Humble Indie Bundle 9

Humble Indie Bundle 9 is now available.  The bundle features six games. Pay what you want and get the beautifully colorful magical action-puzzle platformer Trine 2: Complete Story; the side-scrolling stealth game Mark of the Ninja; the physics-based puzzler Eets Munchies; and the heavy metal action/adventure/RTS rocker Brütal Legend. If you pay over the average, you’ll also receive the award-winning space strategy sim FTL: Faster Than Light and the critically acclaimed puzzle platformer FEZ.

I have already played FTL.  It is an intriguing game – hard but satisfying.  I also own Trine 2 but have not gotten to it yet.  This bundle is worth-while even for those games alone!  The others are magnificent icing on the cake.

All of these games run on Linux as well as Mac and Windows.  If you pay at least $1, you will get Steam keys.

Steam Summer Sale

Steam is having its big summer sale until July 22, 2013.  This is a humongous sale with daily and flash deals, as well as other sale prices. Flash sales are the best if you can catch them.  The sale also extends to Steam for Linux.  The prices are out of this world!  Excellent indie games FTL and SPAZ (Space Pirates and Zombies) are available for $2.49 and $1.99, respectively.  I’m sure you will find something you like, if you are into gaming at all.  🙂

Humble Bundle Weekly Sale and Note on Steam

This week’s Humble Bundle weekly sale features three games by Klei Entertainment:  Shank, Shank 2, and Eets.  Shank and Shank 2 are available on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.

As always, these games are pay what you want.  If you pay $1 or more, you get free Steam keys so you have the option of redeeming the games on Steam.

For the last few months, Steam has only been getting about 1.3 percent of their users from us Linux people.  We need to start redeeming our Linux games on Steam so they know we support them.   It won’t cost money to set up a Steam account.  They do, however, make available 200+ games, only some of which end up in Humble Bundles.

The first couple of months I redeemed games with their Steam keys, it appears that I got a link to the Windows version (not a problem for me because I also run Steam for Windows, but that requires dual-booting).  Valve seems to have fixed the problem – now, Steam keys for Linux games point you to a Linux download.

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• Pay what you want for this Android (and desktop!) game bundle

Steam for Linux Official Release with Celebration Sale

Steam for Linux is now officially released.  It is available in the Ubuntu Software Center for versions 12.10, 12.04, 11.04 and 10.04:

Steam for Linux now in Ubuntu Software Center

To celebrate, Valve has launched a Steam for Linux Celebration Sale, where you can save between 50 percent and 80 percent:

Steam for Linux Celebration Sale

A complete list of the games available as part of this sale is at http://store.steampowered.com/sale/linux_release/.  The sale will end on February 21 at 10:00 am PST.

Steam Beta Testing Imminent

Valve has announced on the company’s Linux blog that internal beta testing for their Steam client for Linux will be starting next week. There will also be a private external beta test for 1,000 users some time in October.

The private external beta will include Steam and one Valve game. Support will be limited to Ubuntu 12.04 and above.

Valve will be using a sign-up page for the external beta.

Non-game Software Coming to Steam

Valve has recently announced that it will be adding non-game software to its offerings on Steam.

The software titles that will be coming to Steam range “from creativity to productivity.” Many of them will make use of popular Steamworks features such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save to the Steam cloud. The launch date for this expansion is September 5.

In order to use Steam on Linux, you need to install wine and winetricks:

sudo apt-get install wine winetricks

and then use winetricks to install Steam:

winetricks steam

It is best to set up Steam in a 32 bit partition. I am running 32 bit Quantal, to keep from having any problems.

Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:

• Steam to start hosting non-game software
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• Steam to Offer Non-Gaming Software
• Steam to begin selling non-games software

Steam’d Linux

Valve has formally announced in the first post on its Linux blog that it plans to bring its Steam game distribution service to Linux. The company is also working to port its Source game engine and the 2009 game Left 4 Dead 2. The software will be available at launch on Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin.

Valve is focusing on Ubuntu at this time because 1) they are just starting development, and working with a single distribution is “critical”; and 2) Ubuntu is popular among gamers and developers. Based on the success of their Ubuntu deployment, they will consider other distributions in the future.

Valve is also focusing on porting other Valve titles to Linux.