Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

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The games will work if there is a Linux port on Steam and you've already bought for Windows/Mac. You don't have to buy twice. However there seems to be a few games with working Linux ports that aren't available in Steam under Linux yet, bastion being one example.

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.

>You don't have to buy twice.

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).

The ports are currently free on the beta, assuming you have bought the original. Seems unlikely that they will change that as "buy once, run anywhere" seems to be a big selling point of Steam.

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.

>or even make it a requirement to get onto Steam

Let's hope not.

> >or even make it a requirement to get onto Steam > 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!

Valve doesn't have any business muscling developers into this or that platform. It's wrong if Microsoft does it, and it's wrong if Valve does it. Let the better platform win, in an open and competitive way. (I'm confident Linux would win out in such a contest, btw.)

IIRC they currently mandate Windows compatibility to launch any game on Steam. You can't publish a Mac only game for example.

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.

As it stands the mac ports on steam have all been free so it stands to reason it would be the same for linux.

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.

FWIW, that's not a hard rule. There is at least one recent game (Call of Duty: Black Ops) that you have to buy separately if you want to play on both Mac and PC.

I think that's because it's a different publisher (i.e. farmed out to Aspyr).

It's also the same version that's up on the Mac App Store which has limited multi player functionality.

Currently on the Steam client I have installed on my laptop that runs Mint, I can install roughly 20 games from my existing Steam library. Some of these games were available the moment I installed the client, others gained working Linux ports and became available in the Linux client with no action on my part.

Beside the Call of Duty port for Mac mentioned below, I know of no other game that has required multiple purchases for multiple platforms.

The incentive to game developers to port to Linux is that they expand their market by allowing people who only run Linux to play and they also make their product more attractive to people like myself who dual-boot Windows and Linux, but would prefer not to have to reboot into Windows to play a game.

I can confirm ports are free. I have Steam on both Mac and Windows.

Not all are. If you own CoD4 for PC, you don't Aspyr's Mac port.

> I believe most of the Steam Linux games available are native ports and don't use Wine.

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.

> 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.

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.

I've read (but can't confirm) that many Mac games run through Wine. Wine's bad reputation mostly comes from the one-size fits all approach normally used. If the developers of each game individually configured, and packaged, their game with Wine, they would all run quite well. This is probably the path many games will take, if at all, due to the cost of trying to redevelop a Windows-only game for Linux.

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