Valve to Port Steam Games to Linux?
Yesterday, I received a link from Pici in #ubuntu-offtopic on IRC. Initially, it just looked like a job offering stating Valve (you know, the creators of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress and all that jazz?) wanted a senior software engineer (whatever that is), but after skimming it, my eyes rested on a single sentence under “Responsibilities”:
- Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.
WOW! I see great things coming to the Linux platform in gaming; I’ve had great success installing and running Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source in Wine, despite having rather low FPS.
If I were able to run these games natively, it would be a dream come true. Do you think you have what it takes to port these games to Windows, plus the rest of the responsibilities in the linked job offering? Come on, punk. Make my day.
Lasse Havelund on September 15th, 2007
Tags: counter strike, day of defeat, games, gaming, Half Life 2, linux, Miscellaneous, orange box, portal, Steam, team fortress, Valve
Jad responded on September 15th, 2007 at 4:25 pm | permalink
This is an amazing news dude,
Porting Valve’s games into Linux would be amazing.
Chris Vicius responded on September 18th, 2007 at 7:26 pm | permalink
This is a big step for linux. Is a good step because the only company that support the community beside ID was Epic, now with valve other companies may be want to develop games for linux kernel too. For me this is a great news.
Eragon responded on March 15th, 2008 at 9:21 pm | permalink
s2 games also support it with savage 1 and 2, and introversion with darwinia, uplink, and defcon
Johnson responded on May 2nd, 2008 at 6:01 pm | permalink
It is all well underway, and I’m quite satisfied about the recurring optimism around the net concerning our move. We are hoping this might pave the way for other developers as well.
Kevin responded on June 28th, 2008 at 5:00 am | permalink
Even if they just added an opengl mode, that would be enough. The games run well enough under DirectX 8.1 mode - all that’s really missing is GL based shaders (wine tries to convert the D3D ones, but it’s messy that way). They don’t really need a full port, just adding OpenGL would be enough.
James.Denholm responded on August 4th, 2008 at 1:16 am | permalink
Rock on Valve! And rock on Linux!
Then again, will the Ubuntu community accept that software not avalible under the GPL licence is avalible on Linux?