Linux geeks round on Steam

THERE'S PLENTY of consternation floating around the Steam forums this morning as open sauce geeks get het up over Valve's persistant refusal to port its popular Steam game-delivery client to something a little more penguin-based.

Valve's moderator team re-confirmed yesterday that the service would not be appearing on Linux or, for that matter, on Mac OSX - despite a 111 page forum thread full of requests. Counter-Strike and some other Valve games are available on Linux, but the rest of the soon-to-be-improved Steam platform is not, and this is angering 'second-class' Linux users.

But with little commercial incentive to work on Linux - and the fact that 99% of the third party games on Steam won't work on either that OS or OSX - means that Valve is focusing its development on the Windows side.

The community is so irate that moderators in the Steam forums are threatening to ban users who consistently whine about the issue. The issue, moderators say, is closed - and so the fan's mouths should be, too, it seems.

Some gamers have jumped to Valve's defence, suggesting that Valve is a small Seattle company that can't be expected to expend limited resources on Linux compatibility - apparently not realising that Valve's small size makes it all the more profitable, especially given the commercial success of third party games on Steam.

Valve is (un)fortunate in that many of its core users are total geeks and, hence, more likely to favour a Linux implementation. Cheesing off your core fanbase is never a good idea, and it remains to be seen how long Valve can continue to hold out. µ