“Valve today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST. The Steam client is now available to download for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. Ubuntu is the most popular distribution of Linux used by millions of people globally and known for its well-designed, easy-to-use customer experience.” The beginning of the Steambox. We’re on the cusp of a sea change in the gaming world.
As if I needed excuses for having a beer.
Hmmm… well, the major holidays are over so Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale is probably out of the question. But Anchor Steam Beer would be a fitting choice for this special occasion.
Not quite. IIRC it’s the fifth day of Chinese New Year celebrations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year#Fifth_day
So have some dumplings with your Tsingtao lager!
I’m very cautiously optimistic about this. They might get a lot of indie developers on board making Linux games, but the AAA title houses, I can see them standing on the side lines for long while to not upset their partners at Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc.
These days “AAA” is losing its meaning. The lines between indie and “AAA” are becoming more blurry.
I wish it was true.
While indies have made really good strides (Bastion was my favorite game of 2012 for example), AAA content requires millions of dollars for development.
Until we can somehow generate content (graphics, levels, audio, music, etc) with a much smaller budget there will still be a market for AAA releases.
I’m not saying AAA is particularly better (most of the time it’s opposite), but they sell well. It’s like the big Hollywood blockbusters, vs independent films.
Judging a game – or any expression for that matter – based on whether it’s indie or not is ridiculous anyway. Being indie doesn’t make a bad game better, nor does being an AAA title make a good game worse.
It’s all arbitrary. Just play what you like.
Right, big studios have more resources, but they often aren’t putting emphasis on different perspectives of quality such as depth and originality. Rather they focus on producing mass market stuff. I.e. you often find indie games with much better story lines than many mindless AAA eye candies.
Edited 2013-02-14 21:24 UTC
They generate millions for who exactly? Certainly not the developers. Tim Schafer of Double Fine fame said once something along the lines of “when using other people’s money to develop a game, most of whatever you make in sales, is going to them”
Kickstarter and other sites like it, bring developers in direct contact with their audience (the gamers) with the latter choosing to pay for a product that might ship in a few years, in advance. It was also the reason, InExile, who develop Wastelands 2, enabled Unity 3D to create native Linux games.
If I were one of the big publishers, I would have pissed my pants by now. The writing is on the wall. They are going extinct.
The “AAA” titles are dying. For some reason they cost millions to make and most turn out to be horrible. They end up as losses (which are blamed on piracy, of course). Just look at the latest “AAA” flop – Aliens: Colonial Marines. Took 6 years to make, turned out to be a turd.
Star Citizen is a really good example of this. Chris Roberts generated the most kickstarter funding in history because he knows howto make damn good games. I just hope they make a Linux version like they want to.
Didn’t some people from Hollywood have similair concerns about the movie business ?
And yet they so often fail completely (DNF, Aliens: Colonial Marines etc).
Can’t help but wonder what they’re paying all those millions for. Obviously not for talent and skill.
The developers and designers may actually be perfectly-well skilled and talented, but if the head(s) of the department(s) constantly hop in to “guide” the people, to restrict what they’re allowed to do or how and so on the end result is often like this. And the one reason these heads often do this is because they’ve got an expensive license on their hands that they need to turn into cash and they believe they know more about gaming and development than they really do. You know the saying about the blind leading the deaf and so on? (Okay, in this case it’d be a 200-pound blind and deaf gorilla leading a mouse that’s tied to its ankle with a chain and any wrong step..)
Yeah, I was a bit harsh there 😉
On other words, they’re incompetent imbeciles.
A much more likely scenario.
Hardly. I don’t like 99% of Indie-games that are being released, they rely way, WAY too much on a single trick to try to make the game look innovative or cool. Or they go for the pixelated look to hide the fact that they just do not have the resources to make anything more impressive graphically. AAA-games, on the other hand, are given millions in budgets to work with and actually create the resources needed.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that there are good venues for Indie-devs to release their games under and all that, I just cannot agree with your assessment.
And most so called AAA games have a playing time of 10h because they spend too much effort on the graphics and to little on actual content.
Do they, though? Atleast I don’t own any such AAA-games, yet I do own quite a large collection of them, though of course I may have just missed the ones with such little real content.
That sounds just like a lot of “AAA” game to me….
Gameplay is king. Unfortunately it would seem that the “AAA” studios have forgotten all about this and instead seems obsessed with vfx masturbation, DLC in favor of actual content and never-ending sequels.
Some of them, yes, but “vfx masturbation” does not necessarily mean the lack of everything else. Out of the top of my head some of the best AAA-games in my collection are Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Fallout 3, Guild Wars 2, Far Cry 3 and Sid Meier’s Civilization V and while all of them do support DLCs they all offer compelling features, 50+ hours of gameplay — some of them even hundreds of hours of gameplay — and still manage to do this “vfx masturbation” you mentioned.
I know very, VERY few Indie-studios that can manage anything similar; really, the only one that comes to mind is CD Projekt Red with The Witcher. I don’t know if The Witcher 2 would count as indie any longer as the studio grew so much after the success of the first game in the series.
And here we come to the point I have been trying to make: Indie-games are all fine and good and I’m happy for the people who like those games, but they are not a panacea to all of our gaming needs. These studios just do not have the resources to make the kinds of games I’d like, and I ain’t the only one out here.
CDPR is the perfect example. Independent company that made outstanding games, which are way better than many so called “AAA” titles. They spend a lot on making them, but nowhere near some crazy millions which some companies spend (to only produce some mass market junk).
Edited 2013-02-15 08:21 UTC
Yeah, obviously not ALL “AAA” games are bad but you got to admit that many are and there have been some spectacular misfires as of late.
Nah, those games are obviously NOT vfx masturbation since they’re, you know, good.
I see your point but it’s also kinda like saying that you need big budget record companies to make good music.
Here is an interview with one of the CDPR managers where he speaks about importance of staying independent from big publishers:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/02/11/we-are-re…
Edited 2013-02-15 18:52 UTC
I am not entirely certain why you’re giving me such a link as I do not disagree with that notion.
Just to demonstrate that CDPR express the idea that becoming AAA means losing quality, since most big publishers are directed by money motivations only (based on the mass market production) and not by motivation to create great games. CDPR however want to preserve their values and this means staying independent.
Edited 2013-02-15 19:52 UTC
That seems a bit hypocritical – the parent, CD Projekt, sustained itself and grew mostly by PL localisation and distribution of titles from big publishers.
( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?553040 )
Edited 2013-02-22 00:01 UTC
I would hardly ever call CD Projekt “indie” …they are one of the biggest (quite possibly the biggest) local game distributors of the past decade+ in their home country, PL – and yes, that includes largely AA titles. Also big localisation projects (think RPGs like Baldur’s Gate or Planescape Torment), that’s how their own game development studio got really started.
Witcher was a game that took almost a decade to make, on & off (I saw some first screenshots in 98 or so, in a gaming magazine; looking a bit like Die by the Sword back then) – hardly any real indie would have a chance to do a game for that long. Also, its story & world aren’t original – the game is based on locally quite popular book series; there was even a (horrible, don’t even try) Witcher/Wiedźmin TV series.
Will it work under Mint or do I have to return to that bag of nonsense called Ubuntu?
In this case, it doesn’t make much sense to say that ‘Steam for Linux officially released.’ More like ‘Steam for Ubuntu …’
#fragmentation
Edited 2013-02-15 00:00 UTC
Don’t be ridiculous. If it works on Ubuntu, it will work on just about any distro out there. Especially those that will runs debs. Mint is an Ubuntu fork, why wouldn’t it work?
#fragmentation – lame excuse by people who just want to hate on having choice
Edited 2013-02-15 01:09 UTC
IDK, if you can download it from the ‘Ubuntu software center’ and install it on any distro, why do they mention Ubuntu like 10 times in the press release, and not Mint, Fedora, etc? If anything, that confuses the hell out of end users. You said it would work in Mint, and that this should’ve been obvious. However, the guy asking the question didn’t know that, and neither did I :-\
Well, if I go to http://www.steampowered.com, click “install Steam” in the topright corner, and click on the subsequently appearing link, I get something which looks very much like a deb package.
Though I’d be the first one to agree that the Linux world’s love of dynamic linking is a true cause of platform fragmentation: if packages came with exotic libraries included, as is the case on most other OSs, no one would even question whether a given package may install on its target OS.
Nothing is preventing Valve from using static linking and judging from Steam’s horribly large size’s I’d say they do.
While what you say is true it’s largely irrelevant. You can make it work on any distro with some effort and people have done so and documented how (in some cases posted scripts). Most non-Ubuntu Linux users won’t have a problem following these instructions to a successful conclusion.
That said they do make a number of *very annoying* assumptions, not just about library versions but about other Ubuntuy things (like notifications).
I’ll still take a dedicated Ubuntu game box over a dedicated Windows one any day.
To answer your question directly, yes, it works on Mint, at least on Mint 13 that I’m currently running.
Steam keys for Humble Bundle games can be used for the Linux versions, though not all HIB games have made their Steam Linux debut yet.
Also if you happen to have an old Valve game that has had a Linux release you can use the registration number to get the native port via Steam.
I’ve never been a PC gamer, at least partially because I run Linux. I think I’ll give this a try. I’m still torn on which, if any console Iwill get this time.
Tons of games run on Linux with Wine these days.
Speaking of Linux specific games, made FOR Linux, not vampiring other platform’s game through emulation. Otherwise you can say… Mame !
Kochise
Eeeeek! Dont say this Word!
Which word? Emulation?
AAAAAAA!!!
But Wine is an emu…
[kills You with a herring]
It is how games are “ported” to Mac. Do you belive that Starcraft 2 has a native Mac port?
Crysis doesn’t, Starcraft II, Battlefield 3 etc. etc. etc. etc.
Until then Linux is second rate for gaming.
Crysis 1, 2 and 3 (I have beta multiplayer) is the most demanding DirectX game and will take any resources you may have.
Running in emulation isn’t good enough. I want triple A title not just run of the mill stuff I could have had years ago (if I was running windows).
Until there is cutting edge triple A titles for Linux it isn’t good enough for PC gamers.
PC Gaming is about cutting edge.
Edited 2013-02-18 21:14 UTC
We’re on the cusp of a sea change in the gaming world.
No we’re not. This won’t attract people like me who quite frankly don’t give a damn about PC gaming on *ANY* OS, especially worthless FPS titles.
So many for so long have said that watershed events like this would never happen, yet here we are.
“Gaming in Linux was a non-starter, the graphics stack is not up to par” blah, blah, blah.
Kudos to everyone who has made it possible for me to enjoy this amazing KDE desktop on top of a free software ecosystem (GNU Userland and Linux Kernel).
It just keeps getting better and better.
My gratitude goes out to everyone in the floss ecosystem who has ever devoted time to helping a newbie find his way around, wrote documentation, translated an app or wrote code.
If it were not for them, we would not have the ground to build on that it is now making it possible to reach out so far in terms of platforms.
I will say it again with an even bigger smile: it just keeps getting better and better.
http://www.osnews.com/comments/26785#552844
And so it begins .. infinite breakage.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/256673/steam-destroys-my-ubuntu
http://omgcheesecake.net/index.php?/topic/3846-steam-for-linux-rele…
Absolutely brilliant.