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Valve's Steam & Games Coming To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Valve's Steam and Source Engine-based games are coming to Linux. Michael from well known site Phoronix.com has been invited to Valve's office and was able to spend a day with the developers and Gabe Newell himself. He is confirming the rumors about Linux ports from Valve, and has been able to play the games and work the developers himself. Attached in the article are pictures from Valve's offices with games running on Linux."
Seriously, one the same day: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/04/25/1241241/phoronix-confirms-gnulinux-steam-and-source-engine-clients
Unfortunately, even if every Steam user switched entirely to Linux it would still only have a few percentage points of market share. Linux users waaaay overestimate how much of an impact ths will have. Especially when the Windows version will have 1000+ more games to choose from.
I already play Valve games on my Linux computer using PlayOnLinux (http://www.playonlinux.com/). That's been very stable for me, but I'm hoping that a native Valve client will allow even better system performance while gaming.
No, I don't. Get back to me when EA, Activision, Ubisoft etc. provide any official plans to release their big budget titles on Linux. I won't hold my breath, though. Plus it's funny since all the Valve games being wanked over are all 'already-released games'. Most of them over 4 to 5 years old.
All of which are still incredibly popular.
There's cynical, and then there's just stupid.
This *is* big news because of the old games, and because it kicks the door open to a huge number of new games. Steam is an enormous force in the games world... however you want to cut it.
I think this is less to do with Linux being a big market , and more to do with expanding Steam in a way that EA won't with Origin and keep Steam's many fairly vociferous and loyal support.
Whatever... I'm not complaining... nor am I underestimating the impact this will have.
TFA shows Valve dev workstations running L4D2 under Linux.
I can play games offline.
Except when you can't. I've had a handful of times when steam wants to connect even when I tell it to play offline. And it refuses to do anything else. It has pissed me right the hell off each time. That's DRM getting between me and what I paid for.
Steam is a pretty good distribution system. And Valve has a lot of sales which make it enticing. But as far as DRM goes, it's still too much.
What good timing. There just happen to be a bunch of Kickstarter projects that will need a way to distribute their promised Linux clients.
No sig for you!!
Sorry, but as someone who regularly uses Windows, OSX and Linux on the desktop, I have to say it's been very aggravating the past two years especially in desktop Linux... Binary drivers are even more of a pain to get running on a recent distro than in the past both for nVidia, and AMD/ATI.. though the FLOSS drivers have had a lot of progress, none of them (for AMD/ATI or nVidia) are sufficient for gaming. Beyond this, I had issues with Intel graphics around Ubuntu 9.04 (iirc), regression issues in the driver that most laptops used at the time.
The fact is, for those interested in gaming, Windows is the best bet.. on the high end, if you want a unix-like OS, you're better off with OSX. For servers, Linux now rules the roost, so to speak. That doesn't mean that Linux is in any way, shape or form at a usable desktop level. Ubuntu was close in the 8.x releases, but has slid. Mint is about as good as it gets today, imho, but still has a lot of rough edges for a typical user. There's a huge difference in what you/I will put up with from a free OS, and what your typical customer will.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info