Valve Launches SteamOS Sale, Confirms A Lot Of New Linux Games

[kenjitamura]

My purchases:

Borderlands 2 ROW 4.99 USD
PAYDAY 2 5.99 USD
Saints Row IV Game of the Century Edition 7.49 USD
Transistor 6.79 USD
Metro 2033 Redux 12.49 USD

The start of my "Full Controller Support" collection for the steam box. I'll be sure to grab Shadows of Mordor, Batman: Arkham Knight, the Talos Principle, and Borderlands the Pre-sequel sometime in the future. But I probably won't be building my steam box until around November when the Steam controller and Skylake are out. For now I just wanted to grab the most enticing low hanging fruit from this deal and I'm hoping to see other titles on sale sometime before the controller lands.

I also hope some cheaper HTPC cases hit the market before then because right now I'm looking at spending $95 on one with all the features I want. Compare that to a $35 ATX Mid-Tower with feature parity and it feels ridiculous there's a $60 price hike for a more compact case.

[hiryu]

Linux sales?

I'm interested in Shadow of Mordor and Pay Day 2. It's also nice that they're on sale... but there's no Linux support yet. If I buy them now in Linux to take advantage of the sale, will it still count as a Linux sale? I won't ever install them under Windows to begin with.

These games are all under the SteamOS sale, but do the sales count as Linux sales for titles not yet released for Linux? Does anyone have any idea?

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamos_sale

I assume my Batman pre-order must count toward linux as it's a pre-order (can't play it yet in ANY OS and I bought it in Linux of course) with Linux support already explicitly listed. I've been waiting for Arkham Knight for a veeery long time. I'm in shock that we're getting a Linux release. I love the previous games in that series (especially Origins).

[ObiWan]

You know GabeN has succeeded when AAA studios produce special trailers for Linux releases... holy shit

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor for Linux trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YDJN7MkZMk

Feral Interactive is just a Mac porter, like Aspyr, so not really a AAA games developer.

[kenjitamura]

I'm interested in Shadow of Mordor and Pay Day 2. It's also nice that they're on sale... but there's no Linux support yet. If I buy them now in Linux to take advantage of the sale, will it still count as a Linux sale? I won't ever install them under Windows to begin with.

These games are all under the SteamOS sale, but do the sales count as Linux sales for titles not yet released for Linux? Does anyone have any idea?

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamos_sale

I assume my Batman pre-order must count toward linux as it's a pre-order (can't play it yet in ANY OS and I bought it in Linux of course) with Linux support already explicitly listed. I've been waiting for Arkham Knight for a veeery long time. I'm in shock that we're getting a Linux release. I love the previous games in that series (especially Origins).

The vast majority of cross-platform games on Steam label themselves as steamplay titles which means when you buy it on Steam you can play it on any platform. I'm assuming Valve wouldn't be listing titles on their SteamOS sale page that wouldn't allow you to buy them now and use on SteamOS later when it's released.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_...9439-QHKN-1308

[liam]

I'm sure he also didn't expect to already see multiple demos from different software and hardware companies already working this early, so.... What he was naively guessing with no inside information is just his personal guess.

It's coming out later this year - how fast games pick it up is still something of an open question, though. It looks like Valve will probably be an early adopter and they can push out a lot of linux native games relatively quickly if they want to.

Perhaps. He said it with SO much authority, though
AFAIK, khronos has said that the api won't be finished before the end of the year. Assuming things go well, it will hopefully be finalized by this time next year, or a bit earlier. I expect the amd/nvidia/intel will have their drivers ready very soon there after, but the games are another story. Again, it things go well, we'll see some games next year.

[erendorn]

Perhaps. He said it with SO much authority, though
AFAIK, khronos has said that the api won't be finished before the end of the year. Assuming things go well, it will hopefully be finalized by this time next year, or a bit earlier. I expect the amd/nvidia/intel will have their drivers ready very soon there after, but the games are another story. Again, it things go well, we'll see some games next year.

Drivers can be there sooner, as the SPIR-V spec are already out there

[Tiger_Coder]

Vulkan will be sooner then you think

• PowerVR demo shows graphics chip makers already know the details of Vulkan. All of them should already have some form of Vulkan driver in house. We might see partial supported drivers very soon.
• Valve and Epic also in Vulkan community. Dota 2 has shown running in Vulkan. They should also have backend support for current version of Vulkan in their engines. We might see vulkan support as experimental in Valve games soon.
• Like HTML 5, Vulkan did not need to be finalize to have support. All the major players already know and helping to make it and when it will be finalize, most of them already have good support.

Personally I would expect some Dota 2 command line switch which enable Vulkan support on Nvidia's driver with also some experimental switch to enable Vulkan in driver to arrive before October. Let's see what happens.

[GreatEmerald]

Glad to see Batman. Is that using UE4? If so that's encouraging given that it's likely to be one of the more used engine for AAA, we might see more stuff on Linux.

No, it's UE3.

[Licaon]

These games are all under the SteamOS sale, but do the sales count as Linux sales for titles not yet released for Linux? Does anyone have any idea?

You need to use the Steam interface anyway, what OS are you running it on? I guess that's the one that counts

There I fixed it for you:

Yeah, as expected they starts to advertising SteamOS more explicitly not GNU/Linux.

Seriously, does that even matter?

the witcha 3
i don't know if this is good or not that good, given witcha 2 history (read „port“ here)...

I can't find the exact post ( here somewhere https://github.com/virtual-programmi...2-linux/issues ), but the eON dude mentioned getting their layer up on par for DX10/DX11 compatibility...

[eydee]

While new games on linux are welcome, this is marketing BS. Phoronix says "a lot of new linux games". Valve says may of the most popular games. Then I look at the page and it's only approx. 50 of them, most of which are noname/indie/not so popular/not new. This is a good start, but nothing fancy. The big publishers are still nowhere to be found.