Valve Announces Steam Goes Beyond Gaming

[AJSB]

Hardly if ever the Steam Client will be GPL'ed....DRM issues....

[Prescience500]

Beyond gaming? Maybe this could be useful for people who always complain about not having enough professional apps on Linux.

Either way, does anyone know if Valve is offering their games in naitive 64-bit? Also, does anyone know if it will be compatible with Wayland without X (assuming you're using an open driver, of course)?

[SolidSteel144]

Steam and Source 1 games will not be released as native 64-bit.
32-bit Steam will however support 64-bit games.

[blackout23]

I'd like to see MS offering Office for Linux on Valve store even though I know that rather hell would freeze over. Office 2007 runs fine on my
laptop at least the programms I need (Word, Excel and basic Powerpoint) but I'd like native support.

Please no comments that one should use Libre or Open Office instead. It just not a good frankly especially if you use Excel like a pro and don't just want to add and subtract some cell value. It's fine if you want to write a simple letter for yourself and print it out but when you start working with other people they'll likely open your stuff with MS Office and shit will be all over the place. Being able to open a file doesn't make it compatible.

[peperoni]

That was the move M$ forced Valve to make. The other one would be Valve buying Ubuntu, which would allow Valve to compete with M$ in the server market since Ubuntu has a good position there. Who knows?

[Cyborg16]

I'm not sure if that makes Steam the first app store to target all major platforms, but probably it's the first big one to do so.

Thanks for the links, "bug!"! From my point of view, Steam could complement debian's/red-hat's/arch's/... packaging nicely by supporting the applications not there (i.e. commercial and no-cost-restricted-licence stuff). No real need for Steam to integrate with apt-get or whatever (though a packaged script to install and update Steam itself could work well).

Of course, this means Valve gets to make a lot of the money people are going to spend on Linux software. The fact that they are a highly democratic company is somewhat fitting, if not really encouraging...

[curaga]

The other one would be Valve buying Ubuntu, which would allow Valve to compete with M$ in the server market since Ubuntu has a good position there.

You just outlined a terrible scenario. If Valve bought Ubuntu, many things would get worse. Guess how long it would take before U came with tracking pre-installed and unremovable. In the name of anti-cheat of course, holy Valve would never use that against you.

No, you can't run that GCC. It's classified as a possible hacking tool, facilitating cheating. You have been reported to the authorities and your Steam profile has been deleted, removing all your access to anything you ever "bought" there.

[GreatEmerald]

a leading destination for PC and Mac games.

Can Mac really be called a separate platform at this point? They are using the same hardware as PC, and you can install most of the same software on it. This sounds to me like a "PC = Windows" sort of marketing fail.

[89c51]

You just outlined a terrible scenario. If Valve bought Ubuntu, many things would get worse. Guess how long it would take before U came with tracking pre-installed and unremovable. In the name of anti-cheat of course, holy Valve would never use that against you.

No, you can't run that GCC. It's classified as a possible hacking tool, facilitating cheating. You have been reported to the authorities and your Steam profile has been deleted, removing all your access to anything you ever "bought" there.

Even though i understand the anti-DRM crowd is there a different way for someone to protect the work that he chose to sell for profit?

[Rigaldo]

Hello, I'm new in these forums this is my first post.

I just wanted to say, that as far as package management goes, Valve probably doesn't truly need to integrate with any package management. They could probably just ship Steam for every distro and then it creates a folder(/usr/steam , /steam, /home/user/steam , who knows ) where it puts all Steam applications, possibly with a few libraries for easier compatibility. This may not be according to the current spirit of Linux, but I think it would make it easier for them to care for every distro and have compatibility. They'd just needto port Steam and it would be like their package manager, possibly even providing some necessary libraries that will differ greatly between distros(I mean like the same we use now, but the version they compiled the program with or they know it works better). Especially if they are to going to also have their own system to upgrade their software.

This probably isn't something really new and already mentioned, but I think I analyzed it a bit more.