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

[Svartalf]

It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

Actually... If you want to get the "Games for Windows" label, yes you do.

If you want to sell in venues like Wal-Mart and elsewhere, you'd better be one of the big players or have that label on your box.

[Svartalf]

Yes , but if you are not selling Linux, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from catering to that demographic (Unless they are actually not buying a game because they are thinking about switching to Linux and don't want another reason not to switch).
It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

(And now actually addressing your remarks...)

It's kind of like a balancing act, really- miss the window or execute anything other than nearly flawlessly, you typically cease to be as a company.

There is a threshold at which you start considering the possibility of catering to a certain crowd. If you've not been about there was a threshold for Windows gaming versus DOS that happened about around Win98's heyday- which is actually very similar to the one we're discussing now. There was a handful of BIG game studios that were ahead of the game (no pun intended) on Windows that just didn't execute as well as they ought to have and died. 7th Level being one of them from that era. There were quite a few DOS era winners that missed the boat and weren't ready and now are no-more, either shuttering their doors or being absorbed into EA, Activision, etc.

If you bet against Linux, you might end up in the latter boat- and even EA and the lot of that size aren't invulnerable to that. If you bet on it and fail to execute right, you could end up like the former and flame-out like Loki Games did.

It's because of THAT thinking that many studios and the publishers are sitting on the fence. It's a possible sea-change moment in the industry and they're trying, mainly in vain, to augur which way the seas are flowing on them with Linux.

You're at the usage threshold that they can see that is leading them to start thinking about what they might/might not do- it just doesn't always go the way we'd like for it to, or in the timeframe we'd like to see it.

[madrang]

Hi Guys today I browsed in the new Beta GCFs from CS Source Beta. It
seems Valve planed to use the OSX Engine for UNIX (Linux). I found in
the "counter-strike source beta engine.gcf" a file named "hl2.sh".

This is the Code from the "hl2.sh"...

#!/bin/bash

# figure out the absolute path to the script being run a bit
# non-obvious, the ${0%/*} pulls the path out of $0, cd's into the
# specified directory, then uses $PWD to figure out where that
# directory lives - and all this in a subshell, so we don't affect
# $PWD

GAMEROOT=$(cd "${0%/*}" && echo $PWD)

#determine platform
UNAME=`uname`
if [ "$UNAME" == "Darwin" ]; then
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="${GAMEROOT}"/bin:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
elif [ "$UNAME" == "Linux" ]; then
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${GAMEROOT}"/bin:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
fi

if [ -z $GAMEEXE ]; then
GAMEEXE=hl2_osx
fi

ulimit -n 2048

# and launch the game
cd "$GAMEROOT"

STATUS=42
while [ $STATUS -eq 42 ]; do
${DEBUGGER} "${GAMEROOT}"/${GAMEEXE} "$@"
STATUS=$?
done
exit $STATUS

Update : This is not just in the GFC files, it is also in the CSS
beta folder in Steam apps.

[Julius]

@Svartalf:

I highly doubt that any company is seriously thinking about Linux as a game changing system like the switch from dos to windows. I doubt they even do it in regard to MACs, and they are probably right.
Especially now that Microsoft got back on track with the not quite as bad Windows7.

There is a general move to multi-platform games for some years however, and some companies are realizing that MACs (and to a lesser amount Linux) might be a small but also profitable market if games are made with portability in mind and thus costs to port to yet another system is low.

You can see this btw in many remarks about Linux ports, that due to the myriads of different Linux systems official support is too difficult, meaning for the profits that could be made its still too costly (id is a case in point as they don't officially support Linux).

[madrang]

Hi Guys today I browsed in the new Beta GCFs from CS Source Beta. It
seems Valve planed to use the OSX Engine for UNIX (Linux). I found in
the "counter-strike source beta engine.gcf" a file named "hl2.sh".

This is the Code from the "hl2.sh"...



Update : This is not just in the GFC files, it is also in the CSS
beta folder in Steam apps.

@Svartalf:

You can see this btw in many remarks about Linux ports, that due to the myriads of different Linux systems official support is too difficult, meaning for the profits that could be made its still too costly (id is a case in point as they don't officially support Linux).

Well i don't know how much valve will make in profits but they are working on porting source games to linux.

[numasan]

http://digitizor.com/2010/08/22/valve-puts-an-end-to-the-steam-on-linux-rumors/

Would Phoronix care to explain?

[AHSauge]

I don't think we can just assume that there 100% definitive want be any Linux port of Steam based on that. Sure, it's an official person speaking, but that doesn't automatically make it 100% true or accurate. We've seen some sort of client working in Linux, so already there we do know that they aren't 100% truthful. In my opinion they could simply be denying that they're working on it because they can't or don't want to commit to anything just yet. Saying that there will be a port would create bad publicity if they can't keep that promise, and they want to make sure that doesn't happen.

I'm not saying that this is the case, but it could be, and we'll never know for sure unless there suddenly pops up a more of less fully working client or anyone from Valve says something else.

[nanonyme]

Maybe they simply abandoned the port because it was getting too much uncontrollable publicity?

[AHSauge]

Not that I'm an expert or something, but I doubt that. If anything, the publicity only shows there's interest for a Linux port. Valve don't need to control this kind of publicity as it's not hurting them or their products, they just can't promise something they aren't certain they can keep. In other words, they don't want to repeat what Epic did, and we all know why that is so.

[Macukat]

Doug Lombardi: There's no Linux version that we're working on right now. ...