Valve Games and Steam on Ubuntu 12.04

This article is more than 12 years old.


Yesterday, the Valve Linux team publicly announced their ongoing work to bring Steam to Linux. A major part of that announcement is the choice of Ubuntu 12.04.

Valve has been a major force in gaming since 1996. Gabe Newell and the Valve team have created some of the best game series EVER. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and most recently Portal are extremely popular, and quite addicting.

The one thing missing early on was a good distribution mechanism. Valve learned early on that retail physical box distribution can only go so far and was expensive. The Steam client came out of hiding in 2003 and has been a driving force ever since. Many game platforms have tried to create what Steam provides from multiplayer communication and community features but none are as strong.

The linux gaming community has been very vocal in trying to get more support in the gaming community. With the growth in numbers of independent developers, the number of indie games supporting Linux growing exponentially, and quite popular game engines such as Unity3D supporting Ubuntu, Valve finally came to the conclusion that even their game engine Source has to come to Ubuntu.

The announcement states there is a 11 person team working on bringing the Steam client to Ubuntu and the first game will be Left 4 Dead 2. This is yet another huge development in the gaming space for Ubuntu users.

Talk to us today

Interested in running Ubuntu in your organisation?

Newsletter signup

Get the latest Ubuntu news and updates in your inbox.

By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to Canonical’s Privacy Policy.

Related posts

From sales development to renewals: Mariam Tawakol’s career progression at Canonical

Career progression doesn’t follow a single path – and at Canonical, we embrace that. Our culture encourages individuals to explore roles aligned with their...

In pursuit of quality: UX for documentation authors

Canonical’s Platform Engineering team has been hard at work crafting documentation in Rockcraft and Charmcraft around native support for web app frameworks...

Canonical announces Charmed Feast: A production-grade feature store for your open source MLOps stack

July 10, 2025: Today, Canonical announced the release of Charmed Feast, an enterprise solution for feature management with seamless integration with Charmed...