From Phoronix (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=source_linux&num=1):
“There have been rumors since last year that Valve may be serious about porting Source games to Linux after Valve Software began seeking a senior software engineer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Valve Software has yet to officially announce Linux clients for any of its software, but at Phoronix we have received information confirming that Valve is indeed porting its very popular Source engine to the Linux platform.”
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#1 by Meneer R on May 7, 2008 - 5:04 pm
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The rumors have been going around.
But phoronix is _confirming_ unofficially. (that is: they have insider information)
Logically we won’t get an official press release any time soon.
But Phoronix has extra details; and they were completely right about ADM/ATI way before it happened.
It will have a huge impact nevertheless. I don’t think Valve is coming to profit from linux users. They are not coming _for_ the linux users, they came to bring them.
Microsoft is now a direct competitior of them. And you can’t beat them on their own platform. They need linux as much as we need them. I can’t count the amount of people dual-booting just for games.
Finally, steam is exactly what game developpers need. Some standarized environment. I wouldn’t be suprised if it came with its own sdl and opengl libraries and such. Like a sort of mini-game-oriented-distrobution.
Also, steam often had these hardware surveys in the client. They must have noted the amount of users that were running wine. And also, that these users stopped purchasing new games.
#2 by Vadim P. on May 7, 2008 - 9:33 pm
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Oh this’ll be awesome. I do hope they get around the “Why isn’t my distro supported? And my distro! And my distro! But mine doesn’t it different and it doesn’t work! I know you’re just all M$ luvrs!” Linux problem.
#3 by Rioting_pacifist on May 7, 2008 - 10:20 pm
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Vadim hoepfully theyll offer 32 and 64 bit compiles, like firefox, that way its supported across all ditros that have the right libraries
While i welcome the news, I doubt its true, the only thing that will convince me they have any plans is if they port the steam client, they already have plenty of linux compatible games we just need to get the client working natively and then were talking.
OTOH, linux doesnt have many games perhaps theyve realised that if they ported to linux they would
1) get opengl storted which means HDR & future updates in xp
2) get almost 100% linux gamers to work through thier client, sure there arnt many of us but 0.2% of all pc users (assuming 1/5 of us want to play games, is still a hell of a lot of users.
3)Theres money to be made on mobile gaming platforms, e.g HL1 on andriod, hell imagine some sort of CS on your phone port for your phone
4)omnipresence, developers will go “hmm we could ship CDs with three different binaries all over the world, or we could just pay valve”
5)Its all a crazy ass conspiracy to get carmak/merge with ID to form some sort of supper game company.
6)I will finally shut up
#4 by Jacob Hume on May 7, 2008 - 11:44 pm
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I sure hope so. I’ve been an avid gamer for years (I especially enjoy the Valve lineup), and have been attempting to get rid of my Windows partition for quite a while. Allowing Steam to run natively in Linux would finally take care of that – and would begin to chisel away the “there’s no games for Linux” argument.
#5 by kilis on May 8, 2008 - 1:19 am
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Yeah that will be cool.
#6 by Stefan on May 8, 2008 - 6:50 am
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I just hope they GPL their Steam-Client so that distributions can include it by default and also patch it themselves/make it fit perfectly into their colorschemes and menubars etc.
But that probably wont happen. :/ It will be just as proprietary as Skype or ATI-Drivers and suck terribly. But whatever.