Valve Says "Yes" To Steam Linux This Year

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExMzA

by trotsky • 14 years ago

223 162 14 years ago

It'll finally a be a three horse race on the desktop.

ajross• 14 years ago

Six. You forgot about the other three horses ("Sony", "Microsoft" and "Nintendo") because they're so far ahead. And there are two little horses coming up fast from behind.

Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market. I'm sure I'll enjoy a few Steam games on my Linux box (which I use basically 100% of the time), but this is hardly a paradigm shift. Consoles and mobile (maybe "web" will persist as a separate sub-market, but I'm not sure about that) are the future of gaming platforms.

daenz• 14 years ago

> Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market.

Source?

masklinn2• 14 years ago

> Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market.

Let's throw bullshit in the air, it's not like anybody has numbers or give a flying shit about them anyway.

> Consoles [...] are the future of gaming platforms.

Consoles have been the future of gaming platforms for 25 years now. And oddly, computers are still there as gaming platforms with developers and distributors making significant amounts of money from them. Hell, computer-based gaming has never been better as far as I'm concerned, the big shitty franchise-based publishers are getting the fuck away from it and indies are coming back to the front of the scene.

Consoles are not the future of anything, they're a gaming media amongst others. And mobile is nice, I play a lot on my phone, but let's not kid ourselves: it's the future of killing handled consoles and that's about it.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

>Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market.

So we're doing that thing where we just make shit up now about the largest gaming market in the world?

Consoles are a primarily American/Japanese phenomenon with some other western countries participating. PC gaming is how the entire world games and it's growing faster than ever.

pessimizer• 14 years ago

Gaming on the desktop might be one of the only means of survival for the desktop.

Recipe to make desktop into console. 1. plug desktop into tv. 2. buy wireless mini-keyboard and mouse, or install menu system that operates by D-pad to select games. 3. There is no step three.

jjcm• 14 years ago

Because of the quotes, I'm not sure if you mean that PC gaming is dead, or if you mean that the way we consume PC games is dying. Either way though, PC gaming numbers are on the rise. They overtook console gaming revenues back in 2010, and have continued to grow.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/97705-pc-gaming-vs-console...

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

There are 3 important inflection points here.

One is Steam on linux period. Even if it were its own little universe, having the support of Valve and the steam platform opens up a lot of opportunities for gaming on linux.

Another is Valve's core games on linux, which would definitely give a big kickstart to linux as a gaming platform.

Perhaps the most important could be when the top tier multi-platform game engines begin including linux as a targeted platform as a matter of routine.

phn• 14 years ago

I think valve's core games on linux will be there at the same time the linux steam client arrives to give it that push. It was that way with the mac. However, I think there will still be some time before we start seeing the majority of games ported to the three platforms.

Sometimes, mac ports that are done by third parties are not on steam because they can't split the revenue, so you still have to get the mac version separately.

But even with all the hurdles, I think this is a great step in the right direction.

Scaevolus• 14 years ago

Often, the difficulty of bringing a game to OSX is porting DirectX graphics code to OpenGL. Once that's done, the hard part of Linux support is dealing with distribution fragmentation and dependencies.

Steam on Linux will probably ship with the audio/graphics/input libraries it needs, so 3rd party developers don't have to worry about environment nearly as much.

b0rsuk2• 14 years ago

I think only a fraction of existing games will be ported. However, now there will be a much stronger incentive to use cross-platform engines in the future. It used to be "windows + mac port" for a lot of games. "windows + mac port + linux port" sounds silly, so the obvious solution is to start with something that already is cross-platform.

Wasteland 2 chose Unity engine because it's so cross-platform. It even has unpolished Linux support. The Linux port of Unity hasn't been released, because developers were doing that in their spare time and it wasn't up to Unity creators' standards. Now, InExile has been given Unity source for purposes of creating a decent Linux port. It's a single anecdote, but it illustrates what I'm saying above. Makers of Unity will probably want to get the most out of it, so Linux port of Unity will be contributed "upstream" and it's very likely that Unity will support Linux from now on.

ekianjo9• 14 years ago

I am still wondering, however, whether we will really see Steam on "Linux" or Steam on "A Single Distro", which would probably happen to be Ubuntu. If that does happen, that would further consolidate the domination of Ubuntu in the Linux World (at least in numbers) as an unintended consequence.

I do not see Valve releasing clients for every distro out there.

For Linux/Ubuntu to be really strong in gaming, Steam is a big plus, however we also need strong driver support from nVidia and ATI. As far as I know, the best drivers on Linux are still not on par with their equivalent on Windows in terms of performance. If playing the same game on Linux means losing 10 fps on your favorite game, this may not be a very enticing alternative if you have both systems installed.

Symmetry3• 14 years ago

Honestly, Intel integrated graphics have been getting better very quickly recently, and already have pretty good Linux drivers. Maybe you wouldn't want to run Crysis on them, but for, say, Team Fortress 2 it should be good enough.

forrestthewoods2• 14 years ago

Video drivers in OS X are dreadful and games run substantially faster in Windows on the same hardware. I would assume "linux" will be even worse.

moonchrome2• 14 years ago

> As far as I know, the best drivers on Linux are still not on par with their equivalent on Windows in terms of performance.

Forget performance, ATI drivers are so unstable it's barely usable (eg. Gnome 3 restarting regularly, like once per hour), and that's just plain desktop apps (Vim/browser), trying to run some version of VLC from default repo instantly crashed the PC (needed to restart), when I tried to play games random graphics bugs were everywhere (texture artifacts, framebuffer not clearing properly, etc.) All distros I've tried so far have problems with closed source drivers, and the OSS ones don't have HW 3D I think because it's slow as hell. Also - you can't alt-tab from full screen games. I looked it up, found a post that started with "you need to modify your xconfig" closed the tab. I think linux needs a lot more polish to be viable for everyday use as multimedia/gaming desktop OS, I would love to ditch the windows partition and rebooting but I don't think it's going to happen soon.

yock• 14 years ago

I do not see Valve releasing clients for every distro out there.

I guess that would depend on how the client software is built and if they utilize the shared libraries included in the Linux distribution. If dependencies are compiled into the distributed binaries, it's really not that hard to repackage the artifacts into different packages for different systems.

rsanchez1• 14 years ago

Yes, lets bring DRM to linux.

paol• 14 years ago

DRM is the games publishers' choice, no matter what distribution platform they use. Steam doesn't force DRM on publishers and there are plenty of games there without DRM.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

This is fantastic news! All the games I want to play are available on Linux, but, due the lack of the convenience that Steam offers has been off-putting. I can finally enjoy most of my favorite games right in my favorite environment...

muhfuhkuh2• 14 years ago

So, no more install.sh scripts that you have to chmod +x, no more "undefined symbol" errors from games expecting old library files, no dependency hell (though, admittedly, I don't encounter those as much anymore).

That I can definitely get behind!

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

Nope , just wait 10 minutes for Steam to load , check DRM and do all updates and your ready to go!

muhfuhkuh2• 14 years ago

Believe me, I'd wait a few more seconds for it to do that than it erroring out to a prompt with "UNDEFINED SYMBOL: GTK_BUILDER_NEW", or worse, crash with a core dump where I'll never find it or know what to do with.

Splines• 14 years ago

That's one of my biggest annoyances with Steam. It takes so long to load.

I'm tempted to install another partition of Windows with nothing on it except steam and the drivers necessary for me to play games, to see if it'll make starting steam any faster.

shmerl14• 14 years ago

But you get all the DRM junk. Better to deal with chmod +x than with DRM restrictions.

nikomen• 14 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, game companies have salaries to pay and are interested in protecting their IP so they can continue to pay those salaries.

sliverstorm8• 14 years ago

Is that sarcasm? 'Cos while Steam restricts you in a few ways (e.g. no giving free copies to friends) the experience is so superior I continually choose to buy games on Steam over any other method.

Hell, one of the biggest reasons I patronize the Humble Indie Bundles is because I can get the games into my Steam account.

MartinCron4• 14 years ago

I know a lot of people are against DRM in any and all forms, but the Steam implementation is pretty much the definitive case study in how to do this stuff the right way.

commandar2• 14 years ago

Steam doesn't necessarily mean DRM-laden. Some games use Steamworks DRM, true, but many simply use Steam as a delivery mechanism. ARMA2, for example, can be run directly from its directly in the Steamapps folder.

pippy• 14 years ago

This is bigger than what many might think. I'd still be using Linux now if I didn't have to edit xorg.conf just to change the screen resolution. (Yes I'm aware of the http://xkcd.com/963/ comic).

The gap between programmer and user is Linux's biggest fault. For example Unity, developers recognised an issue with the UI. Instead of doing user studies and tweaking it for the better they canned Gnome and reprogrammed it. Now they're in the same situation but with an entirely different codebase.

Having a large company with a product that has to work will add consistency, and hopefully force Linux to start tweaking instead of redeveloping.

I might actually install it on my next machine.

tene• 14 years ago

It's been many years since I've had to touch xorg.conf to change screen resolution. I can do it on the command line (xrandr) or through gui tools. Do you have significantly unusual hardware?

fingerprinter• 14 years ago

1. As someone else noted, literally years since you ever had to touch config file by hand. Use Ubuntu, you'll love it.

2. I do believe your view of Unity is a bit odd. Canonical recognized that the state of Linux UI/DE was NOT going to make the leap from programmer. They saw this VIA user studies. That is when they decided to create Unity. And user study after user study Unity keeps coming out ahead of all the other DE in Linux and is on par with usability of current OSX. Point being, Ubuntu is going after users the right way. Unity in 12.04 shows this and the reviews speak to it.

3. Sometimes you simply have to rewrite. This is a fact (sorry Joel) in software. The challenge is to recognize when it is necessary and avoid it when not 100% necessary to achieve your business objectives.

jff2• 14 years ago

I don't even have an xorg.conf. Things "just work", and if they don't, I use xrandr at the command line to fix things live. It's really gotten a lot better than the bad old days of hacking around with XF86Config.

ekianjo9• 14 years ago

Chmod +x and install.sh scripts have rarely been a problem recently. It's not that complicated and most people familiar with Linux know about these basic commands.

Dependencies is still a problem, however. There are still a few cases where I had to spend significant time to make a game run correctly because of dependencies. And the online resources on this matter are scarce.

But even on a Linux backend, it's possible to introduce specific formats encompassing all needed libraries. That's what being done on the Open Pandora, where a single PND file contains, in a zipped format, the executable, all the needed libraries, and the data for the game. That way, you avoid the problem altogether.

MrScruff• 14 years ago

Perhaps tongue in cheek but it's normally easier to type sh install.sh

oscilloscope• 14 years ago

For anyone looking to get some excellent games on their Linux box, don't miss out on the current Humble Indie Bundle. Amnesia, Psychonauts, LIMBO, Sword & Sworcery, and Bastion. Pay more than $1: get codes to unlock on Steam.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

Credit to Humble Bundle for showing that DRM-free can be profitable, and Linux can make up a substantial slice of the revenue pie.

Kronopath• 14 years ago

To be clear you have to pay over the average (which at the moment is $7.86) to get Bastion. Still, this is probably the best Humble Bundle since the first one. Every game here is great.

EtienneK• 14 years ago

The games can also be unlocked from the Ubuntu Software Centre: http://blog.canonical.com/2012/05/31/humble-indie-bundle-5-c...

liljimmytables2• 14 years ago

Humble Bundles have been my primary source of linux games for a while. They deserve much kudos for upping the game, as it were.

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

I wonder if this will stop at games?

If Valve manage to deliver a platform with an easy-install that works cross distro it would seem a very good place for developers who want to port to Linux but are scared of distro fragmentation issues.

I hope that I will be able to run games under Linux that I have already bought for windows without having to re-buy them.

sliverstorm8• 14 years ago

It would be cool, but one thing about games that makes this much less painful- they usually don't depend on twenty system libraries.

In other words, I doubt Valve is going to create a hyper-robust platform that can intelligently install any package; that's completely unnecessary for their purposes.

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Steam for Linux just created it's own chrooted environment and user account and then simply installed it's own set of libraries which would then be shared amongst steam programs but not with the system in general. X11 might be complicated of course (because Steam would have to run in the same X11 session as other software), but perhaps Valve are planning this around Wayland?

What this would provide is a "distro within a distro" where only things like the kernel version would vary. This would potentially allow anything within steam to sidestep a load of the distro compatibility issues. Instead of creating a .deb and a .rpm you just package for Steam.

100983• 14 years ago

Can't wait to do a

steam install halflife2episode2

that is, if they provide a command line interface :-)

loboman• 14 years ago

not sure about episode2, but Half Life 2 works perfectly with Steam, through Wine (if you are using ubuntu, install wine, then download Steam and run it... it should work just out of the box)

parfe• 14 years ago

Can't wait to do a

steam install halflife2episode3

ysangkok2• 14 years ago

Remember how Phoronix insinuated it was just around the corner two years ago: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...

I doubt Valve need two years to port it to Linux. With Gabe's track record of taking his time developing software, I don't think we should get our hopes up too soon.

aidenn03• 14 years ago

If they want to support more than just a single version of a single linuxdistro, two years would be an incredibly fast port. Ask anyone who has done commercial software shipped binary-only for linux.

chalst• 14 years ago

That was an unsourced claim which Valve denied ("There's no Linux version that we're working on right now. ", Aug 2010).

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-08-12-valve-on-st...

joestringer• 14 years ago

Has Valve actually confirmed the rumour this time around?

TheGateKeeper• 14 years ago

I hope they have a CLI only version available for simpler server management on both local and remote systems. Having it as a desktop UI for gaming would be absolutely fantastic.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Desktop and console gaming are shrinking. [1] Mobile and browser games are growing absurdly fast. The industry is shifting to mobile. [2] Steam is about 1 decade too late.

[1] http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2011.pdf

[2] http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/video-game-industry-...

koeselitz2• 14 years ago

Well, this seems wrong on a couple of counts. For one thing, Steam has iOS and Android clients as of January of this year. For another, Steam was released a decade ago in 2002 - and if that's "1 decade too late," I'd like to see a prototype for a game distribution client that would work on the 1992 internet with 1992 hardware. (Seriously, that would be kind of neat. Very different, I suspect, but interesting nonetheless.)

Aqua_Geek• 14 years ago

> For one thing, Steam has iOS and Android clients[…]

Are you referring to the Steam Mobile app? (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/steam-mobile/id495369748?mt=8)

That's a pretty far cry from being a real client. Granted, I'm sure it's been hell trying to figure out how to play in Apple's garden - not to mention porting their engine to iOS/Android. But still, they've got a ways to go before I think we can call them a real player in the mobile gaming market.

EDIT:

> For another, Steam was released a decade ago in 2002 - and if that's "1 decade too late," […]

Good point. Steam was a huge game changer and still continues to impress me. But I think the parent was referring to being a decade too late in the sense that the industry is shifting to mobile (though I'm not sure I completely agree - not for the AAA titles on Steam, anyway).

Tuna-Fish3• 14 years ago

"2000-2008 figures are sales of new physical content at retail exclusively"

Desktop gaming is not shrinking. It's rapidly shifting from physical retail to digital delivery, and it's very likely growing very rapidly. Most of that "other delivery formats" column is Steam, not mobile and browser games.

Of course, no-one outside Valve actually knows that, because they choose do not publish sales data, and they were estimated to have 70% of the digital delivery market in 2009, and probably much more of it now.

ekianjo9• 14 years ago

It's not because one industry is shrinking that it may disappear completely. You can still grow in share inside a shrinking industry and make lots of money out of it. Desktop PC gaming has been said to shrink continously, but obviously it is still there, and quite stable at this stage.

Mobile and browser games may be growing very, very fast, but that's a very fractioned world, based on micro-payments. That's not where you'll see most of the "AAA" titles in the near future anyway.

Overall, there are a lot of different needs to cater to, and people playing on browsers are probably very different from the ones playing on consoles, and so on. None of this segments is going to fade away any time soon.

shangrila• 14 years ago

Linux has finally grown up. It's getting DRM!

sliverstorm8• 14 years ago

When has it not had DRM? There is boatloads of corporate software that runs on Linux that interfaces with a license manager, for example.

phazmatis• 14 years ago

Hopefully they don't bite off more than they can chew and try to run on more than one flavor of linux. Ubuntu AMD64 LTS ought to be enough for anyone.

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

Another thing to think about here:

It very interesting to me to think about Valve's motivations for doing this. One theory is that they want to develop a console (which I have heard denounced as a far fetches rumour on here).

So if we assume that this is not the case, and that you have a smart and well established company like Valve porting their flagship products to the Linux platform; what does that say about how they see the future for Linux in the consumer space?

In other threads we have people worried that the coming UEFIgate will leave the majority of devices locked out of running a Linux OS. If this is the case then why would Valve now be deciding to take on the task of porting everything over to a platform that was as good as dead to the consumer?

dkersten3• 14 years ago

Maybe they're preparing in case Windows 8 doesn't do so well?

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

In which case are they predicting a mass exodus of PC users from Windows to desktop Linux? Or are they more interested in creating a Linux port as a step towards porting it to future Linux based platforms (ChromeBook/Box?)?

If the future is ARM based devices and UEFI then people won't be able to install Linux even Windows 8 sucks to an obscene degree.

regularfry• 14 years ago

I think they're preparing in case Windows 8 does do well. If Microsoft can put a working app store into Windows 8, and require it for delivering everything signable to run on Windows 9, Steam's toast.

jebblue• 14 years ago

Ok Valve is starting to rock. If it works they will start receiving my money again. Time to upgrade my hardware - when it happens!

shadowmint• 14 years ago

Well, since android is basically a posix compliant linux system with a ui layer on top, this seems like an obvious step in the direction of having a full android steam client, which will be a massive win for them, especially since I imagine much of osx code base ports across relatively easily.

(Yes, I know there are differences, but the point is that the same base code can be ported easy if they do it right)

plq• 14 years ago

I guess this means I should start looking at BSD as my primary desktop OS :)

Valve Says "Yes" To Steam Linux This Year

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