Never thought that being a reader of GamingOnLinux and Debian mailing lists would intersect so directly. But look at what just arrived at my mailbox. That is right, Valve is giving away all their past and future games to Debian Developers.
Read the original post at debian-devel-announce. Disclaimer: I am not a Debian Developer.
QuoteHi all,
At $dayjob for Collabora, we've been working with Valve on SteamOS, which is based on Debian. Valve are keen to contribute back to the community, and I'm discussing a couple of ways that they may be able to do that [0].
Immediately though, they've offered a free subscription to any Debian Developer which provides access to all past and future Valve produced games [1]!
If you're interested, and a DD, simply mail [email protected] with a mail signed by a key in the Debian keyring, and he'll send you back a redemption code to add in Steam. If you haven't heared from him in a couple of days, you can also prod me at [email protected] as he may happen to be on holiday that week.
Happy gaming,
Neil
[0] If anyone has any specific ideas, drop me a mail :)
[1] List at http://deb.li/91yz, but excluding Steam Greenlight.
Read the original post at debian-devel-announce. Disclaimer: I am not a Debian Developer.
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The fact that they've released a new ISO that has features pulled in from the unofficial Ye Olde SteamOSe project this early proves, at least to me, that they Get It(tm). It's still very early on, and SteamOS is literally Steam on top of Debian... There's not much code to share. But it's there.
Unless you mean opening up the Steam client, in which case, yeah that would be great, but unrealistic right now. Will they get there? Very possibly. Time will tell.
So they consider DRM to be the integral part of their service? I really don't see a good reason for that. Convenience of the service in some aspects has nothing to do with restrictions it also adds. I.e. nothing stops Steam from keeping the convenience while dropping the DRM nonsense. Except their unwillingness.
No, they don't. I already explained in the previous threads, that DRM-free means offering standalone packages / installers first (and then of course no additional requirements to run the client for running the game and so on). Steam fails at step one already.
If you want to hammer against DRM on Steam, talk to the game developers.
once the game is installed you can unistall steam and keep the game.
To clarify, it's not about a burden of logging in anywhere. It's about an ability to install (from a backup for example) and run the game without the service.
What if i don't want to open my browser and connect to a website to download my games, what than?
That would be DRM forcing me to run a browser that have no relevance to installing or downloading my game.
DRM is only bad when its overdone and/or hinders legitimate costumers. Ofc it would also be nice if everything was open source but in some fields open source is not a very viable option.
Steam is basically a browser too you know.
That's quite true. Indeed, I believe many people will kill themselves the day Steam shuts down! :P
In any case we'll have to live with that, at least for a while. After all, better to have games on Steam under GNU/Linux that games on Steam under Windows. It is already a large improvement that I didn't expect so soon.