It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1

by yigit • 16 years ago

192 55 16 years ago

ramy_d2• 16 years ago

Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years: the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux. This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles.

Those enthusiasts within the Phoronix community even managed to get the unreleased Steam Linux client running up to a partially drawn UI and other modifications, but now that work can stop as Valve is preparing to officially release the Steam Linux client from where they will start to offer Linux native games available for sale. 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.

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.

Similar to Valve's strategy with Mac OS X, it's expected that they too will be providing Linux game releases on the same day as Windows / Mac OS X for their new titles and that there will be first-rate support across all platforms. Portal II should mark the first of these efforts.

This is terrific news considering the last major tier-one game release with a native Linux client was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars back in 2007. There was also supposed to be Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux with claims of it still being worked on, but two years later that has yet to see the light of day, except now it could with the release of the Steam middleware. In the past few years there has just been less-known game releases like Shadowgrounds: Survivor via Linux Game Publishing (LGP) and then the community-spawned open-source games like Alien Arena 2009, Nexuiz, and Sauerbraten, but what Valve has just done should prove to forever revolutionize the Linux gaming scene.

Our friends at Unigine Corp though will now face greater competition in the area of developing the best game engine that is supported on Linux. The Unigine developer is quite visually advanced (and at the same time, very demanding on the hardware) while their developers are quite friendly towards Linux, but to this point besides a couple of great OpenGL benchmarks (found in the Phoronix Test Suite), they have yet to really touch any Linux gamers -- but that will change once Primal Carnage and other titles are released.

We are so grateful that Valve has finally publicly confirmed via the Telegraph (and another pending announcement is likely) that they are bringing Steam and the Source Engine to Linux as this should provide a huge opportunity for the Linux distributions and other Linux stakeholders to prove their viability against Windows and can begin attracting gamers if successfully leveraged. We have already shown that in terms of OpenGL performance, Ubuntu 10.04 is on par with Windows 7 for ATI/AMD and NVIDIA graphics and that Linux is a faster gaming platform to Mac OS X.

Stay tuned for plenty more coverage. Of the six years that Phoronix has been around providing many exclusive news stories and Linux hardware/software coverage, Valve's move with the Steam Linux client / Source engine will likely prove to be the most significant event and opportunity that the Linux desktop has been provided at least since the time of the initial Linux netbook push, if not since the entire time we've been around. Only time will tell though if Linux vendors and stakeholders will fully capitalize upon the opportunity that has the potential of greatly expanding the Linux desktop user-base.

ramy_d2• 16 years ago

page takes for ever to load, here's the article

ytilibitapmoc• 16 years ago

Thank-you from those of us behind brain-dead filtering proxies... :-)

bitwize• 16 years ago

Huh? Games? On my Linux?

eru4• 16 years ago

Unix was one of the first operation systems to come with games out of the box. Linux proudly follows that tradition.

Some other interesting commercial games for Linux are available at http://www.wolfire.com/humble

windsurfer2• 16 years ago

Some even say UNIX was written to make and play games in.

jgg2• 16 years ago

That is awesome. If it hasn't been posted already, please submit that as a top-level link!

ugh4• 16 years ago

That may be true but Linux still sucks as a gaming platform. That’s just how it is and facing up to that reality might help.

sirn• 16 years ago

Phoronix's source seems to be from the Telegraph.co.uk's article[1]. While I don't doubt Valve will release Steam for Linux, I'd wait for the slightly more official statement before declaring it's official.

  [1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7715209/Steam-for-Mac-goes-live.html

retroflexzy• 16 years ago

What's more, the second source cited is basically a copy-n-paste of the Telegraph article.

Phoronix can pretend to be a reliable primary source all it wants, but it's questionable stuff like this that makes its reporting a complete joke amongst the X and DRI/Mesa development community.

_delirium• 16 years ago

I've had a similar impression. There's more than one time I've read a Phoronix article and thought: "Finally, an article on this subject! Only, this one isn't very good."

javanix• 16 years ago

I honestly wasn't sure if this day would ever come.

After all, if OS X, with all of Apple's resources, couldn't wrap up much developer support, what hope did Linux have?

Absolutely fantastic news!

mrcharles• 16 years ago

It's not really news yet. Valve won't officially get behind it until such a point as they can be sure that it will function solidly on the majority of major Linux platforms. Even beyond that, they'll want to make sure there's a market for it, and that's going to be the harder part. I expect any linux stuff done so far is exploratory rather than a guarantee.

I mean, the support that's there could be just one or two guys noodling around. At one point in the life of Neverwinter Nights, there was a BeOS port done by a BeOS fanatic in the Bioware office.

Sadly, until there's an official announcement, I wouldn't get too excited.

apakatt• 16 years ago

Check the image from the Mac Steam announcement: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/mac/MacSteam_AlfredJasonG... The guy has TWO penguins on his desk! That must count as an official announcement as well, right? ;)

papachito2• 16 years ago

There's nothing official yet from Valve.

timdorr2• 16 years ago

FTA: "An announcement from Valve itself is imminent."

So, you found evidence of it, even got it running, but all over unofficial channels. This is about as official as a table is an banana.

papachito2• 16 years ago

What's the source of "An announcement from Valve itself is imminent."?

ComputerGuru• 16 years ago

a banana.

Sorry. >.<

katovatzschyn• 16 years ago

Even so; if this is embraced and people are very excited enough over such announcements, Valve could do a Gorbachev and perhaps announce something like this for Linux based on expected receptions.

nitrogen• 16 years ago

Other non-tech news sources have claimed that Valve has confirmed a future Linux client.

krschultz2• 16 years ago

So now Linux users: BUY BUY BUY.

I'll be sure to buy a few things from it once it is available even if I'm not likely to play many games.

Passively supporting this isn't very helpful, vote with your wallet. The more money they make the better it is for Linux in the future.

jws• 16 years ago

Inside the Steam program:

  Failed to load web page (unknown error).-324
  Failed to load web page (unknown error).

Then after much reloading a simply black screen. It seems they did not plan to service the spike.

TeHCrAzY2• 16 years ago

Unlikey, the load from this is being produced during the low in thier daily performance graphs. You can confirm that by googling 'steam stats' or something similar (ill dig up the link when i'm off my mobile).

Steam internally uses webkit, perhaps your os is missing something it needs.

krschultz2• 16 years ago

I read this as a "Steam coming to Linux soon" not a "Steam is now available on Linux today, right this second" announcement.

teamonkey• 16 years ago

The same thing happened when Half Life 2 was released on Steam for Windows all those years ago.

jerf2• 16 years ago

Any idea how this is going to interact with DRM? Because I might buy games from Steam, but the idea that I'd put DRM on my Linux system is little more than snicker-worthy. (Sure, just let me compile that into my kernel for you, no sweat....)

windsurfer2• 16 years ago

The DRM is, for the most part, userspace and is mainly an authenticaton scheme to determine if you are authorized to play the game.

jerf2• 16 years ago

Where is your information from? I can't seem to Google anything up. "For the most part, userspace" doesn't really mean much.

It is difficult to imagine the authentication scheme that wouldn't be fairly trivial to crack, given that I have full control over the entire software stack from top to bottom, including not merely the kernel but my choice of hypervisor.

ericz• 16 years ago

The only reason some of my friends still dual boot Windows is to play games. Cheers for one of the biggest gaming developments in Linux. Now hopefully there will be others that follow!

rbreve• 16 years ago

I downloaded Valve for OSX , but there are not many games for mac right now, all the good games are only available for windows

wingo• 16 years ago

I feel like an out-of-touch old man. (Getting there, perhaps?)

Both the article and the comments assume a baseline level of understanding ("Steam Mac OS X client"; "Linux support"; suitably vague nouns). Searching helps me resolve these words, to some degree; but I still don't know what this thing is (that is not a quotidian HN topic).

I'm sure Lisp implementation articles are similarly opaque to non-initiates. But, um, a little help, please? :)

johnswamps• 16 years ago

Steam is sort of like an app-store for games which only ran on Windows for a long time. You buy games on Steam and can then download the games on any computer you install Steam on. There's a bunch of other stuff such as being able to talk to your friends, multiplayer, and keeping track of achievements. Valve (the creators of Steam) are porting it to Mac and Linux. This is not, however, sufficient to play all games on Steam, since games from many companies are on Steam and not all of them are interested in making their games cross-platform. So, in addition, Valve is porting their Source engine, which powers games such as Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal to Mac and Linux so that those players will able to play them. They will of course be able to play any other games on Steam that are class-platform.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Steam is a digital content distribution platform for games. It wraps up the online store, purchasing, user accounts, multiplayer gaming functionality (with features similar to xbox live), and actually downloading and running games on a user's machine.

It is Valve Software's creation that they use as a channel to distribute their own games (Half-Life, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal, etc.) It is one of the best platforms of its kind and a huge number of other game developers have been using it as a release channel for their games as well.

Porting it to Mac OS X and Linux is a big deal because it means those platforms now have a first-class digital content distribution platform for games as well. So, for example, all of those game makers who are already using multi-platform game engines and releasing their games on Mac as well as PC will be able to do so through Steam, rather than through Steam for the PC and some other channel for the Mac.

Additionally, Valve is porting several of their big (multi-million sales) games to the Mac, shoring up the Mac as a legitimate gaming platform. All of this helps spur a self-reinforcing feedback cycle boosting game development on the OS X (more sales, more games, more development of multi-platform game engines, all of which feeds back on itself).

In short, with this one move Valve has pushed OS X (and soon make Linux) from 2nd class citizen to nearly a full peer with Windows as a gaming platform.

aw3c2• 16 years ago

What the previous two answers did not mention is that Steam requires online verification and that it can lock you out from being able to play the games you played for (DRM).

See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(content_delivery)#System...

swah• 16 years ago

I don't understand, why is this program valuable to be open-source? What does it do?

k0eselitz• 16 years ago

Heh. It's "official" - if by "official" you mean "not official at all."

It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux

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