Valve officially announces Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 for Linux

After many rumours, Valve has now officially confirmed that it is porting its Steam game distribution platform to Linux. A port of the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is also being worked on. The announcement coincides with the launch of a new Valve Linux Team blog, which will provide a first hand account of future Linux developments at the company.

Dedicated games servers for Valve games have long been running under Linux. In 2011, the company decided to put together a Linux team to port the Steam client and L4D2 to Ubuntu. Valve has since added 11 people to a growing team of Linux developers.

According to the company, it now has native Linux versions of both Steam and Left 4 Dead 2, the former is still missing some functionality. Valve's Linux team is now working on a full-featured Linux version of the Steam client and on optimising L4D2 for OpenGL. The objective is to have the game running just as well on Linux as it does on Windows; Mac OS X is also supported. For now, Valve is concentrating its Linux efforts on supporting Ubuntu, but other distributions will be supported later, said the company in its statement. Other games will also be supported in the future, if all goes according to plan.

Previously, users have had to resort to Wine or CrossOver to install Steam for Windows under Linux. This works in principle, but the Steam client and most games can be very buggy under these systems.

(fab)