'Steam'd Penguins' - Steam to get Linux support, bringing L4D2 along

Comment

As if Greenlight, Big Picture and whatever else they’ve got working underneath their pots and pans, bubbling away, wasn’t enough, Valve have gone and announced that Steam, and Left 4 Dead 2, are coming to Linux. Free hats for everyone! Ahem, that’s a different game. But still, that’s pretty great news, if only because it finally places Steam in a position where they’re now on every different kind of beige box.

The news comes from an official Linux blog that Valve have set up to talk about what they’re doing with the platform. They’re going to be focusing on Ubuntu to begin with, which I’ll admit means little to me beyond the fact that I think it’s probably the most popular, and I think I drank its tropical fruit goodness as a child, as well as listening to a terrifying theme song. 
Left 4 Dead 2, the only game that Steam Linux is going to ship with (for the moment) is admittedly not running quite as well on Linux as they’d like it to on Windows, but once they’ve got it optimised as they want it to be, they’re going to start porting over the rest of the Source library. Which means that lucky Linux players are going to be getting Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half Life 2 and, when it comes out, Dota 2. Which, while not the complete Steam library, is still a pretty great selection of games. 
As with Mac support, it’s unlikely that it’s going to mean everyone on Windows is going to pack up shop and move over to Linux’s open source goodness just because there are a few games on it, and even if Valve are doing the hard work of supporting it, it’s unlikely many other publishers are. Indies might, though, as they’ve done with Mac, so it’s certainly not going to be a wasted effort.
Either way, it’s going to be interesting to see what novelty hats they put in TF2 for linux users. The Mac earbuds are now worth around $30, if you’re savvy about selling them.

Login to comment

Enter your PCGamesN username.
Enter the password that accompanies your username.
Forgotten your password?

Call of Duty: Ghosts screenshots drift spookily up through the floor into your monitor

FIFA 14 is getting a new engine on consoles, but not on PC

Thief is on the Xbox, which means we get a screenshot

Xbox One Kinect for Windows is coming "at some point down the line"

14.5 million people have played Diablo 3, for an average of 193 hours each

Battlefield 4 will report for duty on October 29

Neverwinter servers sent back in time to prevent Auction exploit from happening

Call of Duty Ghosts revealed: sympathetic characters, dog companion, massive explosions

Door Kickers alpha available now, hurt doors and shoot men with real time tactics

Stompy bots crash into Kickstarter with Heavy Gear Assault

Guild Wars 2 price tag cut permanently

Snute puts on a StarCraft 2 clinic, SHOUTcraft Grand Finals tonight

World of Tanks 8.6 shakes up artillery tiers, leaves them "a lot more balanced"

Watch this: two men fly an airship in full-body VR kits

"I don’t think we really know what a perfect MOBA is yet," says the man in charge of EA's Dawngate

10% of laptops sold before April this year featured touchscreens, report claims

Valve reverse Dota 2 update, leave non-functional items behind

Battlefield 4 announcement incoming as Xbox reveal looms

Team Fortress 2 VR support arrives on OSX