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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
The Year of the Linux (Gaming) Desktop is finally here!
I don't care if it's open source or not, just as long as i can play my beloved counter strike at a decent fps and not have to switch back to windows. Anyone who says different can just suck on it
And if that doesn't work here's another source.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would assume left it in?
I haven't been following this whole thing, but I assume it's going to be closed source. Much as I'd prefer it open (like everything) and am sure it will be a nightmare to get running (and keep running) in my distro of choice (gentoo) I'm cool with just the functionality for now.
They must have made a change to the matrix.
Never with a dry hand, that's for sure.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Unquestionably, Steam has DRM, but it is some of the least intrusive DRM out there.
I can play games offline. I can download copies of my games as many times as I want on other devices. I don't get limited activations. Steam doesn't break anything else on my box. And Steam routinely has really cheap prices.
I don't like DRM. I feel it punishes paying customers without stopping pirates. But frankly, I think Steam is worth the trade-off. The DRM doesn't get in the way, and the benefits are pretty good.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's not for the open source community. It's for gamers who use Linux. Not every Linux user has the same ideologies.
Agreed. I used to bitch at people buying digital only assets (ITunes, I'm looking at you) as a no win situation. Steam is all the opposite of that. They get insane rebates you'll never see in stores. They let you play offline, redownload countless times, they have automated patching of games which is worth gold, gone are the days of waiting on gamespy servers and going through hoops becasue the publishers will make you go to shady ad infested download sites with their "wait half an hour or pay for a gold memebership" crap. They even have plus values such as notification of new video cards drivers and it can even patch it for you (opt-in) The only thing I hate is that I can't be logged in from several computer at once on the same account, I could play a game on my pc while my gf plays one on my laptop...I guess shared accounts would be a rampant problem. I used to hate the very idea of it...but getting top notch games for under 20$ helped me cope.
We should have been
So much more by now
Too dead inside
To even know the guilt
TFA shows Valve dev workstations running L4D2 under Linux.
Right? Why doesn't the most successful online game distribution platform and developer of all time just open source their entire livelihood?
look for the goodies on steam workshop.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I completely agree with this. One of the big problems with Valve attempting something like the SteamBox is Steam and games being tied to the Windows and OS X platforms. Apple definitely wouldn't allow a third party to use their OS and it's questionable whether Microsoft would let someone build a console on Windows technology that would compete with the Xbox. Not to mention that even if Microsoft did, consoles generally have a negative or very thin profit margin and paying for an OEM OS licenses on top of the cost of the hardware is the last thing you'd want to do in that circumstance.
From Valve's perspective, building a game console on Linux would be highly preferable to Windows because it would leave them in full control of the software stack without any license fees. Not to mention that a set baseline of hardware would allow them to do mitigate the biggest problem facing gaming on Linux (after game availability) which is the poor and inconsistent state of 3d graphics drivers by providing guarantees for what will work to developers.
If they are truly interested in building their own game console, porting Steam (and Source) to Linux would be a good first step.
What if this signature were clever?
I just installed Steam under wine, and it worked. I bought HL2, and it worked. Then a terrible thing happened, and I accidentally the whole .wine directory.
Guess what happened when I reinstalled Steam again? The first time I fired it up, it popped up a little message saying that it couldn't see the installs of all the games I'd bought, and would I like it to go and download them again? Well yes, of course I would, so I clicked "OK", had a cup of tea, and boom, HL2 just plain worked, again.
This isn't like anything else I've seen of DRM. This is just plain handy.
Shuttleworth recently said the target for Ubuntu was 200 million users in four years and hinted at some upcoming hardware partnerships...
What if the SteamBox's official OS is going to be Ubuntu and Steam is to be heavily integrated into Unity?
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Uh, yeah, that's known as "Steam".
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.
You're not kidding. Slackware 9 was my introduction to Linux, and after accidentally deleting my Windows partition, it was all I had. It took 2 weeks just to figure out how to configure my DSL connection. Two of the best weeks I ever had, I might add.
The penguin made me do it.