Steam coming to Linux, you say?

People following the Valve/Steam/Linux news already know that the awesome hackers at Valve have Left 4 Dead 2 running on Ubuntu like a champ. They know that Valve has been doing some work toward a so-called three meter display (ie, for television display), and have probably speculated that they are at least considering building a console.

This is a post about what I’m looking forward to seeing out of Valve on Linux.

Playing Games

Foremost, I’m looking to playing games without even the minor inconveniences of WINE. Often there are tweaks, there’s turning off features, or some minor thorn of just about every game I’ve played on WINE. WINE is awesome, and it’s made some money for game companies, as there are games I bought because I knew that I could play them.

But it’s not perfect, and for people that eschew yak shaving to play a game, the set of titles they might purchase and play drops (I’m not thinking about side projects like PlayOnLinux, as I’ve not tried them).

For a lot of games, if they make it to Linux, that means getting full eye candy. Full features.

Building Games

Secondly, I’m hopeful that the game creation tools will be coming to Linux. Some of these kind-of-sort-of run under WINE, but my experience with these hasn’t been nearly as good as with games. Even if the current generation tools don’t make it, maybe the next generation will.

The lower the barrier to entry for creating game content, the more that will be created, and the better games we will see. That’s true of technology in general.

I’ve made a few maps years ago under Windows, but the few times I tried to build maps under WINE it was much clunkier and fraught with peril. I’m very hopeful that in another decade or so it will be commonplace for gamers to be mappers and modelers, even if their extent of mapping and modeling is just to customize existing maps and models.

Building Bridges

But, like others, my biggest hope is that this work will result in greater support from the four corners of the earth for Open Source and Linux. That it will widen the market for gaming, while making governments and businesses evaluate Linux as a greater possibility for their employees.

Just like Android has pushed a device with Linux to far more hands than ever before, a Valve console could do it again. But so can Steam for Linux. There’s plenty of people that keep a second computer or dual booting just for games. There also a general perception that Windows is the king because of gaming. Linux getting more gaming means that even Apple may end up supporting iTunes for Linux one day.

A side bet is, assuming the success of Steam for Linux, could that competition bring Microsoft back from the brink? For years Microsoft has had the capacity to push the computing world far beyond its current state. But it’s had no reason. That’s harmed its server market, which hasn’t been very competitive.

Conclusion

In any case, as a long-term fan of Valve’s games, I look forward to playing Half-Life 3 on Linux (just like I played Half-Life 2 here), and with any luck the Black Mesa modification can be playable on Linux too.