Everyone who owns the game on Steam Win/Mac, and happened to be in the Steam Linux public beta, now owns the game on Linux too. Launch Steam your client and enjoy Steel Storm among other games on Steam Linux, and there is no DRM for this game on Steam Linux.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
Right here: "So now since Steam is on Linux too, Linux binaries are only available on Steam Linux."
Those words are pretty ambiguous, and could easily be interpreted to mean that "Linux binaries are only available on Steam Linux". Pit was asking for clarification in case that's what you were saying, not trolling you.
@motorsep: Indeed, no idea how steam works (I never had windows or a mac) and not trolling. And a clear ++ for 'not steam-only' ;^>
As for the DRM-free games on Steam, where can I read more about it? Does that mean I can buy games on Steam and play them anywhere? Can I see if a game is DRM-free before I buy it?
Basically, the situation is that for game developers, making use of Steam's built in DRM is optional. Some (but not many) developers such as Kot-In-Action have distributed their games on Steam in a way that doesn't require the Steam client to be running. This isn't something that's shown on the Steam store, so unless you're looking at a specific game and are willing to search forums or contact the developer to find out whether they've done that, there's no convenient way of finding out - if there's a community maintained list somewhere, I'm not aware of it.
So far as Steam goes, your best bet (if having DRM free games is important to you) would be to try to by your games directly from developers who offer DRM free copies in addition to Steam keys (this is done by most developers using the "Humble Store app", such as Frozenbyte and the guys who made FTL).
I agree, I buy games from the Humble Store or directly to developers. I might start playing my purchased games thru Steam, that's fine since I wouldn't absolutely depend on it. I'm concerned about depending on the distributor and/or being online to play my games.
Thanks!
Well, it's more that you need the Steam client to download/install the games to begin with, and that's tied to your Steam account. For the ones that don't make use of the Steam DRM, you don't need Steam running to play them, but if you uninstalled them, and then for some reason weren't able to access your Steam account, you wouldn't be able to access those games anymore either.
Most Steam games (including those that do make use of Steam's DRM can run in an "offline mode" that you can activate whilst Steam is online (so if your connection drops out unexpectedly, and you weren't already in offline mode, you'd need to wait until you could connect again before being able to enable offline mode).
Right, that's a dependence too.