, use jails, if you don't truest them use visualization, it is still going to be tones easier running a client OS that actually co-operates.

Time to see what mainstream games do for Mac/Linux

[chocobanana]

Great news! I'm really looking forward to see what Steam, as a mainstream game distribution platform, will do for Linux and Mac.

But does it run on Lin-...

[Kirin Fenrir]

...oh. So it does. :)

Re:But does it run on Lin-...

[Nadaka]

Yes it does.

One of the two things keeping me using my windows partition is games.

With good titles like these coming to linux, the only remaining factor is my desire to keep my .NET skills sharp in case I need to find a new job quickly.

Re:But does it run on Lin-...

[X0563511]

I'd say virtualbox or something similar can fill that need. Almost time to reclaim that drive space!

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[joe_bruin]

Even better, free Portal for PC and Mac here: http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

Valve Time

[skyride]

"By the end of summer" really, in valve time, means "at some point next year". Its great, it'll happen, but I wouldn't hold your breat.

Re:Valve Time

[will.perdikakis]

Now that this is out of the way, maybe they will finish HL2:Ep3!

Re:Valve Time

[Chris Burke]

"By the end of summer" really, in valve time, means "at some point next year". Its great, it'll happen, but I wouldn't hold your breat.

At first I was going to mention that they don't say summer of what year, but then I realized that they aren't necessarily referring to any specific summer at all.

"By the end of the existence of summer" really gives them a lot of time to get it done! I doubt any of us will be checking by then.

why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT through?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why by World of Goo through steam, when you could buy it NOT through steam? Seriously, they sell a DRM-free version, doesn't require any intrusive software on your machine, your computer stays YOUR computer, no worries about what the thing might be doing behind your back, etc.

I can understand the argument of, "Well, game XYZ is only available through stream", even though I wouldn't do it myself. Buy when there's a totally un-DRMed alternative available, why would anyone chose Steam over that?

32 or 64 bit?

[Neil Watson]

Ut2004 runs find with some 32bit helper libraries on a 64 bit machine. Enemy Territory and Quake Wars both do not (for me).

Re:32 or 64 bit?

[binarylarry]

They both run fine for me under 64-bit Ubuntu.

Re:32 or 64 bit?

[Ant P.]

UT2004 runs fine with no 32-bit whatsoever.

To quote Darth Vader...

[llvllatrix]

Noooooooooooo...I don't want to be tempted by highly addicting games :(

One fewer reason to run Windows

[starglider29a]

among many ;-)

Source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is it confirmed by Valve that it's coming to Linux? All I see is this page saying it's true cause they found lots of Linux looking code files. They found Linux server stuff for Steam a few years ago and exclaimed it was coming soon back then too. I'd like to see an official Valve press release or something from the actual developer, not some people saying they found files. Does it look promising with all those files? Yes. Is it official? No.

Re:Source?

[HeronBlademaster]

Read the last sentence of this article.

I dunno if we should trust Telegraph, but one would assume they wouldn't publish a claim of official confirmation unless they knew it were true.

I am going to vote with my dollars.

[will.perdikakis]

The minute STEAM is released on Linux, I am going to buy anything I want to replay again.

What?

[Diantre]

I can't wait to see the mac users' faces when they are told to enter something in the console :)

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a macbook...and I still play text games in terminal. You know...muds. It's also nice to ssh into my linux box too.

We're not all bad. We just keep quiet so no one associates with those fanboys. *shudder*

Re:What?

[Wyatt Earp]

On a Mac the console is where you go to view your system logs. Terminal is where you go to run commands.

For me, the last things I ran from there were drutil tray close and drutil tray open.

The drive on my Mac Pro tower sometimes gets uppity and I can only get it to open/close from command line.

Re:What?

[Wyatt Earp]

You MUD from terminal? I used Atlantis and Savitar.

Re:What?

[VGPowerlord]

I can't wait to see the mac users' faces when they are told to enter something in the console :)

Steam requires users to enter something into the console?

Do you think this is the Linux versions or something?

./steam -game tf -command update -dir .

*waits for Team Fortress 2 to install/update*

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Atlantis for a little while, but it slowed my typing speed. I also don't play hack n' slash. I'm partial to RP intensive stuff requiring various "poses".

I appreciate the info though.

Re:What?

[GNious]

judging from the wait I have here trying to create an account from a Mac laptop, you might not want to hold your breath...

Re:What?

[trapnest]

Me either. That being said I have half a dozen terminals open all the time on my MBP.

Re:What?

[maccodemonkey]

2001 called. They want their joke back.

Re:What?

[BitZtream]

I do it all the time, not sure what the problem is. Its not really any different than telling someone to use the command prompt in windows, which is rather common when debugging problems over the phone or forums and such anyway.

When you give someone a list of instructions to follow and they are already well outside their comfort zone, the terminal doesn't really make it that much scarier.

The only thing my wife notices about the terminal is that when she sees white text on a black screen, it means I'm working on a server so she knows to leave me alone if possible as its probably important.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not really sure what the joke there is. I don't see why the game would ask you to enter something to the console, or why it would be a problem if it did.

Re:What?

[AndreR]

You're giving the linux term too much credit.

./steam -uG tf -o .

more like it

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm... I use the console quite a bit, as I did with slack.

Re:What?

[oatworm]

sudo apt-get -t steam install foo

Man, that'd be sweet...

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the same Mac users who actually have a fully functional Terminal program installed by default?

Didn't think that one through too well, did you?

Re:What?

[VGPowerlord]

Er... you are aware that I posted a real command that works on the dedicated server installer/updater?

tf2@www:~$ ./steam -command update -game tf -dir .
Checking bootstrapper version ...
Updating Installation
Checking/Installing 'Team Fortress 2 Content' version 146

Checking/Installing 'Team Fortress 2 Materials' version 56

Checking/Installing 'Base Source Shared Materials' version 8

Checking/Installing 'Base Source Shared Models' version 4

Checking/Installing 'Base Source Shared Sounds' version 4

Checking/Installing 'OB Linux Dedicated Server' version 34

HLDS installation up to date

The dedicated server steam client doesn't use single character switches, only named switches in the form steam -command [parameters] [flags]

Well, -command can be moved around, but it disagrees with its own documentation by doing so.

Re:What?

[AndreR]

Ouch, I'll shut up now. Thought you were making that up, my bad.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The console? You mean the terminal?

Re:What?

[sakari]

I wont wait for you to realize that a big portion of Mac users are old die hard UNIX users ..

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to see the mac users' faces when they are told to enter something in the console :)

Because OSX doesn't have a shell....right. (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[VGPowerlord]

I'll have to check this link on my computer at home (steampowered.com is blocked where I work).

Dedicated "Steam" Distro of Linux

[DarthVain]

in 3... 2... 1

Re:Dedicated "Steam" Distro of Linux

[sparrowhead]

That idea wouldn't be too bad. It would certainly provide some sort of standard other publishers might be tempted to deliver for as well.

Re:Dedicated "Steam" Distro of Linux

[mdm-adph]

Ubuntu Gaming Edition?

Re:Dedicated "Steam" Distro of Linux

[Ranzear]

This borders on oxymoron almost as much as 'Gaming Laptop'.

Re:Dedicated "Steam" Distro of Linux

[tux0r]

Ubuntu Gaming Edition?

Marketing opportunity: Hardcore Ubuntu Gaming Edition - "It's HUGE".

Re:Dedicated "Steam" Distro of Linux

[mjwx]

Steambuntu.com is still available.

Re:Time to see what mainstream games do for Mac/Li

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope my Macbook's GMA950 can run some games (any games!)

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[mehemiah]

took'em long enough

Soo......

[markass530]

We can look forward to a lot hardcore postal fans will be switching to linux?

Re:Soo......

[markass530]

yes i am an idiot, and yes I need to start previewing my comments, to correct for out of control grammatical errors.

Painful

[drdaz]

I'd been looking forward to this for a while now. Having installed I find out that Steam doesn't support case-sensitive file systems.

Color me disappointed.

Their 'solution' is here:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8601-RYPX-5789

*Sighs*

Re:Painful

[gstoddart]

I'd been looking forward to this for a while now. Having installed I find out that Steam doesn't support case-sensitive file systems.

Oh, that's hilarious.

WTF is the point of porting something to Linux if you expect a case-insensitive filesystem??? Heck, I'm not sure I've ever *seen* a case-insensitive filesystem on any UNIX-like OS.

Too funny.

Re:Painful

[drdaz]

I've hacked my way around it by making a case-insensitive disk image and symlinking all the folders it wants to make into it.

It's a kludgy mess. :-|

Re:Painful

[binarylarry]

um... Mac OSX.... and it's actually a certified Unix whereas Linux is just a unixalike (Ubuntu user here).

Re:Painful

[alannon]

By default, unless you specifically re-format a partition, OSX file systems are case-preserving but insensitive.

Re:Painful

[Blakey Rat]

OS X (which is a certified Unix, for whatever that matters) creates case-insensitive filesystems by default. You have to go out of your way to make a case-sensitive one.

This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below. :)

Re:Painful

[drdaz]

Honestly though, I'm not sure what they're thinking.

I'm generalizing here, but I think the last thing the average Mac user will be impressed by is being told Steam doesn't work with their filesystem. AFAIK Macs sold today use case-sensitive filesystems by default.

Of all the places you can cut corners to save development time, it strikes me that this might be the most idiotic choice imaginable. It drops potential customers before they've had a chance to even at what you have to offer.

Re:Painful

[flink]

Heck, I'm not sure I've ever *seen* a case-insensitive filesystem on any UNIX-like OS.

OS X's HFS+ filesystem is case insensitive. It's case preserving, like NTFS.

$ echo bar > FOO.txt
$ cat foo.txt
bar
$ ls *.txt
FOO.txt

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

my solution

create a 20 GB disk image with a case sensitive file system, called 'Steam', using disk utility.

Place Steam.app on the disk image.

Make symlinks from the 2 other locations, to directories on the disk image.

mkdir /Volumes/Steam/Application\ Support
ln -s /Volumes/Steam/Application\ Support/ ~/Libary/Application\ Support/Steam

mkdir /Volumes/Steam/Steam\ Content
ln -s /Volumes/Steam/Steam\ Content/ ~/Documents/Steam\ Content

Re:Painful

[BitZtream]

Oh its better than that, Apple has several tools for helping you deal with the conversion from between case insensitive and sensitive filesystems, its a freaking trivial task.

Honestly, you have to freaking go out of your way to screw this one up, I've never put ANY effort into making an app deal with case sensitivity, I honestly don't know how you manage to do it unless you don't use defines or constants for static filenames, in which case, you're a fsking moron in the first place.

Re:Painful

[gstoddart]

um... Mac OSX.... and it's actually a certified Unix whereas Linux is just a unixalike (Ubuntu user here).

Never having used Mac OSX, that's news to me. (The case-sensitive part, not the Unix part.)

However, having used NextStep, SunOS, HP-UX (9 and 10), Solaris, AIX, IRIX, FreeBSD, Linux, and maybe even a couple others since about '91 -- I've simply never even seen one that was insensitive.

Heck, is a case-insensitive filesystem even POSIX compliant? (I have no idea -- just always thought case insensitive was a pretty lame feature.)

Why not make it an 8.3 fileystem and get it over with. :-P

Re:Painful

[gstoddart]

This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below. :)

Must ... not ... take ... bait ...

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

can you name even one valid reason to use a case-sensitive file system?

that's the reason they're not supported.

Re:Painful

[EvanED]

I'm generalizing here, but I think the last thing the average Mac user will be impressed by is being told Steam doesn't work with their filesystem. AFAIK Macs sold today use case-sensitive filesystems by default.

As others above you have said, the last point is not true, which means that the average Mac user won't ever run into this problem. Hell, the 95th percentile hardcore geek Mac user won't run into this problem.

Re:Painful

[pikester]

Good to know this. I guess I won't be using Steam until they can fix this issue.

Re:Painful

[r_jensen11]

That sounds like a major failure. What do they expect the users to do, reformat their computers using FAT32?

Re:Painful

[BitZtream]

Whats hard? No one would ever notice really, with a GUI the issue is moot unless you care about it.

When you're pointing and clicking for everything the case doesn't matter to users.

There are two reasons apps have problems with case sensitive file systems.

1) The developer went out of their way to make a shitty app that depends on insensitivity.
2) The developer doesn't use constants or defines for hard coded file names, so they have different case in different places in the source.

You really have to be a douche bag to make an app that cant' deal with case sensitive file systems. It takes effort or absolutely unacceptable programming practices to accomplish what they've done.

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see Apple catching up to Microsoft on the usability front. Windows has had case insensitive file systems for YEARS.

Re:Painful

[Blakey Rat]

Whats hard? No one would ever notice really, with a GUI the issue is moot unless you care about it.

Or until they hit "sort by name".

You really have to be a douche bag to make an app that cant' deal with case sensitive file systems. It takes effort or absolutely unacceptable programming practices to accomplish what they've done.

Then don't use it, and relax a bit. It's not like you're out anything: you didn't have access to Steam yesterday, and you don't today.

Re:Painful

[Blakey Rat]

Apple's HFS has always been case insensitive, back to 1984. This is only an issue because, since OS X is based on Unix, a certain (tiny) subset of people want to use it "the Unix way". Real Mac users (meaning: have been using a Mac longer than 5 years) wouldn't, in a million years, go out of their way to format a drive as case sensitive.

Re:Painful

[trapnest]

I think this is a Mac-only issue, and almost a non-issue because OS X by default doesn't create case-sensitive filesystems.

Re:Painful

[lederhosen]

There is no debate. Everyone that has some programming experience with unicode and multi language support knows that the *only* sane way is to have case sensitive file systems. Maybe the right thinking people (at apple and other places) should realize that the current locale should not influence if two file names are to be treated as equal (the reason is that not all languages agree on which characters are uppercase/lowercase versions of each other).

Re:Painful

[Quok]

Sorry, not quite:

$ echo bar > FOO.txt
$ cat foo.txt
cat: foo.txt: No such file or directory
$ ls *.txt
FOO.txt
$ cat FOO.txt
bar

And the disk utility reports my filesystem as Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)

Re:Painful

[godrik]

Whats hard? No one would ever notice really, with a GUI the issue is moot unless you care about it.

Or until they hit "sort by name".

Well, that's a GUI issue and not the file system issue.
You can define your sorting operation so that A>a>B>b>C>c...

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

my hopes are up that this gets fixed soon.
no case-insensitivity for linux, so no linux port if the games aren't compatible with case-sensitive filesystems...

Re:Painful

[FrangoAssado]

Whats hard? No one would ever notice really, with a GUI the issue is moot unless you care about it.

Or until they hit "sort by name".

Ermm... why do you think sorting has anything to do with case sensitivity of the filesystem?

"A" and "a" are two different files in a case-sensitive filesystem, and two names for the same file in a case-insensitive filesystem. That's the difference. Any method used for sorting file names in one system can be done exactly the same way in the other.

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Create a 20GB disk image with a case insensitive file system, using disk utility.

Copy Steam.app to the disk image.

Try and run Steam.app.

For both errors, create a symlink from the folder in the error, to a new folder on the disk image.

Then it should work.

Re:Painful

[Draek]

This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below. :)
Reply to This

While us, left-thinking people see how useful and simple it is and continue along just fine ;)

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Case-sensitive filesystems may be sane for PROGRAMMERS, but they're not sane for USERS.

As a user, I couldn't care less about how hard it is for you to deal with it. I'm not a machine, I don't want to start thinking like one just because the programmer working a layer or two beneath me can't figure out a way to make it work for people that think like humans.

MS and Apple have no problem doing it, and their systems are just as multi-language as any Linux release.

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

ignorance!=correctness

Re:Painful

[jgerry]

The Mac filesystem is case insensitive by default. Yours is set to case-sensitive, so the above example won't work.

I tried to run case-sensitive OS X last year, lasted about 2 weeks. Most stuff worked fine, but my expensive music software (Ableton Live) and a few others things broke. Just wasn't worth it for me.

Re:Painful

[pizzach]

Yes, this is exactly the reason I got a 60 on a Java assignment in College. (I had to argue it up from 0.) The classpath name didn't match the filename, so the program wouldn't simply run on Linux. You had to know the correct case to make it magically work. F*ck case insensitive filesystems. F*ck case preserving filesystems. Case sensitive all the way. Case insensitive is like the parsing of broken HTML. You don't know what the hell the results are going to be because everyone interprets what should be done differently.

Re:Painful

[carton]

Apple said they plan to change that default, because yes, it is silly and not performant, in a Unicode world.

Also, NFS is usually case-sensitive, so if you copy something NFS -> HFS+ -> NFS you can end up with an unfaithful copy.

pkgsrc will not work on case-insensitive filesystems. In general, many Unix programs have trouble building there.

I go out of my way to install macs with case-sensitive filesystems, which is why the question is coming up.

It's also an indication that the code is shit, and written by Windows morons who don't give a shit about a clean mac port. The case-sensitivity problems are really easy to fix if the developer cares. That's why mac zealots who do give a shit often share this information: it's a warning sign of a bad port.

Re:Painful

[oatworm]

HFS+ didn't support case sensitivity until 10.3; even now, it's not turned on by default because there are still quite a few programs out there that count on it being only case-preserving. That said, you can create a case-sensitive HFS+ (HFSX) volume in Mac OS X if such is your pleasure.

Re:Painful

[Blakey Rat]

It's also an indication that the code is shit, and written by Windows morons who don't give a shit about a clean mac port.

I don't think that follows; by that logic, since Windows already uses the case-insensitive NTFS, it should be broken on Windows as well, right?

I'd wager the bug is in a third-party library they're using. If they know about the issue enough to write a knowledge base article, it's harder than trivial to fix and might be in someone else's code.

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Same goes for Adobe's Photoshop. Shame on them.

Re:Painful

[Pharmboy]

Why not make it an 8.3 fileystem and get it over with. :-P

Because Microsoft willl charge you $0.25 per unit sold up to a max of $250,000 per license, assuming you meant FAT's 8.3 system.

Re:Painful

[Cloud K]

Correct.

This can actually be annoying in some OSes (can't remember if it's Windows or an earlier version of OS X) when trying to change the case of a file. It chirps up "no you can't rename it to that, silly, it's the same file name!" so you have to rename it to something else, and then rename it back with the desired case.

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, the 95th percentile hardcore geek Mac user won't run into this problem.

Because they've spent the past ten years smugly turning up their noses at Windows users as nothing more than little kids playing video games, and now they're too stubborn and/or embarrassed to admit they've secretly been waiting for something like this all this time?

I keed, I keed. :-)

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

You twit, long file name patents precisely do NOT apply if you stick to 8.3.

Re:Painful

[SmittyTheBold]

Not only that, but it's not supported by Apple as of Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopard installer explicitly disallows use on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Re:Painful

[rincebrain]

You're just wrong.

NTFS itself is case-sensitive - the Windows interface on top of it is case-preserving and disallows collisions in case-insensitive cases, but NTFS itself allows multiple files which would collide in a really case-insensitive filesystem.

If you don't believe me, go mount a filesystem using NTFS-3G, make two files which would collide on a case-insensitive filesystem, and be amazed as it fails to panic.

Or, if you really want proof, go read the NTFS specifications about how it behaves in various namespaces.

Re:Painful

[BitZtream]

So you change your file names in memory to a specific case to sort by name rather than using a proper sorting algorithm? That falls under shitty programming practices. You pull that sort of shit in my development team and you'll find yourself looking for a new job.

Re:Painful

[BitZtream]

I worked around the problem by creating a disk image with an insensitive file system. Steam will now start, but running games appears to be out of the question at least until I hack together more symlinks.

So I bought Torchlight to give it a whirl since it was only $10. It crashes on start.

The crash report makes it clear the problem is simply crappy code on Valves part.

It creates its directory structure using mixed case file names, then access them via an all lowercase path.

They've intentionally screwed with the case in some parts of their code. The best part is, the parts they've screwed with are internal paths that users never see, for instance my copy of torchlight is in: /Volumes/Steam/myname/Content/Common/Torchlight/TorchlightMac.app/Contents/MacOS/TorchlightMac

Steam launches the app as ( according to the crash report ) /volumes/steam/myname/content/common/torchlight/TorchlightMac.app/Contents/MacOS/TorchlightMac

The problem is ... half the files were copied to /Volumes and the other half to /volumes/steam that it created.

This is a clear indication of absolutely shitty programming practices at Valve. They had to actively do something to the path to break it. There is no logical reason to do this except bad programming.

Dear Valve,

Learn to use some defines guys and stop converting your paths to lowercase internally or at least fucking do it consistently, if you're doing it for sorting, you are doing it wrong, fix your sorting algorithm, if you need me too I'll write you an implementation that doesn't suck seems you seem to be unable to.

Re:Painful

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe nobody has made a comment about Valve being case-insensitive clods.

Re:Painful

[williamhb]

There is no debate. Everyone that has some programming experience with unicode and multi language support knows that the *only* sane way is to have case sensitive file systems.

And on the day that most computers or other file systems are bought by programmers, maybe the market will listen to you. But today by far the majority of people buying filesystems (be they computers or USB drives) are not programmers, and just don't want to have to deal with Accounts.xls being different from accounts.xls. If that makes a very few programmers' lives very slightly harder, so be it.

Re:Painful

[johncadengo]

So I bought Torchlight to give it a whirl since it was only $10.

You didn't have to buy anything. As stated in the summary, Portal is free until May 24th.

Re:Painful

[drdaz]

Interesting... I just assumed that case-sensitive was the norm when I reinstalled Mac OS, being a Linux-type myself.

So I spent a little while formatting, and then restoring from Time Machine to a now case-insensitive OS partition. Problem solved I guess. (To anybody reading this, it isn't for the feint of heart, and doesn't 'just work' as you'd like it to. Basically you need to do a fresh install, followed by importing from a Time Machine backup).

As a programmer though, I can't help but shudder when I see stuff like this. There's just not really an excuse, and most programmers manage to not screw it up. Heck, even Microsoft doesn't have this kind of restriction on their OS X products.

Re:Painful

[brkello]

Why would it effect users? Unless the user is being a moron and naming things strange (such that they make multiple files with different capitalizations that mean different things to them) then I don't see how, as a user, you run in to any issues. From a GUI perspective, you just click on the file. From command line, you just tab auto-complete it. I think this is one of those "problem exists between keyboard and chair" sort of thing.

Re:Painful

[Chelloveck]

Not only that, but it's not supported by Apple as of Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopard installer explicitly disallows use on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Whud you talkin' 'bout, Willis? The first thing I did when I got my new MacBook was to wipe the drive, reformat to case-sensitive, and reinstall Snow Leopard. It works fine, except for a few poorly-behaved third-party apps. Like Steam, unfortunately...

Re:Painful

[flink]

I was referring to vanilla default HFS+, you are running HFSX, a variant introduced in OS X 10.3 that is optionally case sensitive. However, no Mac that I know of ships in a case-sensitive configuration, so you must have reformatted your drive at some point and specifically selected case-sensitive. You should be aware that some poorly-written Mac apps fail when used on a case-sensitive file system.

Re:Painful

[Flodis]

If you have read the 'readme' and still not found the solution to the problem because it was in the 'README' or vice versa, then you know it can be a problem. I honestly don't see how a case-sensitive file system is beneficial to users. It just gives an extra dimension to make things less clear. Anyone care to explain the benefits?

My Question

[Jaysyn]

Is will you get access to the Linux binaries if you already have the Win32 version?

Even a discount would be nice I guess.

Re:My Question

[VGPowerlord]

Is will you get access to the Linux binaries if you already have the Win32 version?

Even a discount would be nice I guess.

<sarcasm>No, they're going to let people who buy the Windows version have the Mac version for free, but not the Linux version (if they really do make one).</sarcasm>

Re:My Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they already setup a "Steamplay" system for the companies that want to sell 1 game and you can play on Mac or PC i would assume this would also apply to linux.

Re:My Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope so, I already have TF2 running under wine, but it's slightly less than optimal, not having to buy it all over again would be awesome

Re:My Question

[slimjim8094]

Yes. Just like they're doing for Mac.

Valve doesn't screw their customers.

Re:My Question

[Narishma]

Since that's how it's done in the Mac version of Steam for the games available so far, I don't see why it would be different for Linux.

Re:My Question

[hansamurai]

Mac users can download all the games they already bought on Windows for free.

Re:My Question

[Arker]

Valve doesn't screw their customers.

That certainly wasnt my experience.

Re:My Question

[slimjim8094]

Then you must be very unlucky. To be frank, I've never heard of anybody having specific issues with it (people have general issues with DRM, as do I, but nobody can ever say "this thing doesn't work and it should")

Re:My Question

[Jaysyn]

Thanks, I think. I didn't know they did that either.

Re:My Question

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be able to. If I remember correctly, if you already own the games in windows, using their "steamplay", it works on both OSs without having to rebuy anything.

Re:My Question

[BitZtream]

hahaha yea, and Microsoft writes secure code. Were you born yesterday? Have you not heard the horror stories of people losing their libraries with no recourse?

Re:My Question

[tweak13]

I have two words for you: Offline Mode

I'm not sure if you were including that as "general issues with DRM" or not, but it certainly is something that doesn't work like it should. I shouldn't have to know in advance when my internet might go out to be able to play a game.

Re:My Question

[HeronBlademaster]

No? I even got Valve to give me a refund for a defective game, despite Steam's explicit "no refunds" policy. I've been quite impressed with Valve's attitude toward their customers.

(For the curious: Commandos:BEL and Commandos:BTCoD only supported Win9x, but Steam explicitly prevents you from running anything in Win9x compatibility mode; as a result the "Save game" functionality was broken, rendering the game useless unless I wanted to play the whole thing in one sitting. Despite numerous angry phone calls, Eidos wouldn't support the game unless I ran it in Win9x compatibility mode, so I contacted Valve and they gave me a refund. The older two Commandos games disappeared from Steam shortly thereafter, only recently making a reappearance.)

Re:My Question

[EvanED]

...nobody can ever say "this thing doesn't work and it should"

I have two Portal licenses and couldn't give one away to someone I wanted to have it, even when I emailed Valve and asked them to transfer the license. I would consider that "this thing doesn't work and it should." I've also had games unplayable because my internet connection went down during updates that I didn't ask for.

Look up in the thread and you'll see several people with their accounts disabled.

Re:My Question

[VGPowerlord]

I have two Portal licenses and couldn't give one away to someone I wanted to have it

Valve only allows this for specific games and 4-packs. This is mentioned right in their FAQ. As I recall, this limits the products to:
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Left 4 Dead 4-pack*
Left 4 Dead 2 4-pack*
Borderlands 4-pack*

*Only applies to 3 of the 4, the fourth you're stuck with.
** It's mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Portal is free right now anyway.

Re:My Question

[f3rret]

Valve doesn't screw their customers.

ALL companies screw their customers, the question is whether or not they do it intentionally.

Re:My Question

[mdm-adph]

Circumstantial experience is circumstantial, whaddayouknow.

Re:My Question

[EvanED]

Valve only allows this for specific games and 4-packs. This is mentioned right in their FAQ.

So I said "Steam sucks in this way" and your response is "yeah, but Valve says they suck in this way so it's okay"?

Re:My Question

[VGPowerlord]

Valve only allows this for specific games and 4-packs. This is mentioned right in their FAQ.

So I said "Steam sucks in this way" and your response is "yeah, but Valve says they suck in this way so it's okay"?

This was well publicized around the time that Orange Box came out. In other words, you should have known well in advance that they wouldn't do it, so I don't know what you're complaining about.

Re:My Question

[EvanED]

I'm complaining about it because it's is a real problem with Steam-like digital distribution with DRM.

slimjim8094 said he never heard of anyone having a specific problem with the DRM. I posted a problem I've had with the DRM. Just because I know it was a problem when I made the purchase doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

Re:My Question

[Arker]

Steam explicitly prevents you from running anything in Win9x compatibility mode

The fact that they can even think about imposing such control over your computer should tell you something.

Re:My Question

[Arker]

To be frank, I've never heard of anybody having specific issues with it (people have general issues with DRM, as do I, but nobody can ever say "this thing doesn't work and it should")

Game I bought and paid for (multiple copies of, in fact) before they came up with 'steam' suddenly quit working without it. That is a clear case of 'this thing doesnt work and it should.' They would not refund my purchases or offer any sort of remedy that didnt involve giving control of my computer to them by installing this steam thing. They will never get another penny from me.

Re:My Question

[HeronBlademaster]

It's because some of Steam's stuff simply doesn't work in those modes.

Re:My Question

[HeronBlademaster]

Oh, and in case you're not clear on what I meant, Steam doesn't prevent you from running non-Steam stuff in Win9x compatibility mode, only Steam games.

Re:My Question

[Arker]

So what?

So *some* of their stuff doesnt work in compatibility mode, therefore they prevent you from running any of them that way?

Regardless, you are missing my point. The fact that they *can* do this indicates their software is malware to begin with.

Re:My Question

[HeronBlademaster]

I don't mean some of Valve's games, I mean Steam itself doesn't work under Win9x.

If your product didn't function in compatibility mode in crash-inducing ways, wouldn't you prevent it from running in such modes?

Re:My Question

[Arker]

Referring back to your first post:

"(For the curious: Commandos:BEL and Commandos:BTCoD only supported Win9x, but Steam explicitly prevents you from running anything in Win9x compatibility mode; as a result the "Save game" functionality was broken,"

Re:My Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I posted a problem I've had with the DRM. Just because I know it was a problem when I made the purchase doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

No, what you posted was your cool story bro of you going well out of your way and disregarding all warnings to MAKE a problem for yourself with Steam's DRM. That is to say, you took the gun classes, knew what you were doing with the gun, cleaned the gun, loaded the gun, removed the safety, carefully aimed at your foot, pulled the trigger, and then started complaining about the gun manufacturer because you shot yourself in the foot.

Re:My Question

[HeronBlademaster]

Steam itself breaks if you try to run it in Win9x compatibility mode. If Steam launches a game, the game runs in the same compatibility mode as Steam. Therefore, if a game requires Win9x compatibility mode, Steam is not compatible with that game.

I fail to see how this is Steam's fault, and I certainly don't see how this somehow makes Steam "malware".

Re:My Question

[EvanED]

That is to say, you took the gun classes, knew what you were doing with the gun, cleaned the gun, loaded the gun, removed the safety, carefully aimed at your foot, pulled the trigger, and then started complaining about the gun manufacturer because you shot yourself in the foot.

That would only be an apt analogy if the only way to buy the gun involved said process. If I could go out to Best Buy and pick up a copy of Portal that didn't have the license transfer problem, but I choose to get it on Steam anyway, then it would be my problem. As it is, the only way to get Portal is through Steam with the associated restrictions, and IMO that is clearly Steam's problem.

Re:My Question

[Rockoon]

You have failed to the knowledge gambit.

Any programmer worth his salt will tell you that you are fucking stupid to suggest that software should *support* being run with arbitrary compatibility shims, which intentionally cause non-standard behavior that last seen over 10 years ago, between it and the OS.

Some complex programs require compatibility shims. Some complex programs do not. Some morons see evil everywhere, even when they have no fucking idea what they are talking about.

Steam isnt the problem here. That game that requires that the OS emulate bugs from over a decade ago is the problem here.

Re:My Question

[Arker]

Umm no.

He had two programs (games, which he had bought) which *required* that compatibility shim to run.

He had a third program (steam) which *prevented* him from running those programs, which he owned, in the compatibility mode they required, on his own machine.

The problem here (assuming what he wrote is accurate) is that the third program has effectively denied him control of his own machine.

Re:My Question

[Rockoon]

He had a third program (steam) which *prevented* him from running those programs, which he owned, in the compatibility mode they required, on his own machine.

Wrong.

Steam simply should not have been selling those games, and low and behold when informed of the problem, they removed the games from sale.. AND REFUNDED HIS MONEY. He did not own the games after all.

Were you considered a "slow" child in school?

Re:My Question

[BitZtream]

... Read the rest of this thread ... or every other thread on slashdot about Steam ... or do a simple google search ... its rather well known by everyone not licking Gabe's balls. They know it too, but they're too busy to speak and they mumble when they try.

Questions without answers

[Anonymous Coward]

But when there's a totally un-DRMed alternative available, why would anyone chose Steam over that?

We... we don't know, AC.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[space_jake]

Not everyone has heard of World of Goo, they might browse the Steam library for an impulse buy.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Tei]

I give you some reasons:
  - You already trust the Steam shop. This is important for people nervaous about his credit card details
  - You have a centralized location to re-download. If you move to another computer (or OS), you just click to download again
  - If you have savegames on your Mac, Netbook, PC, ..these savegames follow you around. You can start playing on the netbook, continue on the Mac and finish on the PC.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Then hack away captain bringdown. Show us your stuff and how awsum yous ares

MS Buyout

[greenskyx]

Looks like Valve is trying to get bought out by Microsoft.

Re:MS Buyout

[elFarto the 2nd]

Doubt that'll happen. Gabe Newell left Microsoft to start Valve.

Re:MS Buyout

[Anonymous Coward]

Link?

Re:MS Buyout

[MachineShedFred]

Or, according to the interview with Gabe Newell available on Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

RPS: I have a friend (an idiot) who is determined that in six months Valve will be owned by either Microsoft or EA

Gabe: Tell him that I’m not interested in buying either one of them.

Asked and answered.

Wolf! wolf! wolf!

[Kjella]

Cries phoronix again. It's hardly the first time they've claimed steam is coming to Linux based on some reused cross-platform tools or scripts. There's no official confirmation, there's no certainty that there is a complete Linux version and even if there were it's no certainty that they see a business case for it. For example Telltale recently made Mac versions of their games but there's no Linux version in sight...

Re:Wolf! wolf! wolf!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you didn't read what phoronix wrote.

Re:Wolf! wolf! wolf!

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA is not from phoronix, they are mentioned as an afterthought.

Re:Wolf! wolf! wolf!

[danieltdp]

Quoting TFA (emphasis mine):

For all those doubting our reports that Source/Steam would be coming to Linux, you can find confirmation in the UK's Telegraph and other news sites. An announcement from Valve itself is imminent.

So, it's not official

Re:Wolf! wolf! wolf!

[Ant P.]

I wonder if Valve is just saying this to get Larabel to stop spamming their inbox every 2 hours asking when it's being released. Phoronix is nothing but a troll with a website looking for new ways to incite people into exposing themselves to banner ads.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Rockoon]

Steam Achievements?

Re:DRM

[amicusNYCL]

What exactly does Steam have to apologize for? Steam is a practical, high-quality, professional distribution service and Valve is a company committed to its customers. What is there to apologize for? When games were requiring the CD to be in the drive did that also just positively infuriate you? What about when you installed Ultima 7 and had to read off map coordinates, were you going around looking for the map coordinate apologists?

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

The Steam Version doesn't have any DRM either.

Re:Time to see what mainstream games do for Mac/Li

[VGPowerlord]

Well, I saw farther up that Portal is free right now, so why not give it a try?

Granted, anything with a newer version of the engine might have problems (Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and to a certain extent Team Fortress 2 (changes were backported from L4D).

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some of us don't wear tinfoil hats all the time?

and my big question is

[RobertLTux]

if you have several games on the windows platform will they flip you a pass to the linux versions??

(game publishers dream: having somebody "need" to buy 3 copies of a game (Win/Lin/Mac))

Re:and my big question is

[ninjacheeseburger]

The answer is yes amazingly. If you own the game you can play it on any platform that supports it.

Re:and my big question is

[BitZtream]

Yes, there are games tagged in the system as being playable on multiple platforms, they are marked with an icon so you know they are available on multiple platforms and playable across any of them when you buy them.

This I'm sure will change after Mac and Linux people buy into it and they can start ripping us off for multiple copies again.

Re:and my big question is

[Anonymous Coward]

Games purchased through Steam are usable on any machine logged in on the same Steam account. This means that if you purchase, say, Team Fortress 2 today for Windows, it is usable on Mac and Linux whenever Valve releases them for the platform.

Re:and my big question is

[Piata]

According to shacknews:

"Through "Steam Play", the Mac client will allow players who have already purchased compatible products in the Windows version to re-download the Mac versions at no cost, allowing them to continue to play the game on the other platform. The Steam Cloud will be cross-platform compatible. Multiplayer games are also cross-compatible, allowing Windows and Mac players to play with each other."

Re:and my big question is

[ensignyu]

Right now, all the games that support both Mac and Windows are marked as "SteamPlay" meaning you only have to buy one copy of the game to play it on all platforms. I don't know if that's guaranteed if we'll start seeing exceptions in the future.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[E1ven]

I GREATLY prefer to buy games through Steam, and will often pay a premium to do so. It gives me the convenience of being able to download it on any PC I go to; It's in my list, along with every other game.
I don't need to store the DMG or ISO, and go through a manual install process. It's all there, in one place, easy as pie, and ready to move across systems.

Re:DRM

[brkello]

He has heard of somewhere at some time in history someone had trouble with Steam. This has turned in to a personal experience for him and will fight against the evil of Steam no matter in what form. It doesn't matter what anyone says to defend Steam, he comes here because he knows that when he bashes DRM he is part of the "cool" crowd and gains a bunch of karma. Anyone who disagrees is instantly labeled an apologist and all their arguments are rendered moot. It is the slightly more mature form of the "lalala sticking fingers in ears" form of debate.

TF2 is NOT available today

[slimjim8094]

The summary is wrong. Team Fortress 2 will NOT be available today. It'll most likely be out next Wednesday.

In fact, it doesn't even show up in the list of owned games.

Re:TF2 is NOT available today

[Anonymous Coward]

It's available right now.

Re:TF2 is NOT available today

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the editor stuff? Will mapping be possible on Mac any time soon?

Re:TF2 is NOT available today

[slimjim8094]

If you're in the beta, which is still ongoing. It's not out now.

Re:TF2 is NOT available today

[slimjim8094]

Yes.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

In related Steam/DRM news: Rockstar used a cracked version of Max Payne 2 for steam retail.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[brkello]

Because many of their other games are through Steam. So if they get a new system all their games will be on Steam and readily available to download?

I can't help but to notice that its Phoronix again

[jandrese]

Despite the odd use of the word "official" in the title, this is very much a "read strings in the binary and saw the word 'Linux'" type release. It just means that Valve has been messing around with it, and certainly does not mean that there has been any official announcement from anybody yet. I would like to get my hopes up, but this is pretty much the same story they posted 2 years ago, and I can't help but to notice that nothing materialized from Valve on the Linux front in that time.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give:

[OldAndInTheWay]

SLASHDOTTED!

Steam. Isn't that a "Walled Garden"?

[BlueBoxSW.com]

Yes, I know I'm being snarky.

Re:Steam. Isn't that a "Walled Garden"?

[geekoid]

then punctuate it!

A good thing...

[drc003]

...in my opinion. It will be nice to see Linux get support for top gaming titles. Not only that but in some cases without having to wait weeks or months after the titles initial release. No matter what your thoughts are on Valve and/or Steam I at least think they deserve praise for giving some love to the Linux community.

Client = games?

[Itninja]

Does having a functioning Steam client of a Mac mean all the games will run a Mac or Linux? I found that, even with Windows 7, several games just would not run (even though I more than met the SR's). I like the casual games and the little ones like Build-A-Lot run for a second and then crash. Best $1.99 I ever spent?

Re:Client = games?

[HeronBlademaster]

Not all games, no, just the games whose developers have ported to OSX. I think there are 57 games on the OSX-supported list right now.

Re:I can't help but to notice that its Phoronix ag

[spikeb]

read one of the articles linked by phoronix: it was confirmed by the telegraph UK http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7715209/Steam-for-Mac-goes-live.html

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[BitZtream]

WHY THE HELL DO EDITORS APPROVE POSTS LIKE THIS WITHOUT A GOD DAMN URL TO THE IMPORTANT BITS.

For fucks sake, it takes your users to actually post the important parts of the story slashdot, come on.

User driven content is one thing, slashvertising for some other site that doesn't even have the information your users care about is just retarded.

Thank you FooAtWFU for providing the one bit of information I actually cared about (And joe_bruin below for the free portal linkage)

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[zoloto]

If a game can be purchased without DRM and later added to steam via "add non-steam games" - I'll do that. In many cases, the steam overlay is available and - incidentally - extremely useful to have =) Excellent point.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed... what has Linux inovated in the consumer space lately? It sure hasn't been any 'store front' type applications :) They always just "replace" what's available elsewhere in many instances.

Most still can't even agree on their package format yet (i kidd... i kid... only slightly)

Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesystems?

[BitZtream]

Kick ass ... steam for OS X ... and it won't run on a case-sensitive file system ... fucking brilliant guys, good job.

Probably better this way, less of your infected DRM on my machine. Sometimes its good that you do such retarded things that I get tripped up and don't make my own retard moves.

Going to need more than one source

[Anonymous Coward]

Phoronix is down right now so I can't see how they're justifying this claim, but they've been "speculating" that the Source engine has been running on Linux for ages with zero concrete evidence. Until Valve announces Steam for Linux, it doesn't exist and Phoronix are just pulling this out of their ass.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

same here. i only buy games on steam now - mainly because i can get them "NOW", and it's a superb source of indie games - that which i mostlye play these days... gogo defense grid & sol survivor!
  I also love the mix of high-end, and family/casual stuff.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Sir_Lewk]

I purchased the iD pack on steam and currently play the games I got from it on Linux. Just because you buy it from steam doesn't mean the DRM aspects are going to be used.

BOO!

[cadeon]

No old school Half Life or Counter-Strike. I hope they get brought over, I like my CS 1.6

Re:BOO!

[BassMan449]

I imagine they will be brought over as I believe they already support OpenGL anyway. I know Day of Defeat does so I would imagine porting them would be far simpler than porting the entire Source engine. They probably did Source first because that is their big selling item right now.

Re:BOO!

[VGPowerlord]

Valve hasn't said whether HL1 (or GoldSrc) games will be brought over, only that Source games will be.

Having said that, what's wrong with Counter-Strike: Source? I hear Valve is making some changes to it this month, which is currently in Beta-testing. Not bad considering that the Source port is something like 6 years old.

No GMA x3100 support

[Anonymous Coward]

I know GMA x3100 isn't supported but I'm bummed out about that. I know, I know - upgrade.

Buy Once, Play On Anything

[wkurzius]

I was very pleased to find that the copy of Torchlight I bought to play on Windows is available to me on OS X for no extra coin.

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[BitZtream]

http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/235/steamsucks.png

Here's my take:

[metamatic]

1. Valve's DRM isn't horribly invasive or system-destroying.

2. They do the right thing by having cheap prices on downloadable games--including $2.99 special offers.

3. They are now doing the right thing by supporting Mac and Linux, and by allowing your existing licenses to work with any platform. This is really key, because it means that people who have a PC just for gaming and a Mac or Linux box for everything else will be encouraged to switch to Mac or Linux entirely and drop Windows. If you had to re-buy all your games, that wouldn't happen.

4. If we all support Valve, it'll show that gaming on Mac and Linux can be viable, and maybe help break the stranglehold Microsoft has on PC gaming.

So I already spent $10 with them, and plan to support them more. Once Mac and Linux gaming takes off again, then we can start supporting people who offer DRM-free games.

Re:Here's my take:

[Jamu]

2. They do the right thing by having cheap prices on downloadable games--including $2.99 special offers.

Unfortunately the games that aren't on special offer are significantly more expensive than they are in online shops and even in highstreet stores. The last couple of games I've bought I've not gotten on Steam because of the £10 or so I've saved by getting it from Amazon. Buying the game from a supermarket, like Asda (Walmart), would also have been cheaper. Valve need to look at setting their prices at a competitive level.

Re:Here's my take:

[dangitman]

With this and the Humbe Indie Bundle, could it be? 2010: The Year of Cross-Platform Gaming on The Desktop!

This is really key, because it means that people who have a PC just for gaming and a Mac or Linux box for everything else will be encouraged to switch to Mac or Linux entirely and drop Windows. If you had to re-buy all your games, that wouldn't happen.

Seriously, this is spot-on. I like to support gaming on the Mac, but I just got sick of paying the inflated prices for old games. Even an old title that would be in the $5 bargain bin for Windows, would sell at full-price for the Mac. So, I've mostly been playing PS3 games and downloadable indie games for the Mac. The situation with games on disc for Mac is ridiculous, with the exception of X-Plane, which isn't really a game.

Being able to easily migrate is awesome - and it means I might one day be able to easily move to Linux if/when it has enough applications to meet my professional needs, and bring my games with me.

Re:Here's my take:

[dangitman]

The last couple of games I've bought I've not gotten on Steam because of the £10 or so I've saved by getting it from Amazon. Buying the game from a supermarket, like Asda (Walmart), would also have been cheaper.

Yeah, but you only get it for one platform, which is annoying if you ever want to switch. And if you lose the disc, your game is gone. With Steam, you can re-download at any time. You can play it on the other side of the world even if you forget to bring the disc with you.

Re:Here's my take:

[Anonymous Coward]

Once Mac and Linux gaming takes off again, then we can start supporting people who offer DRM-free games.

Again? MacOS classic was a target for a while, when IBM-PCs hadn't completely obliterated everything else, MacOS X has never had many games at all, and I don't think you can say two incompatible systems with completely different architectures are the same thing. As for Linux... well I hope you are joking.

Re:Here's my take:

[BloodyIron]

Running Windows on a computer does not make it a PC. Having the computer in your posession for personal use, as opposed to business use, makes it personal. That's why Macs are also PCs. So are computers with Linux/BSD/OS2/etc installed.

I'd like to see it on Linux.

[Beelzebud]

However, Valve has not "confirmed" anything in regards to the Linux client. Phoronix has been talking about a Linux client for a good 6 years now, and just because they found evidence of an internal client at Valve, it is not in any way "confirmation" of a public Linux client. Let's not forget that Blizzard has had an internal WoW client they've used since the game was in BETA, but they've never made plans to release it officially.

I'd love to see it, but Valve has not confirmed anything in regards to Linux.

Re:I'd like to see it on Linux.

[Kev Vance]

It wasn't Phoronix who got the confirmation from Valve, it was telegraph.co.uk.

Re:I'd like to see it on Linux.

[Beelzebud]

I simply don't think that is confirmation. It's one sentence, as a throw-away line at the end of the article, and they don't even credit anyone as telling them that. I"m still waiting to hear this from Valve. I really don't think the news of a Linux client will spread via anonymous source.

Steam on Linux, for how many games?

[Danathar]

I know there is more than I think there is, but exactly how many games will be available via Steam on Linux? 2? 3?

Re:Steam on Linux, for how many games?

[BitZtream]

None, unless you have a case-insensitive file system!

Team Fortress 2 is not yet available for the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite what the story on the front page here at Slashdot says, Team Fortress 2 is not yet available for the Mac.

: (

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[trapnest]

Doesn't load :(

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[PhrstBrn]

Steam is DRM. It may not be very intrusive for most people, but it's still DRM. I use Steam, I'm happy with the service and Valve, but I know it's DRM and what I'm getting into.

Valve has said *nothing* about linux

[BrianRoach]

The Telegraph in the UK reports that there is a Linux version confirmed ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7715209/Steam-for-Mac-goes-live.html ) .... They cite no source for that information, and Valve hasn't said anything about it. Every other blog / "News" site is parroting their report.

Re:Valve has said *nothing* about linux

[interval1066]

"Every other blog / "News" site is parroting their report."

Big deal, the supposed "real" news outlets parrot what others say all the time whether its accurate or or not. Just look at how they regurgitate the made up figures regarding pirating of digital media the big labels trot out for them. Still, if true, this is huge news for the Linux community. It would be so great for Valve to do this. I'm a fan of Steam, I really like the service. Having it run on Linux would remove the last reason I have any Windows running on any of my rigs at all.

Re:Valve has said *nothing* about linux

[BrianRoach]

I agree - I'm a big Steam fan as well. Gaming is the only reason I have Windows, and Steam on Linux would take a big swipe at that. As for the parroting ... I don't care that everybody does it, but was just pointing out that everyone is simply regurgitating the original, unsubstantiated claim.

It's just that the Great Linux Steam Hope has been around for 2 years now. I'm not saying they'll never do it ... I'm just not holding my breath until they announce they're doing it.

Case-insensitive?

[Movi]

Just tried running it. It requires the partition be case-insensitive! What is this valve? 2004?

Re:Case-insensitive?

[ekgringo]

Case-sensitive? That's so 1984. What, do you really have a need for separate bin biN bIn bIN Bin BiN BIn and BIN directories?

What GMA stands for

[tepples]

I hope my Macbook's GMA950 can run some games

If your Intel GMA's model number starts with a 9, expect its performance to live up to its name: "Graphics My Ass". GMA 900 and GMA 950 are roughly comparable to Voodoo3 era video cards, which lack even fixed-function vertex processing.

(any games!)

In a two-dimensional video game, each game object is represented as one textured rectangle. This uses far fewer vertices than the full mesh of an object in a 3D game and still flies on machines with software T&L. An Intel Mac, even one with a GMA 950, shouldn't have any problem running 2D games.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[jo_ham]

They didn't include it because now everyone just clicked on that link. The server just melted.

The free version of Portal is the very first thing shown to you after you install the Mac Steam client, which you need to have running to make use of that page.

Choice between Steam and a console version

[tepples]

I can understand the argument of, "Well, game XYZ is only available through stream", even though I wouldn't do it myself.

What would you choose if a game is available on Steam (which includes digital restrictions management) or on Wii Shop (which includes even harsher digital restrictions management)?

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[HeronBlademaster]

Kick ass ... steam for OS X ... and it won't run on a case-sensitive file system ... fucking brilliant guys, good job.

What's the problem? Case-insensitive is the default in both OSX and Windows; it's silly to get mad at them for not supporting edge cases.

At any rate, one would assume they'll resolve that issue before they release a Linux client, so just wait a few months if it's that important to you.

AppleScript

[tepples]

I can't wait to see the mac users' faces when they are told to enter something in the console

How about "Cool; this is just like AppleScript"?

Remember to convert for Valve Time

[Captain Spam]

Several publications are also reporting that a Linux version of Steam has been confirmed, and is expected within the next few months.

So, assuming this is legit, using my handy-dandy Valve Time Conversion Dartboard, we can expect a Linux Steam client and Source Engine port... oh... sometime between March of next year and August of 2015. Still, a better time frame than we had before, and better than we usually get from Valve!

FUSE workaround?

[mikeee]

So, it's a Linux port that will only be usable by people who dual-boot? Good grief.

I bet you could hack together a workaround without massive effort; write a case-desensitizer FUSE filesystem, and have it 'remount' a case-insensitive view of an existing filesystem in an alternate path.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[pyster]

You will be able to spot the mac users a month from know as they all scream the cake is a lie randomly.

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[BitZtream]

It indicates very very low quality of code. It takes effort or sloppiness to cause your applications to have problems with case sensitive file systems.

I develop apps for FreeBSD, Windows and OSX, I have never in my life had to do anything special to deal with FBSD or my case sensitive OSX install.

There are 2 ways this happens. You didn't use defines or constants or environment variables, so you hard coded file names in multiple places in your code using different case, causing the software to look for two different files ... OR ...

You did something even more insanely screwy that I can't even come up with to intentionally make your app case insensitive.

Apple has a series of scripts and utilities to detect the issues and pinpoint them so you can fix them. Its really not difficult. It shows just how bad their software/developers are, its not like it would take them more than a day to fix their entire collection of software if you threw 3 or 4 people at it.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

Most mac owners would have world of Goo from last years MacHeist bundle. So that is the only reason I can think for not buying it in on Steam.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[supersloshy]

- You have a centralized location to re-download. If you move to another computer (or OS), you just click to download again

Same for World of Goo. All you have to do is go to your personal download link, pick your platform/installation method, and download it.

- If you have savegames on your Mac, Netbook, PC, ..these savegames follow you around. You can start playing on the netbook, continue on the Mac and finish on the PC.

It's pretty easy to synchronize files between computers using symbolic links. For example, I copied my data for World of Goo, Aquaria, Pidgin, and other games/programs to Dropbox, made symbolic links on each computer connected to the account, and it acts like the settings are right where they should be.

I still think buying it DRM-free is much better than buying it on Steam. Your money goes directly to the developers this way (well, some goes to PayPal too but not as much as Steam takes).

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[DavidTC]

Yup.

It claims 'If you download the Mac version, you get the PC version free'.

But it is lying. Even if you have just a PC, you can go in and get a free license. (Which makes sense, as all licenses are apparently for both.) Go to the Steam store start page, follow the link (Which is the link above) on the side, one more click, and, tada, free Portal.

It took me two tries, though, the first time the page timed out. This deal is good to the 24th, though, so if you can't get in today don't fret.

I'm not even going to bother trying to download it yet, because I assume that once I have a 'free license', as long as Stream is concerned, I own the game and can download it later.

Incidentally, I wasn't aware until just now that I could use the Steam store when not in Steam. (I've only been using Steam for a few months.) Thanks for the link.

How to Troll a Microsoft Fanboy

[twoallbeefpatties]

Imply that this means that the Mac is now just as serious a gaming platform as Windows is. :D (I've already gotten a couple of people with Apple Derangement Syndrome pissed off at me for that one.)

Re:How to Troll a Microsoft Fanboy

[mqduck]

What the heck does "just as serious a gaming platform" mean? The MacOS certainly isn't as *good* a gaming platform, due to the huge number of games not available for it. That's just the objective fact of the matter.

Re:How to Troll a Microsoft Fanboy

[twoallbeefpatties]

What the heck does "just as serious a gaming platform" mean?

That's exactly why it's the right term for trolling people. :D

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

And as your OS of choice continues to languish in the 1% market share range, and your community is wondering why nobody actually wants to use your rubbish, the rest of us will go off and do something more useful (and fun) then typing into a terminal all day.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[X0563511]

  - If you have savegames on your Mac, Netbook, PC, ..these savegames follow you around. You can start playing on the netbook, continue on the Mac and finish on the PC.

Only if the game supports the Steam Cloud. I don't know how common third-party games are with this, I have not personally seen this used outside of a Valve game. Most will stick that stuff in your profile directory somewhere. ('my documents' or whatever).

I for one support our new linux Steam overlords

[The_Dougster]

I suppose I'm a linux game old-timer. Back in the late 90s I had custom compiled Mesa for accelerated OpenGL with my most excellent Voodoo2 board. It was so big we called them graphics boards, not cards. It weighed about 5 pounds, was a full length card, and had every square centimeter covered with chips. But, my did it run Quake and Quake2 in full 3D glory. Truly I was the envy of my nerdish college neighbors who had not yet achieved Linux Wizard Level Zero, as I had done.

Really though, in my experience, which is rather quite enormous, it is generally possible to get most Windows® games to run mostly allright in linux operating systems through a huge amount of fiddling, tweaking, screwing around, and otherwise editing various config files and recompiling things with different options selected. The problem arises in that usually one does "some stuff" and eventually "it works." Unfortunately, you probably changed 20 things in between when it didn't work and when it did, and heaven only knows which one of those 20 things was the real thing that made it work.

Compounding the issue, is that some games seem to run with mutually exclusive settings to other games. In this case you find yourself running distinct instances of the X-Window System with specific config files, say to have 16-bit color at a certain special resolution, and a rather large number of configuration files special to a particular game of interest. Naturally, the more games like this that you have, the more the overall complexity is multiplied.

It really wouldn't take a lot to make a consistent platform which is capable of running all of these diverse applications, and Steam is definately something to think about. There was a lot of grumbling and whatnot when it was new, but personally I like the ability to purchase a game on Steam, sign in with my username and password, and have it download the content to whatever computer I am signed on at and magically make it work without having to search through boxes of cdroms and hope that the cd-key is on a sticker in the case and that the cdrom is still readable. Just log in, install content, and play... no optical drive required. If they can get this stuff working on a linux OS, and it really doesn't seem that far-fetched what with the excellent state of Wine these days, then hats off to Valve!

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about World of Goo, but when I bought Portal at Target specifically because I did not want to download it through Steam, I was NOT happy to get home and discover I still had to install Steam if I wanted to play my game - a fact mentioned nowhere on the box, I might add.

roll on Linux

[DaveGod]

I hope they repeat the free Portal with the Linux client. I've gotten my computer-illiterate flatmates ("roomies" or whatever) using Ubuntu (utterly painless except for iTunes) and Portal could enable the next step - from the Facebook "games" they're mostly bored of to real ones.

P.S. Mac users who have ignored games up to now: most of the titles in the /. post are pretty much dead now really, but:
- Portal is arguably the most fun little 1 player game available, and is strongly recommended whether free or not;
- HL2 is arguably the highest quality full-size 1 player game available, a little dated but still well worth it;
- TF2 is arguably the most fun multiplayer game that still has lots (and lots!) of full servers to play on, so many there are plenty of servers suitable for new players.
(well, of the first-person type games anyway, which tend to be the most popular)

Re:roll on Linux

[arb phd slp]

I was all ready to buy Portal with real money, but if they want to give it to me for free, so much the better.

I am going to n00b up TF2 when it comes out until I get some practice in. My apologies to my teammates in advance.

If you don't want to wait until the Linux client comes out, borrow somebody's computer, make yourself a Steam account, and "buy" the free Portal. Then use that same account on your Linux machine and redownload it.

Re:roll on Linux

[rwa2]

I got Portal by accident along with "The Orange Box" way back when. Had no idea how awesome it was. But, yeah, I basically lived http://xkcd.com/606/

I could never quite get into TF2, however, even though I really enjoyed similar games such as Tribes II (bought the Linux version, no less; you can get the WInders version for free nowadays) and Tribes III, UT2004 on Linux, and Wolfenstein ET on Linux, Tremulous on Linux, etc. etc.

However, I've been pretty hooked on L4D 1&2 lately, even though I'd never been into zombie mania... Valve did a pretty neat job with the cooperative, cinematic, and asymmetric gameplay. Would love to see those properties come to Linux so I could enjoy it at higher resolutions without having to upgrade my old Windows gaming rig.

Great

[geekoid]

now you can pay and download games for a platform they can't play on from the convienance of your own home~

For those about to pound the meat hooks on to there key board in the hopes of creating some sort of cojemt tiraid agains this post, please refer to the punctuation at the end of the sentence.

If that isn't good enough,maybe a picture would help:

http://tinyurl.com/dhh3nu

lets buy tons of games!

[AlgorithMan]

I think we all should buy a hell of a lot of games... just to show that linux is a damn good marketplace for games... this would hopefully lead to more developers releasing for linux which would take away the last argument for windows...

Re:lets buy tons of games!

[geekoid]

That would lead to a false sense of demand and lead to the fail;ure of said company.

And it wouldn't be the first time.

What Steam should due is form there own Distro.

The Games distro.charge 40 bucks and have it come with a couple of games pre-installed.

Naturally the Fork code would also be available for download, without the games.

They should do that right after the have a steam server I can put on a machine so I don't need to have an account for everyone n the house.

Re:lets buy tons of games!

[AlgorithMan]

Game-Availability would lead to more mainstream acceptance and this would create the demand...

Re:lets buy tons of games!

[discord5]

What Steam should due is form there own Distro.

Yes, because we've all been waiting for yet another linux distro. There's plenty of decent linux distros around, and I'd prefer not to have to boot into Streamux to play a videogame. I might as well stick to gaming on windows then.

Re:lets buy tons of games!

[waveclaw]

It is one thing to release for Linux, a completely different thing to support it.

I think we all should buy a hell of a lot of games... just to show that linux is a damn good marketplace for games...

Surprisingly, a lack of this is the reason CCP dropped their evil-Cedega-non-native-client-under the-covers Linux version of Eve-Online. They claimed the "market wasn't growing fast enough." And here people figured an MMO that requires some thought and skill to play would do well with the Linux community. Queue the 'I play nethack in vt100 at 80x25 just fine' comments.

How long before Valve does this for Steam? How many people have to buy or use Steam on Linux for the CFO not to walk in and pull the plug for a nice 'cost savings bonus'?

Personally this means I get access to a large already-bought back catalog of Source games. I just hope this means the Steam 3rd party and indie developers see this as a chance to rake in a little money. And if any Valve developers are reading, I'd just be happy if a native Steam client could launch Mass Effect under wine. (Bioware -> EA where apparently PC -> Windows.)

Re:lets buy tons of games!

[pandrijeczko]

I am very much looking forward to Steam on Linux provided that Valve don't expect me to re-purchase all the games I have on Windows as Linux versions - free would be best but a heavy discount (to cover the costs of porting to Linux) would be acceptable.

Re:lets buy tons of games!

[AlgorithMan]

I would pay extra for the ability to use the games I own on linux, but I've read somewhere here that this won't cost extra. Valve FTW!

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Richy_T]

This is the truth.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Richy_T]

They'll already be used to assuming the party escort submission position though.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Richy_T]

I'd suspect that the free license you got is just a short term one and if you buy the Mac version (possibly after trying it out on a free license?) you get a permanent PC one.

Root?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the linux client need root access to install?

to bad apple does not have good gameing systems!

[Joe The Dragon]

to bad apple does not have good gameing systems!

A $800 mini desktop with on board video and a old core 2 is not one.

same thing for a $1200 aio with core 2 and on board video but for about $300 more you can get 4670 graphics with 256MB.

or for $2500 NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB

Impact on Wine

[Richy_T]

Does this give any kind of hint that it might be a good idea to start thinking about concentrating less on Wine and maybe work on something to let Mac software run on Linux? Instead of chasing the complex, ever changing and broken win32 API, work on creating a unified *nix front against the beast of Redmond? They could even call it "Mine".

I'm sure someone is about to tell me something like this is in the works already. I welcome the information. :)

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[smaddox]

Is anyone else not able to get it to work? I installed steam, but cannot figure out how to install portal.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give:

[Shikaku]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/400

Or you can just activate it directly from the store.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gPWjiWX-Ps#t=4m12s

Ellis sums up my feelings about the current news very well by the way.

Re:to bad apple does not have good gameing systems

[geekoid]

yeah, that would explain why they only work fine on bootstrapped machines~

too late =(

[Anonymous Coward]

Gah! I should of held-off on buying windows 7...
Then again, linux + steam doesn't necessarily mean SCII ^^;

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[MachineShedFred]

So you went out of your way to format your Mac with a case-sensitive file system, and this is Valve's problem... how?

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[geekoid]

" It takes effort or sloppiness to cause your applications to have problems with case sensitive file systems."

Most likely that didn't have a programing guideline on casing.

Not just the programming team, but it would need to apply to all testing and any API that allow third party apps to work with it.

This applies to almost all software written in windows.

They need to support the people running servers and their customizations.

I suppose you could create a Linux only version and have anyone with customization rewrite everything...but that's a pretty terrible thing to do to your customers, and isn't likely to result in any Linux sales.

That said, I think they are starting to enforce case sensitivity in the serve, just a tine bit at a time. That would explain some of the odd breaks in server customization.

Have you ever worked on a product with a large team? a product that will be tied into by an known number of third party developers?

You are either inexperienced or a crappy programmers.

Oh, and it's going in an environment where you can NOT gaurantee the casing in the environment itself.

You must plan for this ahead of time, or completely developed in in a non case sensitive OS; which would be stupid for a game that 99% of the users will be on windows.

You clearly don't understand complex wide distributed systems.

Re:DRM

[EvanED]

When games were requiring the CD to be in the drive did that also just positively infuriate you?

Steam is better than some of the other DRM things, like the dreadful stuff EA had on a few titles that limits the number of installations, or the whatever it is that installs a CD driver. That said... IMO "requiring the CD to be in the drive" is a far superior DRM mechanism than Steam is. Not even a question.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

This is important for people nervaous about his credit card details

Good heavens! Where on earth did you find an "a" in the word "nervous"? It's not even pronounced anything like that! The "a" key on the keyboard isn't even close to "v" or "o"!

(Note: If you try to tell me you're using a DVORAK keyboard, well, frankly, you're not making a good case for it)

Ok

[tthomas48]

I think we might actually be able to finally ask - "Year of the Linux Desktop"? What fantastic news. First the humble indie game bundle, next Steam!

False Information in Article

[Marshillboy]

Team Fortress 2 was not launched for the Mac client today, it will be launched a subsequent Wednesday following

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[Anonymous Coward]

Kick ass ... steam for OS X ... and it won't run on a case-sensitive file system ... fucking brilliant guys, good job.

I don't know why people are making such a big issue of this, there is a really easy fix. For every file with n alphabetic characters, just 2^n - 1 symlinks, and you'll be up and ready in no time.

FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

You incorrectly punctuated your first statement (it is an interrogative statement, so it should end with a question mark.).

Also, the word "fuck" should be possessive in the phrase "for fuck's sake."

You should not capitalize the first word in a parenthetical phrase.

Lastly, your last sentence needs a period at the end.

I'm just trying to be helpful. Really! Grammar Nazis are your friends!

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM came to Linux a long time ago with the Tivo.

system requirements

[_|()|\|]

I was still using Windows when Steam came out. I avoided it, and Half-Life 2 by extension, because of the DRM. A free copy of Portal sounds pretty good, though, so I figured I'd give it a try. It turns out that the game will run (poorly) with NVIDIA 9400M integrated video, but it refuses to start with NVIDIA 7600GT discrete video. Anyone know a way around that? This game is older than my computer, which had decent specs. at the time (for an iMac, anyway).

I've noticed two quirks about the Steam client itself: steam.sh opens in Xcode each time I reboot, and Steam asks for my administrative password every time it starts. My best guess is that it writes data files of some kind in the .app bundle, which would be a big no-no.

Re:system requirements

[binary paladin]

Weird, I'm not getting issues like that.

The performance is underwhelming on the newest 13" MBP though. It's passable though.

Counter Strike: Source

[Ponder Stibions]

CS:S already plays better on my desktop under Ubuntu than it does under windows 7. I forget I'm running Linux sometimes, and it's a shock to find myself back at my Ubuntu desktop. Sadly GTA:SA does not seem to like WINE at all!

Updated link

[torgosan]

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/12/steam-for-mac-now-available-sort-of/

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Pharmboy]

Works just fine, perhaps it was just /.'ed. It takes you to http://store.steampowered.com/app/400. And yes, it is free until the 24th.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[mako1138]

You can get the best of both worlds: buy WoG direct from 2dboy, then put your serial into Steam.

I didn't do it intentionally but it worked for me.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Pharmboy]

You get the game free, forever, if you get your license now. Steam is actually pretty damn cool about licensing. When they first started Steam, I took my copy of Half Life from 1998 (original version) and moved it to my Steam account. I just downloaded the game, again, on my work computer, so it is installed on several systems, even though I bought it retail, not from Steam.

From my experience, they pretty damn good to deal with, and I have something 30+ games through them. Most of them bought at 50% to 75% off during their weekly sales. I'm 45, so even if the game is two years old, it is still new to me. I don't need to buy the same week it comes out. I'm waiting for Bioshock 2 to go on sale right now, or at least a free week long pass. They do lots of those.

And according to the Steam client itself, if you get the free Portal, you can download and play for Mac or PC, or both. They flatly say that they will do that for all games, so if it has a PC, Mac and Linux versions, you can buy it once and download it on all 3 different systems at no extra fee. One more reason I love giving these guys my money.

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering HFS+ is case-insensitive and currently the only "supported" file system for daily use / system install I don't see why this is an issue.

Loki games didn't need CD in drive

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of protection is no more "evil" than requiring the CD to be in the drive

The standard is already that you don't need the CD to be in the drive. Being "no more evil than" something that most Linux users don't normally have to put up with, isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

Re:DRM

[smash]

So what happens when your 2015 machine has no optical drive, and is 100% dependent on network connectivity or flash cards?

Think i'm off in fantasy land? Go find me a 5 1/4" floppy drive for a laptop....

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[R4nneko]

And you can have Steam track time spent playing the game as well as chat to friends through Steam whilst you are playing. Which I consider perks in any case.

Re:Valve ... you suck, no case-sensitive filesyste

[BitZtream]

Unless you do something to actively screw with filenames like forcing them all to upper or lower case, or you use hard coded file names in multiple places in your apps without using the same case because you are too stupid to use a #define or constant, than it doesn't matter.

I write software for windows, you don't do anything different because its a case insensitive file system, it has always been case insensitive but case perserving. I have ported several apps from Windows to BSD and now OSX, I've never had to make a single change to deal with case sensitivity.

Its really not like you think it is, and for reference ...

I'm the primary author of a SaaS package that includes clients for Windows, OSX and FBSD. It works with a great deal of file names. We have roughly 75k users across the 3 platforms. It started out as a windows only apps. There is no code to deal with 'case' anywhere in the app, which is why it works across all three without any issues.

You really don't have any idea what you're talking about but if you think you do, please describe a situation where a problem with case sensitive file systems would arise when porting from Windows to something with a case sensitive file system.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[kregg]

One word - convenience. You should really try Steam, it is awesome.

Steam for Mac promo

[SteveTauber]

Checkout the official promo that came out at the same time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh5JrzTCAHM

Re:DRM

[bit01]

high-quality, professional

Anything with DRM is defective by design. That is neither high quality nor professional.

---

DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.

Case matters more than you might think

[Xtifr]

Case can affect meaning: "I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse" vs. "I helped my uncle jack off his horse". It can even affect pronunciation, as in "polish" vs. "Polish". As a user, *I* care about case, though I think that case-insensitive filename completion could be handy at times.

Re:Case matters more than you might think

[Blakey Rat]

Case-insensitive filesystems already preserve whatever case you originally named the file as (on Macs: back to the original HFS in 1984.) This is already a completely solved problem.

Nice try, though.

Re:Case matters more than you might think

[Xtifr]

So I can have a file named "polish" and a file named "Polish" side-by-side in the same directory on HFS? Otherwise, it's not a "completely solved problem".

Re:Case matters more than you might think

[Blakey Rat]

Well, hopefully, you'd have "polish" in the "things you rub on shoes" folder and "Polish" in the "nationalities" folder. Unless you have the most disorganized filesystem on the planet, I can't conceive of a way that those two files would be in the same folder.

Look, I do support. I work with end-users. It's already confusing enough that they can have a text document named "Polish" and an image named "Polish" in the same folder. They can't handle anything more confusing than that, even if there is some extremely rare edge-case that Linux geeks might benefit from.

Computers are for *human beings*.

Re:DRM

[EvanED]

Think i'm off in fantasy land? Go find me a 5 1/4" floppy drive for a laptop....

I'll grant you that you can't find a 5 1/4" drive any more. However, you can easily find a 3 1/2" drive around, including USB versions for your laptop. It's been way more than 5 years since games more or less ceased to be distributed on floppies; games on CDs were common even 15 years ago. If CDs follow the same pattern, "I can't find a drive to read this" will become a problem somewhere around, let's say 2020. (And that's being generous. Games are still coming on DVDs, and I seriously doubt you'll ever see a lot of DVD drives that don't read CDs.)

Basically what it comes down to is if I have to bet whether my CDs will be readable in 2025 or Steam will be around in 2025, I'm betting on the CDs.

Modern Linux users appear to be very generous

[SuperKendall]

Linux users, not so much.

Actually, check out the contribution chart for the Humble Indie Bundle (scroll down to almost the end, look on the right).

Anyone can enter any price they like there - the breakdown so far:

Windows users: $8.06
Mac users: $10.23
Linux users: $14.54

That's an average over all the users of that platform that bought software, so that speaks really highly of Linux users appreciating games for the platform and willing to pay.

Re:Modern Linux users appear to be very generous

[node 3]

See my reply to the post two above yours. One game bundle does not negate the general aversion of the Linux crowd from buying software.

Also, like the person who already made this point, you neglected to quote my very next sentence, where I said, "Games, however, are one of the areas where the anti-proprietary sentiment is at its weakest, so it'll really be interesting to see how well Steam would do on Linux."

Re:Modern Linux users appear to be very generous

[SuperKendall]

My whole post was about addressing your "weakest" sentence.

I think one game bundle is a very good indicator that other games would do well, especially since it is an indie bundle and not mainstream software.

Re:Modern Linux users appear to be very generous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just ignore all the other evidence that's not in your favor. The countless companies like Loki that have tried to break into the Linux game market and failed miserably. Just keep on hanging your hopes and dreams on a isolated charity event.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Anonymous Coward]

Any game can use Steam Cloud if they choose to integrate it into their game. Several games from smaller studios due so (for example, Torchlight).

Neat!

[zmollusc]

I never got round to getting half-life 2 but I would definitely buy into a Linux-based Steam setup (not use steam since CS days). Maybe Valve could have little 'demo' free downloads of each title, just enough to prove the graphics and audio code for that title on one's individual Linux setup?

I dont even like it when its done right

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw steam and screw valve.

I dont care how wonderfully their DRM system works, it deprives me of rights i used to take for granted when buying a product.

I do not, and will not buy games which require steam (or any steam-like DRM system)

So that's why games migrated to Steam.

[EricTheO]

Now we know why over the past year so many games have migrated to Steam.
I'm sure Valve was letting game developers know about their plans for Mac and Linux.
Wider distrubution, no physical media to package or ship, higher profits even with a fee paid to Valve.

Woops

[TangoMargarine]

I read that one bit at "Portal III will come out this year." I was confused as I didn't know 2 was even out yet...

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Anonymous Coward]

Oblig. XKCD

http://xkcd.com/606/

Not true

[CountBrass]

I bought Civ IV for the PC through Steam and if I want to play it on my Mac, through Steam.... I have to pay again!

The answer is actually NO

[CountBrass]

I have Civ IV on the PC (Steam) and if I want it on the Mac I have to pay for it again :(

You *can* give your brother a free copy of Portal

[spaceturtle]

Just tell him to click on the free download link before the 24th of May at: http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/

(Yes I know this isn't what you meant.)

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Anonymous Coward]

you must be a mac user.

abuse of moderation

[drinkypoo]

This is obviously not flamebait. When will moderation be fixed? hahahahaha

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Richy_T]

Well dang then. I just paid $20 for portal a couple of months ago. Worth every penny though.

To everyone who'd also love to play SS2 again

[Jesus_666]

If you have anything to contribute (and aren't too lazy to do so), consider joining the openDarkEngine team. They're working on a reimplementation of the Dark Engine, which is used in the Thief games and System Shock 2. Unfortunately, progress is slow.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with OPDE, merely interested and too lazy to contribute.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Jesus_666]

Pretty cool about licensing alright. I just entered my original Half-Life retail CD key. Steam recognized it as... a Half-Life Platinum Pack key, giving me the game, both addons and five different mods. I'm not complaining.

(I can remember those mods being part of a regular Half-Life update at some point but I didn't know that the same apparently applies to the addons.)

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Jesus_666]

Well, I went to http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/ and clicked the huge button. Steam took over from there. That's it. (Of course now I'm waiting for that damn download to finish.)

bias

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's a twisted perspective in these comments that comes from only Windows users having experience with Steam so far.

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[Jesus_666]

It's pretty easy to synchronize files between computers using symbolic links. For example, I copied my data for World of Goo, Aquaria, Pidgin, and other games/programs to Dropbox, made symbolic links on each computer connected to the account, and it acts like the settings are right where they should be.

You are aware that the people who buy World of Goo through Steam think that a symbolic link is when you click an image in a website and something happens?

Re:why buy WoG through Steam, instead of NOT throu

[kalirion]

In fact, you can still legally purchase it for $0.01 for the next couple days.

Though if you're not a dick, you'll choose to pay a reasonable amount.

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[Pharmboy]

Same thing for me. My copy was actually HL + TFC, but they gave me HL: Blue Shift, and HL: Opposing Force, plus the non-Source mods CS and DoD and obviously non-Source DM mode of HL. It seems they "supersized" everyone who bought any version of the original HL. Actually, with the exception of a few odd bugs and odd game play quirks, Blue Shift and Opposing Force are actually pretty good games in the same universe. I wouldn't mind seeing them do something similar with Source, perhaps a HL: Citizen Resistance or something similar that takes place before Gordon came back. I'd pay 19.99 to 29.99 for that, no sweat.

Full Review of Steam for Mac

[JimLynch]

I have a full review of Steam for Mac up on my site. http://jimlynch.com/index.php/2010/05/13/steam-for-mac-review/

Re:for your convenience, the URL they didn't give

[pyrosine]

I've actually collected 80+ games now and agree completely, I just cant help but spend out on their brilliant offers when I have the game for life, undamagable, afterwards. Also, this release would have been amazing had sony not removed otherOS support - cheap, high grade hardware for cheap (at least, in sales which are quite often), high quality games.

Mod parent up

[Jeremy Visser]

That's a very encouraging statistic. To the GP: Jeff Rosen (one of the guys behind Wolfire) wrote an enlightening blog post ("Linux users contribute twice as much as Windows users") on the subject too.

You should definitely read more of the Wolfire Blog. One of my favourite posts is about their reasoning for why you should support Mac OS X and Linux.

Re:DRM

[smash]

I still play games from 1995 or so. By 2020, realistically i'm likely to still occasionally fire up games from 2010.