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

[snuwoods]

Times though are certainly great for Linux gaming with Unigine Corp starting off the week by expanding their Linux game development competition to hopefully provide three new Linux games, Alien Arena 2011 is about to be released, Frozenbyte's Trine Linux port is nearing completion, there's a new dedicated Linux game porting company, and Humble Indie Bundle #2 was just released. It's only Tuesday and there's already all of this Linux gaming news and the week is far from over.

At the very least, there's one more Linux gaming related item coming up and it will be exclusively detailed on Phoronix this weekend or perhaps Monday.

I'm thinking this may be suggestive.

[NiBu]

Here is a short cut from an interview with icculus (http://www.hardware.no/artikler/ryan..._simms/68450/2).

Are you working on a exiting Linux-port now that you're allowed to talk about?

I've gotten into the habit of not talking about projects until the moment they ship... I've had more than one fall apart after announcing it.

But I will say: as UT3 is wrapping up, we've got a portable version of UnrealEngine3, so my next move will be to aggressively court Epic's licensees. Several of them have expressed interest in Mac and Linux support, and it'll will be nice to start getting them running on the latest codebase.

There are so many projects I'd love to do in 2009. Everything seems possible this year.

Maybe phoronix should learn his lesson.

[commella]

Ummm
UE3 has been ported to mac.

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-BLGOTYEMAC/borderlands-game-of-the-year-edition-mac

What happend icculus?

[yogi_berra]

Cool. Call of Duty: Blops, Portal 2, HL2, SupCom2, E2. All in Linux native format delivered by Steam for Linux.

Ohh it's a bunch of indies and it's not using a mythical content delivery platform.

Your mistake.

Just to point something out here, Valve knows exactly how many people are playing their games in wine. Wine as of 1.2 reports the Audio driver in Steam's hardware survey as "Wine wave out mapper." There is no need to be a jackass about Michaels poor phrasing.

[deanjo]

Ummm
UE3 has been ported to mac.

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-BLGOTYEMAC/borderlands-game-of-the-year-edition-mac

What happend icculus?

Boarderlands for Mac uses Cider. Not really a true port but more of a PC version with proprietary wine based libraries.

[deanjo]

Heh... You've gotten enough of one, not once, but twice now.

I'm afraid that old saw's not going to go for much longer...

Your reading too much into the HB/HB2 sales Svartalf. A lot of die hard "gamers" haven't purchased the bundle simply because they have better games available to them even though it is a "decide what you pay model" where as a lot of the linux gamers will buy anything available do to "game starvation" in linux. Even OS X has a larger number of users despite the naysayers that love to say "Mac is only big in North America." and "Mac users are used to paying more for their software, they are used to overspending" (which is funny because it looks like linux users are the ones that are willing to overspend according to the stats). Take that bundle, break it into individual games, slap a $20-$60 price tag on each one and see how it flies. Even with the present model, Win users are dwarfing the other OS's.

Big game publishers are not going to slap a "decide what you pay" model on their games nor are they likely to do away with items like DRM. These are two big factors in HB success.

[Kano]

Of course for the games in the bundle(s) you don't need a highend pc. Some only require 2d mode and others a tiny bit 3d. You can not compare that against latest win/console titles.

[snuwoods]

What is "overspending"?
If the mac crowd overspends, it is because they comply with the commercialized apple model of things.
The HB chartered into the crowd-sourcing phenomenon. Pay-what-you-want enables the generous to be generous and the stingy to be stingy. If the devs are satiated, who cares how much it costs?
This model is only for devs that care about making games. Those that want $60 per game(*cough cough* activision) suck their community dry, and effectively weed out potential customers.

[deanjo]

What is "overspending"?

Paying more for the same item available on other systems at a lower price.

If the mac crowd overspends, it is because they comply with the commercialized apple model of things.

It could be said that linux users overspend out of desperation to get more recognition.

The HB chartered into the crowd-sourcing phenomenon. Pay-what-you-want enables the generous to be generous and the stingy to be stingy. If the devs are satiated, who cares how much it costs?

I'm not saying the HB devs should not be satisfied. Just don't expect the big boys to be satisfied utilizing the same business model.

This model is only for devs that care about making games. Those that want $60 per game(*cough cough* activision) suck their community dry, and effectively weed out potential customers.

I wouldn't say they suck the community dry. If anything the largest communities are from the commercial games. WoW, COD, HL2, UE3, etc etc all have HUGE communities that are doing quite well. The big boys don't care about ~ 1.8 million in sales when one of their games are capable of selling in excess of a billion dollars in sales.

[Svartalf]

Your reading too much into the HB/HB2 sales Svartalf.

Numbers, deanjo... NUMBERS. It matters little which "crowd" bought or didn't buy- or for what "reasons".

It SHOULD be noted that everything you've said up to this point was also said ages back on servers, cluster computing, and mobile devices. Not very accurate then...not likely to be accurate now.

Big game publishers are not going to slap a "decide what you pay" model on their games nor are they likely to do away with items like DRM. These are two big factors in HB success.

Really, deanjo... I think you're going to find the situation a bit different- they don't care what made it successful, only that it was and they got X number of takers for Linux. Seriously. I'm just going to have to agree to strongly disagree with your remarks (which have been shot down before, mind...) and go on.

I'm off trying to make it all come together and if I listened to remarks like yours, I'd have...

1) Never got into Linux development in the first place- something that has garnered me a substantive (Very substantive over the last 8...) income for well over the last 15 of my 25 years in the industry...

2) Never got into Linux game porting/development- something that's looking like it's getting somewhere and not just because it had a "pay what you want" amount set for it. Do keep in mind that the "pay what you want" amount the Linux users paid was averaging higher both HIB's than the Mac and Windows users (There's a message there...you choose to ignore it. Your choice...but businesses look at those numbers and think about what they might/might not do...) and there's a solid figure of how many would pay an average of $13-15 per seat over the $7.80 or so per seat the Windows users did. I made quite a bit of money with that. I plan on working on repeating it with other things down the line over the next couple of years.

If I'd have listened to people making remarks like yours, I'd not be where I am today.