Steam For Linux Will Launch In 2012 [Slashdot]

[DP ServBot]

An anonymous reader writes "Gabe Newell has responded to an email asking if Steam for Linux will be released this year with the simple answer 'Yes.' That means at some point in the next 7 months anyone running Linux will be able to download Steam and start playing a number of games, including at least one Valve title (most likely Left 4 Dead 2). After that the emphasis will be on game developers to start porting their Steam games over to Linux. 2012 could be a great year for gaming on Linux. The news follows the revelation in April that Valve was indeed working on a Linux port of its digital games service. At the time though, and as with all Valve software, we had no idea when it would get released."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[homerhomer]

Damn I love Steam! They seem to understand that if a person chooses another OS that they shouldn't be left in the cold. If tomorrow I decide to buy MAC or Switch to Linux that I can still play there games. This make so much sense. I can't stand vendor lock and even though these games will be stuck on Steam, it's a really nice place to be.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Hopefully the support isn't as halfassed as their Mac client's.

I know a lot of Mac users and they all say the same thing: The client blows.

[jb143]

Damn I love Steam! They seem to understand that if a person chooses another OS that they shouldn't be left in the cold. If tomorrow I decide to buy MAC or Switch to Linux that I can still play there games. This make so much sense. I can't stand vendor lock and even though these games will be stuck on Steam, it's a really nice place to be.

It's still up to the developers to port their games to Linux though...and until now perhaps, there has never been much of a push to do that.

[Jorpho]

Well, there's no shortage of indie games for Linux, at least. And something tells me the devs didn't recompile Psychonauts from scratch when they included it in the most recent Humble Bundle – there's probably a good amount of wrapping going on. And presumably if one Source engine game can be ported, the rest should follow in short order.

And then the next version of Ubuntu will come out and everything will be broken.

[otaku]

this is great (indie games on linux!) one thing linux lacks is gaming big reason I've never really adopted a distro fully just played around and such. This will help

[kedawa]

It's a nice gesture, but Linux can't compete with Windows when it comes to gaming performance. The driver situation is pretty bleak, and the graphics stack is just a mess.

this is great (indie games on linux!) one thing linux lacks is gaming big reason I've never really adopted a distro fully just played around and such. This will help

Only a handful of decent games get released for Linux based operating systems each year, but it does have emulators for just about everything, so there's no shortage of game to play.