Steam coming to Mac OS/Linux?

[portets]

How do you get around the fact that the major computer chip manufacturers are monstrously huge mega-corps?

The game distribution companies are usually small fry by comparison.

If we want to be pure as far as our support for the corporations are concerned, we are going to be living a very lonely Robinson Crusoe kind of life. If that is even possible these days.

I have never owned a console before; I always liked the technology of the PS3, but they were over priced in my opinion. Since the price drop coincided with me thinking about upgrading my No.2. box, I found that purchasing a PS3 was very much a financially viable solution.

I don't like Sony, but I use their products; I don't like many of Apple's policies, but I use their products; I don't like what the oil based consumption driven paradigms that are driving our world to ruin stand for, though I still drive a car & go to the supermarket.

We are ALL caught up in being participants in that, that we don't believe in, even to the point of being participants & totally averse to it at the same time.

This is an extremely complicated time we are living in, we have to try not to loose ourselves, or forget what we stand for, which is all too easy, when we are immersed in the unwitting compromises that we have to make every day.

i very, very much agree with your views.

we don't have to be locked up in our house planning to take down major corporations.

but every single piece of retaliation is good. no matter how small. whether or not that retaliation is good for the world, or your mental heath is a different story.

[oXYnary]

Curious. Will it be possible to run the OSX client on Ubuntu through a translator like wine? After all if Valve is releasing a OSX version of their games, that means opengl (I.E. native). Which is less conversion overhead for a system versus if one used Wine.

[handy]

...
but every single piece of retaliation is good. no matter how small. whether or not that retaliation is good for the world, or your mental heath is a different story.

What ever it takes for us to think that we may be sane, in this insane world.

[ubuntp]

March 8, 2010 – Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Unfortunately this doesn't make Steam on Linux any more likely, simply because there is just too much fragmentation. This is usually a strength of Linux, because everyone can tailor it to their needs, but a major weakness in this case. Mac is a very simple platform.

[Objekt]

Yeah, support for OpenGL is not anywhere near saying Steam will run natively on Linux.

Then there's sound. I don't know what API Apple uses for sound, but it most likely isn't anything compatible with PulseAudio.

[handy]

When I read the Valve statement quoted above (linked in another thread), I realised that they have chosen not to use Transgaming's Cider, which I think is a good move, it should improve the reliability/quality of the games.

I have played a Cider(ed) game or two on OS X, & they were somewhat buggy.

[n0dix]

Recent news (i expect not only for me): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODA1Nw

[portets]

Recent news (i expect not only for me): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODA1Nw

yeah, i read it earlier. i recommend people read that.

do you guys see what this means? it's only speculation but: generally when a company won't support linux they tell you straight up. if they do want to support it, they tell you.

when they tell you they have no comment, it means they are going over the options and haven't reached a for sure decision yet.

right now is our chance to persuade them! sign the petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/st4lin...tion-sign.html

and send them an e-mail with the subject titled "Linux!"

contact@valvesoftware.com

[u235sentinel]

yeah, i read it earlier. i recommend people read that.

do you guys see what this means? it's only speculation but: generally when a company won't support linux they tell you straight up. if they do want to support it, they tell you.

when they tell you they have no comment, it means they are going over the options and haven't reached a for sure decision yet.

right now is our chance to persuade them! sign the petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/st4lin...tion-sign.html

and send them an e-mail with the subject titled "Linux!"

contact@valvesoftware.com

Probably wouldn't hurt to join the Valve group "Steam for Linux" either. There were a couple hundred already in that group last time I checked. It's been a while so I guess I'll check again.

[Objekt]

Let's suppose Valve, and other major publishers, begin selling to Linux users. What, if any, is the potential for the evil of DRM to infect Ubuntu?

Shenanigans like Starforce, limited installations, requiring a constant Internet connection for a single-player game (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft!), and attempts to prevent the user from making legitimate backups of install media, are not things I want to see repeated in the Linux context. I certainly won't buy any games with such "features," except possibly used. Some publishers are trying their hardest to kill the used games market too, by forcing you to tie a particular copy to your identity (e.g. Windows Live). As with all DRM schemes, it's only the paying customers who are punished.

I don't think Ubuntu is as DRM-friendly as Windows, because Ubuntu is open-source, but maybe that is not true. Some Windows DRM schemes are really just thinly-disguised rootkits, and rootkits were around long before Windows.