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Steam Client and Source Games Porting to OSX

Posted by twickline on · 5 comments
Wine-Reviews; By Tom Wickline 		Mail this story
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So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell. In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary "content delivery service" known as "Steam" is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse's mouth. In addition the actual client and "Steam-works" being brought to Apple's operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games.

[Not directly FOSS related, but interesting since Windows is seen as the powerhouse of gaming. - Sander]

these include:

  • Half Life 2 Series
  • Counter Strike: Source
  • Team Fortress 2
  • Left 4 Dead Series
  • Day of Defeat: Source

All I have to say is: Microsoft has to be quaking in their boots. For some time Microsoft's Windows operating system has been the standard for gaming on the PC. With Valve making the push into OSX this means more than just trouble for Microsoft's operating system. It also means their famed DirectX API that is Windows only may be in jeopardy. I say this because as stated in Valve's official announcement in order to port their engine/games to OSX they will be reimplementing them in OpenGL. After the porting of these past released source games Valve plans to treat OSX as a "first tier" operating system. Meaning that all future releases of source games will occur simultaneously for OSX, Windows, and Xbox 360.


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Comments (5)

twickline Story submitter ·
What's interesting is to speculate if the past rumors of a native Linux Steam Client are about to come true. If all the games run on Mac via OpenGL then a port to Linux wouldn't be all that difficult.

Here is one of the rumor sources :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=steam_con...

Anyone here have any thoughts on a Linux port being next?

Cheers, Tom
techiem2 ·
There have been rumors of a Linux client for several years now. If they port it to Mac, that would be one step in the right direction (porting to a *nix based system). As I understand it, a good portion of Steam stuff generally works rather well under Wine/etc. (I haven't tried myself recently) as it is, so a native client would probably run quite well.

I know it would make those of us who keep Windows around for gaming quite happy, as that would open up more games we wouldn't have to boot to that annoying Windows install to play.
jacog ·
They did post a job for a Linux developer a while back, but it was unclear what this person would be doing there.

It is possible, and indeed they'd hit gold if they do so. Linux users (gamers in particular) might make up a small portion of their overall market, but Valve would then end up being the so-called big fish in the small pond.
tharik ·
I for one hope they port it to Linux. I currently have to dual boot, just so my 7 year old can play Sid Meyers train. I will not purchase any other steam games until I can run them native on Linux. Other games are already native on Linux and more are sure to come along. If they do not need us, we do not need them!
justintime ·
I interviewed at Valve to work on a Steam port to Linux (~2 years or so ago), but took another job instead. I'm not 100% sure, but from what I gathered I would have been working on the Linux port alone.

Also keep in mind that even once Steam itself is ported, the game studios would still have to port their games to Linux (and many of them use DirectX). So I'd imagine that the selection of games available on Linux would be limited quite a bit (same probably holds true for Mac as well, but game studios would probably be more willing to do Mac ports).

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