Would the (many, many) games I've already purchased on Steam work on Linux? Will Steam for Linux ship with WINE or something similar? If not, I don't see the real value for someone like me.
I believe most of the Steam Linux games available are native ports and don't use Wine. Maybe there are some that do use Wine, but I don't imagine that they will make them available through Steam unless they are confident that they will actually work.
So the real question here is, "what is the real value of this assuming you already have a dedicated Windows PC or a dual boot for gaming?"
For myself it is nice to have a few good quality indie games available to play if I fancy a short break from coding on my Linux box without having to power cycle my PC. For serious gaming sessions Windows is still king for now.
The real question is about future games. There seems to be increasing interest in cross platform toolkits for game development, this is probably most because people want to target iOS and Android rather than Linux however.
However if it gets to the point where Linux just becomes another output format for a cross platform game engine (like unity3d) then perhaps you can expect future game titles to become available on Linux simply because the friction to launch on the platform is so low.
How do you know ports will be free? It removes most of the incentive that developers would have to make a good port: money (unless Valve pays for the ports, which would be very expensive).
Some developers still occasionally port to linux as is without any incentive other then a wider (albeit minor) possible audience.
Although given gabes apparent hate for windows, i wouldn't put it past value to pay for ports.
It's also the same version that's up on the Mac App Store which has limited multi player functionality.
I guess in terms of incentives to do ports, if Valve plans to launch a Linux based Steam box they can tempt developers with more prominent placing of games with Linux ports, a larger audience (assuming Steambox has good sales) or even flat out make it a requirement to get onto Steam.
There are also current Linux users like myself who are just more tempted to buy a game if it has a Linux port.
Let's hope not.
why not? i think if steam flex its muscle (of which it still doesn't have enough), it might jerk studios to put in the effort!
If Valve are serious about launching their own platform , they're likely to apply as much muscle as they can in order to get games on there.
Beside the Call of Duty port for Mac mentioned below, I know of no other game that has required multiple purchases for multiple platforms.
Games ported using Wine are native ports. Wine's design goal was as a library that developers would use it to port their applications to run natively on any platform Wine supported. Remember, wine is not an emulator.
That's probably why Valve wants to push Linux through a specific Steam Box hardware: that will drive a larger user base running Linux to play games. Not sure if that strategy will work, however, since it will rely heavily on third party publishers to support the platform.
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Just install WINE, Python, WineTricks and then download and install PlayonLinux to configure virtual drives.
Civilization V for example has no native Linux port, but the Windows version works fine in WINE.
There are 62 games ported to Linux so far in the Steam library.
Have fun