I loved Half-Life 2. I loved Counter-Strike 1.5 (and 1.6 too). I loved Portal. Valve has done a good job of making games. But I reeeeally wish some other developers would step up to the plate and port as well. I'm thinking Borderlands, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and others. Those two already have Mac ports so I doubt it's unfeasible to move things over. Wine typically works well enough --assuming you're willing to either fiddle with it for hours or else pay for an out-of-the-box solution like Crossover-- but nothing beats native :)
Edit: Been playing the Portal Beta. The horizontal tearing without vertical sync is annoying. Mainly because, with vertical sync, there is substantial input lag. But hey, it's called "beta" for a reason.
Many developers dont even port their console titles to the PC, or do so much later. Porting to Linux does not make any sense financially (yet), so its more or less good-will. You also need to have the resources to do it and many Devs are under heavy time pressure from publishers.
Porting from consoles to PC's is much harder, though, not to mention that they'll also have to upgrade the graphics in a major way to make it a "competitive" PC game. By contrast, porting to Linux should be much easier.
Also porting old games is one thing, but these days most 3rd party game engines support Linux, too, and it should be even easier to support Linux at launch with new games.
Considering Linux users buy about the same amount of games (in revenue) as Mac users right now (from the surveys/research I've seen), it should be a no-brainer to support Linux if you're already going to support Mac. I could see some not wanting to bother with Mac either, though, but for those who choose Mac, they should also choose Linux.
If you look at the list of games with Linux support at Steam you will notice that virtually all of them has Mac support, which supports your idea about Linux and Mac support.
Most developers use 3rd Party Engines anyway, so they are also limited by the fact that many game engines dont support Linux/Mac yet. But that number is definately growing!
I don't know about Borderlands, but the Deus Ex mac port was not done by the main devs; it was a separate company that specializes in that sort of thing.
The catch is that the mac version isn't available on Steam.
Yeah, surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your POV) there have been very few major players stepping in to convert their historical or recent titles for Linux. They are probably waiting and wondering if there's any good reason to do it... If the Steambox ever sees a release based on a Linux environment, I would expect things to change, though.
Most games make most of their money very shortly after launch so the ROI to do a port probably isn't there unless there is a very compelling display of demand. There are some AAA games that don't make it onto the PC at all, let alone Linux.
The best hope here would be that valve could take some of the games that are known to work flawlessly with WINE and package them up with Steam handling all of the WINE config so it becomes transparent.
It will be interesting to see if a popular AAA franchise (elder scrolls, COD etc) announces a Linux release alongside the Windows release.
As game devs have to think more about crossplatform I guess this might become more likely.
Between the Steam Box, porting everything in their catalog to Linux, Dota 2, and scrambling like madmen to make the ten thousanth TF2 hat, I assume Valve has a lot on their plate right now.
It's presumed (and pretty much a given) that it's being worked on. However there has never been a full confirmation from Valve/Gabe Newell on anything specific.
Dota 2 seems like it's something that would be a flagship title for Steam for Linux. Dota 2 already uses the source engine though, so maybe it is coming soon. One can only hope.
Wow, I'm going to go try this! Portal runs "surprisinly well" (eg. great performance but it has occasional graphical glitches) on my machine (Arch x64, Intel HD 4000), so I'm curious to see how HL2 runs.
I understand Valve hasn't gotten the bugs out quite yet, but this is an excellent start.
Edit: Oh man, "Half-Life 2 (Beta)", "Half-Life 2: Episode One (Beta)", "Half-Life 2: Episode Two (Beta)", and "Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (Beta)" are all in my steam library. It's like Christmas all over again.
Honestly, I don't remember. A native steam package is available in the 'multilib' repository, which should be enough to at least start Steam. To play games, I remember having to install some 32-bit Mesa packages. I also had to install libtxc_dxtn and lib32-libtxc_dxtn, which are texture compression libraries. Without these two, textures didn't appear.
There's a big gap between "can be made to run under wine by following a recipe someone posted to appdb.winehq.org" and "click on Download, then Plan".
I fiddle with messy integration issues on embedded Linux and Android professionally, and am about as qualified as anyone could be to make that work. I never once bothered trying to get wine running. I installed Portal last week without a moment's thought.
Portal worked great on Wine / Linux for me right up to (what I think is) the last level, when the frame rate suddenly plummeted to barely playable. Now it's out for native Linux I'll have to see if the same thing happens.
You know why I'm going to download this? Because I never played the game and when I finally downloaded it to play, there were major graphics engine or driver issues that made it dirt slow and unplayable on my m11x R2. And I couldn't figure out how to fix it so eventually gave up. Coincidentally, I have Linux on my m11x R2. Maybe it'll work on Linux.
What a silly reason. But true. Wouldn't it be ironic if the Linux beta was more bug free in my experience than the Windows version...
Half life 2 works OK on my Intel HD4000. The only bugs are graphical glitches, and they're not very noticable. (Keep in mind that Half Life and Half-Life 2 use completely different game engines; one's bugs don't necessarily translate to the other.)
Tried HL2 on linux yesterday. Very impressed to see that HL2 still does not look too bad even many years later. At full details on full HD, it's still very decent graphically speaking.
valve said last yr they would start porting to linux to avoid microsoft 8 store plans where they want to restrict software sales to the "microsoft app store" and shave 20% fees from all sales. this would destroy the steam delivery model so makes sense they are diversifying
It may be almost 10 years old but it is still one of the best FPS games ever created. Hell I still play Deus Ex as it is my favourite game ever made. Just because a game is not brand new does not mean porting it to a new platform is not worth it.
It also helps Valve keep excitement for half-life 2 going strong when they choose to release episode 3. Then their story won't be "Hey, remember when we released the last chapter to this one back in 2007? Well go play the new one!" Instead, they can say "Hey, remember Half-Life 2? Now you can play it all over again and reacquaint yourself! Then you'll remember why you want episode 3 so bad!"
Edit: Been playing the Portal Beta. The horizontal tearing without vertical sync is annoying. Mainly because, with vertical sync, there is substantial input lag. But hey, it's called "beta" for a reason.