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.
