Valve Officially Launches Steam For Linux

sl4shd0rk writes "Valve has finally released Steam for Linux. Although some of the 57 games listed on the Linux Steam site are previously released from the Humble Bundles, there are others which should provide adequate entertainment for anyone bored with the HB games. Among the games listed, many at deep discounts of 50%-75% off, are HalfLife, CounterStrke Source and Serious Sam 3. Hopefully Valve will keep the ports coming as rumor has it that Left 4 Dead had been ported at least for developers."

Comments

Goodbye Windows

[OhANameWhatName]

It was horrible knowing you.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[MrEricSir]

You might want to wait on that. At this time, there's only ~100 titles available for Linux, and many of them have aleady been out for a year or so.

Maybe one day Linux will be a platform hardcore gamers will use, but Steam for Linux is just a baby step in that direction. Remember, they've had Steam for OS X for a while now, and there's still only a tiny trickle of games for that platform.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[cwebster]

Yes, but remember that the OSX version was a contracted 3rd party port while the Linux version is a much better done in-house port that they are basing their future steambox hardware strategy on. Not exactly apples to apples.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

no, its apples to penguins.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[masternerdguy]

So when everyone is playing Vega Strike and Wesnoth on their i7 + Quad Sli setups Linux will win. The problem is there is a massive backlog of games that are never going to be open sourced or ported that only run on Linux. I for one *like* some of those games. Carmack was right when he said that getting WINE up to spec was the most important project for Linux.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Dusanyu]

sime titles with linux versions are strangly missing for example doom 3 (wich is still sold on steam)

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Chris Burke]

Apples to penguins results in an unhappy penguin. Fish to penguins on the other hand leads to fat and happy penguins.

Wait, I think I'm misunderstanding.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think you might be onto something. OpenBSD

Re:Goodbye Windows

[jones_supa]

You might want to wait on that. At this time, there's only ~100 titles available for Linux, and many of them have aleady been out for a year or so.

Maybe one day Linux will be a platform hardcore gamers will use, but Steam for Linux is just a baby step in that direction. Remember, they've had Steam for OS X for a while now, and there's still only a tiny trickle of games for that platform.

What's the problem? The availability of games for Linux just exploded into new numbers, and more are coming all the time. You don't have to wait for every game under the sun to be ported, and that's not the point anyway. Make the switch and enjoy. 2013 is the Year of Linux Gaming.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[zwede]

At this time, there's only ~100 titles available for Linux

And a couple of weeks ago there were only 40. If they keep going at this rate things are looking promising!

Re:Goodbye Windows

[cwebster]

Skyrim (all DLC plus mods) works in wine currently. PlayOnLinux will even do all the work in setting up the wine environment for it to run in.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[spire3661]

Yes, but have you ever seen this much movement in the space before?

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

If gamers invested even a tiny fraction of the cumulative time they waste whining about modern video games, Linux would already be where everyone wishes it was.

Yeah, because gamers in general know anything about software development.

You're an asshole. No, really, you're probably the world's largest asshole, in fact. Why? Because if you posted on Slashdot less, clearly, you would have developed a cure for cancer by now.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE CONTINUE TO DIE EACH DAY BECAUSE YOU NEED TO POST HERE?!

Monstrous. Simply monstrous.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[zwede]

No, I think a large number of games are in the process of being ported and 60 of them were completed in the last couple of weeks. More will be finished in the next couple of weeks, etc.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[atomican]

I'm sick of Microsoft extremely condescending attitude towards their customers

I'm sick of the (general) Linux community's extremely condescending attitude towards anyone who thinks Linux has flaws and dares to raise them as something that should be addressed, or that perhaps some things work better in Windows and that using Windows because it works better for particular use cases is perfectly reasonable. But no, everyone has to get emotional for some reason.

With regards to that UI masturbation called Windows 8, we'll "get used to it".

Sounds like the current crop of DEs in Linux. If you are told you have "choice" and can use something else, you apparently can choose DEs like MATE (which are OK but based on dead code), XFCE (which are a bit too simple and lacking in functionality) or Cinnamon (which is OK but still too new). Everything sucks in their own way, and moving to Linux can often just result in transferring the suck from one form to another.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[jones_supa]

Never heard that line before ... not hating on Linux, but seriously, don't hold your breath.

A little bit of celebration would not be that out of place, though.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Cito]

Good luck playing any modern games on linux

I love linux and I have my 2 slackware boxes and been running slackware since the 2.0.29 kernel.

but I always kept a windows box as my gaming pc, you just won't get any modern games on it, If I want to play modern games, Far Cry 3, Assassins Creed, Mass Effect, Dragon Age franchises such as those, and many countless others I'll stick to windows gaming.

I'm not going to install linux on my i7, 16gig ram, dual evga ftw 670 sli, 120g ssd / wd black 2tb data drive gaming rig to play games that came out 5+ years ago.

and most people with gaming rigs won't unless they dual boot to fuck around with some nostalgia, and definitely not going to pay 20 bucks for some 10 year old game anyhow.

but even with my whining, it is a step in the right direction and I do hope game developers take notice and see that linux users WANT modern games, but it will first mean game developers will HAVE to stop developing for DirectX9/10/11. And you will have a hard time getting that to happen with contracts setup with AMD and Nvidia graphics cards who build their cards around DirectX primarily. With opengl as more an afterthought it seems.

so you will have to get video card companies to change their habits and open up their drivers and support or talk microsoft into bringin directx to linux (never will happen) before any modern game companies will seriously bring their triple A games to linux platform.

Other than indie companies and opengl built games which can be ported much easier. And Java based games such as Towns, Dwarfs, Minecraft, etc.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[jones_supa]

Many know this site already, but here is a nice overview of the Linux titles: steamlinux.xpaw.ru. Of course there's the Valve's official list too.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[arielCo]

Obligatory: xkcd: Extrapolating

Re:Goodbye Windows

[slimjim8094]

Wait, what? I've never heard that the OS X version of Steam was a 3rd party port. In fact, I'm almost certain it wasn't since I was in the Mac Beta and on the email list with the developers (who all have valvesoftware.com email addresses)

Citation, please?

Re:Goodbye Windows

[elashish14]

Solitaire?

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Nerdfest]

Very much so. People may think it's only a small step, but it's always that first step that's the hardest. This goes a very long way to getting past the "I only stay on Windows because of the games."

Re:Goodbye Windows

[guises]

"They" is only Valve in this case. Valve provides a tiny portion of the games on Steam, unless they can come up with some incentive for developers to do Linux ports (Valve could take a reduced cut, for example) that's not going to mean very much.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Pinhedd]

Marketing is the problem.

The availability of games for Linux just exploded but the majority of these games have been available on Windows for years. Some have even been available on Linux for ages already and are simply just migrating to Steam for the sake of doing so. If all these previously available Linux games failed to see a large amount of success on Linux without Steam, it's unlikely that they will sudden explosion in Linux installations with Steam. Linux users tend to be rather savvy and aware individuals by nature, so anyone seriously wanting to acquire these games for either Windows or Linux has already done so.

There's nothing new here. Aside from a very few individuals who simply refuse to run Windows, there's no one running Linux that hasn't played those games already.

What Steam for Linux will achieve though is a stable prototype for Valve's Linux based game console. One of the largest criticisms leveled at Linux is the horrific binary incompatibility between distros. By using a commercial platform that has a consistent environment it will be much easier for Valve to entice developers to port their games to Linux for Steambox or whatever they're calling it. From there, it will still take several steps to get a game running on Fedora, RedHat, CentOS, Ubuntu, Arch, Mint, etc... but at least there will be Steambox as a common Linux based denominator.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[VortexCortex]

No, I think a large number of games are in the process of being ported and 60 of them were completed in the last couple of weeks. More will be finished in the next couple of weeks, etc.

I think some old games were already ported and as they are vetted as working with Linux Steam they are being announced.

Linux Steam is the best chance Linux gaming is ever going to have, but I wouldn't hold my breath for a huge batch of games.

Vale is not the only game developer. They may be the first major one embracing Linux (read: ensuring their future against MS's craziness), but they are not the only one, nor are they necessarily our "best chance" consumers and game developers have -- The "best chance" is available to everyone already, and cross platform gaming is a force that can not easily be held back any longer. The writing is on the wall for Windows-only PC gaming now, as it was for console exclusive games in the past, and Arcade cabinet exclusive games before that.

As a developer you'd be a damned fool (or need a very expensive reason) to not select or build an engine that's got the (o) Cross Platform bullet point. It costs next to nothing to gain Mac and Linux in addition to Windows if you simply start with a cross platform tool chain. Porting old games can be a pain, but for any new games it's a no-brainer: "Use #1 that's windows only, or pick #2 that's x-platform and will bring in more revenue". Since this has become a selling point engines will compete over: It won't be long before every new major game engine is cross platform -- Valve is just a bit ahead of the curve here (unless you consider Ogre3D and other free x-plat engines).

It's not only that old game engines (and thus the games they support) are being ported to cross platform toolchains, but also new engines are adopting this development model (hell, even application dev is going this way). Microsoft knows this is coming, that's why they want to do some re-engineering of their development model: Their App Store programs are in C# which is a VM language -- I bet they make some changes to the language / API so that new code for their platform is artificially harder to make compatible with Mono, while older C# programs (being byte-code already) can be easily supported going forward; Might even have something to do with XNA getting the can. You see, right now I can easily use OpenGL with C/C++ to make games that run on Mac/Win/Linux ("git pull && make" and I'm done "porting" changes between platforms) -- Microsoft hates that.

If you're doing engine development (like I am), you write an abstraction layer for the native platform interfaces anyway, especially if the game will be on PC + consoles (or even just more than one console). That initial cost to support all the major PC platforms (creating an SDL/freeglut replacement) took me one week of evenings, and now every game I make will be cross platform with no additionally dev cost -- Had I not needed a better multi-threaded event system than these provided it would have taken only a few hours to support all the major PC platforms. Existing engines like Cube(2) and Ogre3D make cross platform development dead simple (if you're using polygonal graphics). Everything is done in shaders nowdays anyway, so even the DirectX vs OpenGL "battle" is a moot point -- whatever shader platform is cross platform -- Why throw away free additional money for the same efforts? With the advent of engine scripting and meta programming languages that compile down into Java / C# / C++, C / ObjC, etc, the cross platform future of games is even stronger. For lighter weight mobile games I can already compile a single source tree into platform specific code for Android, iOS, Win, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PS3, Wii, and DS.

Anyone who doubts the future of gaming on Linux will be bright need look no further than the console market. Publishers like money, it cost more to make separate games for each platform, and

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

True story: I once had to deal with Dioblo II in WINE repeatedly corrupting my MBR. No, really. I could hardly believe it myself until I saw other reports of the exact same thing on the WINE bug tracker.

Bullshit.

ORLY: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4672

Re:Goodbye Windows

[dkf]

Yep, I've successfully run Skyrim and New Vegas, but NV is a bit slow and Skyrim is fine at first but quickly turns into a slideshow, as compared to my Win 7 partition where it's flawless :/

The engine used in both games isn't the greatest, and it tends to bog down on any system once you start to add in mods.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[symbolset]

Developers use "game engines" and add their own features, maps, rules and art to make their games quite often. A very popular one is "Source," which is made by Valve - who is putting together this Linux game sales platform. By porting their own games to Linux they are proving the Source engine's flexibility and capability and beating down an easy path for their Source Engine licensees to capture a new market early in its upswing. Quite often a game developer would not have that much extra work to do to put their game in Linux because 99% of the development isn't in the programming but in the collateral: the art, story, characters, rules, balance tuning and such that transform the game engine into the specific game. These non-programmatic portions of the game that constitute 99% of the game's development effort are by design of the game engine platform independent. Budding game developers really need that because the option to put their game on a console, iPhone or Android tablet has to stay open so that if they find the winning "fun" formula they can rake in the big bucks by selling it in every market without laying out the funds to build it again from scratch for each new platform. This is also developing good data for what hardware a Steambox console needs to have to be successful, as client hardware metrics are measured and reported in actual game play along with things like time of play, duration of engagement with the game and so on.

There are many engines that started on desktop Linux for ease and speed of development and migrated elsewhere for mass-marketability. The Doom engine is a classic example. Before there was Doom iD as a budding company had a Linux only game called "Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris" that was a popular Linux network game to prove the engine. This is why while you're playing Doom3 if you type SPISPOPD you can pass through walls. It's also the origin of the name of the band "Smashing Pumpkins". In SPISPOPD most of the monsters were pumpkins.

The trail of breadcrumbs: Game engine developers include game editors in their games to encourage fan spinoffs and identify promising young developers of the art for recruiting and also improve the value of the game engine with fan spinoff maps, arts, and other such things as well as to prove their game engine as a platform easily built upon - all the while adding value for the people who bought the game without spending extra money on development. Darwinian development rocks!

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Noughmad]

I don't think he meant "hot" as in "will burn your knees, even if your laptop in on a desk".

No 64-bit?

[elvestinkle]

No amd64 that I saw. 'package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)' lame.

Re:No 64-bit?

[Dusanyu]

you have to install 64 bit libraries in Mint or Foobuntu use the comand sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk ia32-libs-sdl

Re:No 64-bit?

[zwede]

Or switch to a smarter distro? My 64-bit distro fixed it automatically and steam runs fine.

Re:No 64-bit?

[zwede]

Which distro might that be?

Gentoo.

Brace yourselves

[arosas]

Allow me to summarize the next five or so hours worth of posts:

Blah blah blah, DRM.
Blah blah blah, "in mother russia".
Blah blah blah, "I, for one, welcome our penguin shaped overlords".
Blah blah blah, "gun control".
Blah blah blah "godwin's law".

You're welcome. (on a side note: wooooo!)

Re:Brace yourselves

[atomican]

Blah blah blah, DRM.
Blah blah blah, "in mother russia".
Blah blah blah, "I, for one, welcome our penguin shaped overlords".
Blah blah blah, "gun control".
Blah blah blah "godwin's law".

I know you're joking but the fact you mention complaining about DRM as part of the joke is disheartening. Yes it's overdone and beating a dead horse at this point, but it's still a serious point to raise and it's important that it never gets forgotten. The fact that games attached with DRM (Steam or otherwise) mean games now have an artificial lifetime attached when they didn't otherwise. Yes you might be able to crack them, but that's besides the point.

Re:Brace yourselves

[Pathogen David]

You forgot "Blah blah blah, year of the Linux desktop."

Re:Kerosene (Jet fuel) warning

[kestasjk]

Yeah.. wake me up when they have ported it to the OpenBSD pkgsrc system as part of the official set of packages and maybe I'll think about potentially buying a game. (As long as it contains no DRM and is also part of the OpenBSD pkgsrc system as part of the official set of packages, audited by portaudit, of course.)

SteamOS

[threeboy]

Is this a step towards an optimized valve os built on linux? I don't use linux but it'd be cool.

Re:SteamOS

[cblguy2]

My son plays a lot on Steam (TF2 mostly). If there were a Steam-centric distro available right now to run on a live disc, I'd download it *tonight* and run it. I don't feel like futzing with an Ubuntu live disc right now, or stomping all over his Windows install right now. Drop in a disc and run, though, with the Steam client already installed? Sign us up.

The Valentines Bundle 2.0

[tuppe666]

Just for information really with Serious Sam 3: BFE is available cheaper :) here

http://www.indieroyale.com/

Downloading serious sam now

[zwede]

I'm running 64-bit Gentoo and noticed Steam in the portage tree so I installed it. Works fine. Tried the free TF2 and it worked perfectly. Just bought SS3 for $8 and it's downloading. Valve is great!

Re:Kerosene (Jet fuel) warning

[zwede]

Your distro can't handle deb? Why not? My Gentoo box just has a thin wrapper around the deb to do the install and make it act like any other Gentoo package. I never see a deb package at all.

Re:Awesome!

[masternerdguy]

Just got back from their site, the only download is a DEB package for Ubuntu. Where's the RPM and shell installation packages? I feel insulted that we finally get steam for Linux but it only works on Ubuntu.....

Will this run from a Ubuntu on a USB stick

[tuppe666]

Ok I wasn't sure I decided if how I felt about steam on Linux...more I suspect that the too negative header to this discussion, when down the side I spotted "Try Linux - Grab Ubuntu Desktop; Ubuntu is our favorite version of Linux. Interested in giving it a whirl? You can install and run Ubuntu from a Live CD or USB stick, or install it to run alongside Windows."

Is that "holy shit I can carry all my steam games around on my USB stick" take it around to my friends...or even work, play a few rounds of team fortress, without any changes to the machine...because if that is true, that is bigger news to me than Steam on Linux, this is Quake Arena/Doom again, only with a raft of cheap choices. I can finally play people I know. [and share an experience with], and socialise with, rather than anonymous strangers on-line [I would rather play off-line than that].

Re:Will this run from a Ubuntu on a USB stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it can run on a USB stick. Step by step:
1) Install Ubuntu or some other distro on the stick (use http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ if you're on Windows). Remember to allow it to change the data on the stick so you can install games on it later! If you don't know what you're doing you might want the 32-bit version of Ubuntu, otherwise you'll have to install the lib32 stuff.
2) Boot into your stick
3) Install graphic drivers, etc (you'll probably want the closed-source packages). If using Ubuntu it'll automatically ask you if you want the proprietary stuff
4) Install Steam
5) Login, install games
6) Have fun with your new portable GNU/Linux OS
7) Buy a USB stick with more memory

Linux != Ubuntu

[egr]

Ubuntu is a Linux, but Linux is not Ubuntu. As far as I can see they've only released for Ubuntu. And yeah... I know I can make it work through some hoops on other systems (and I do), but that's not the point!

Re:Linux != Ubuntu

[zwede]

As far as I can see they've only released for Ubuntu.

Not true. Valve only _supports_ ubuntu. Other distros are welcome to add steam to their package managers. For instance, Gentoo has steam in their repo. It's a thin wrapper package. When you install it, it makes sure all dependencies are met and then downloads steam from valve's server and installs it. All this is automagic as far as the user is concerned.

I've finally got a reason

[ozduo]

to upgrade from 10.04 Lucid

Re:Recent firings?

[UnknownSoldier]

Wow, thought you were joking for a second but I see it is indeed true.
http://www.diffchecker.com/h14Uhs74
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122119-Valves-Newell-Issues-Firings-Statement

Looks like Valve is focusing on the Steam Box + Linux.

Re:This is what I get after installing in Debian x

[deek]

As mentioned by someone else, this is because Debian doesn't have libc6 ver 2.15. You have to download the ubuntu libc6 libraries, and extract them to your ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/ directory.

There are debian testing install scripts for Steam which will automatically do this for you. Go forth and search for them.

Also, don't install the ia32-libs package. Enable multiarch support in Debian: dpkg --add-architecture i386
You can now install individual i386 library packages, instead of having one large package.

Wine and bugs

[fyngyrz]

This may help to spur on WINE development even more.

At one point, I was responsible for a good sized Windows application. Something along the lines of Photoshop. Tested it under Wine, and Wine choked in a few obvious ways. As we thought it'd be nice if it worked under linux, if indirectly, I reported the issues to them. They blithely informed me that if we wanted the bugs fixed, we'd have to pay. Needless to say, we shelved the whole idea.

Is that still the service model?

Re:Wine and bugs

[maztuhblastah]

"They" who?

The WINE project?

No. That's never been the model, actually, since there's no business model. It's an open source project. That said, like any free software project, it's easier to motivate people to fix the bugs that you care about if you show up with patches or donations -- but neither is necessary.

Now if you're referring to Codeweavers, then yes, actually, that is part of their business model.

Re:Wine and bugs

[epyT-R]

or, since your model was pay-for as well, you could've offered a real linux build of your project instead of a half-assed win32 kludge and expecting linux users to pay full freight for it.

Re:Wine and bugs

[LingNoi]

If you want WINE support for your application you either have to pay for it or you code it up yourself and submit the patches. You comment just makes your company sound cheap.

Re:Awesome!

[i.r.id10t]

Alien can go from any of 'em to any of 'em....

Quoth the man page:

  alien [--to-deb] [--to-rpm] [--to-tgz] [--to-slp] [options] file [...]

Re:Awesome!

[Kremmy]

Bullshit. Every game I have on Steam in Linux was purchased on the Windows side.

Hello Tux!

[hoboroadie]

The TF2 gamers that log on with a Linux box before March 1 get an exclusive item; Don't underestimate the power of tchotchkes!