Valve To Release Steam on Linux?

I heard this on The Linux Outlaws Episode 42 and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea.  Up until now Valve has been pretty hostile towards people asking them to release onto Linux, even threatening to ban anyone who brought it up in the forums.  Apparently someone has convinced them of the merits because here’s the story that led Linux Outlaws to report the headline.

My brother, who is really into video games, has informed me that pretty much every computer game developer plans to release via Steam in the near future.  This means that most people, who are always mentioning their only reason for keeping Windows around is to play games, can finally get rid of Windows for good!

By porting Steam to Linux and encouraging game developers to use OpenGL and other such cross-platform technologies over DirectX, I think they’ll be gaining a HUGE potential marketshare.  Afterall, as the story above mentions, Linux users are technical people and probably more likely to enjoy video games.  Sure, there’ll be a few zealots who won’t play games that aren’t open source.  Personally, I don’t care if most games are proprietary/closed source because they aren’t necessary.  I think all of my necessary apps should be Free Software so that no one can ever have power of my ability to use my computer.  But if they started doing nefarious things with computer games, I really couldn’t care less.  I’d just play more Nintendo or something else.

So good on ya Steam - let’s hope those rumors are true.

• Steam
• Valve