Steam OS Question: Can you install non steam games ?

chaparral

chaparral

chaparral

Caporegime
Joined
27 Nov 2005
Posts
25,479
Location
Guernsey
Does anyone know yet if it will be possible to install and play games non steam games on the new steam OS that coming out ??
Am guessing this is not going be possible..:(


As I have some games that are not available to buy on steam..
 
I'm not sure tbh, if it takes off and they start limiting people like that the old monopoly/competition police might have something to say like they have done in the past for Microsoft etc.
 
They've already said you can hack it, change it, do whatever you want with it. It's all open source and it's yours. The only difference will be that Steam will work on making the games available via their client run on the SteamOS (glorified Debian?). Whereas "other" games you have are most likely not going to run perfectly fine on Linux out of the box. It being the "SteamOS" will make no difference here you'll still be stuck as now trying to get it to run in WINE or similar or go through other ways of getting it to work.
 
So potentially yes although the practicalities are, no, it's likely to be steam games only with any real level of ease, in particular I guess if you want to use their controller (which would be pretty much required if you're going to have this in the living room under the TV).
 
Steam OS is Linux based isn't it? Any Linux game should run fine on it... but the bigger issue is finding non-Steam Linux games :) Windows games will not run on it without using something like Wine.

Finners said:
I'm not sure tbh, if it takes off and they start limiting people like that the old monopoly/competition police might have something to say like they have done in the past for Microsoft etc.
Click to expand...

In which case the community will just fork it and produce their own version. That's one of the beauties of open source - building on the shoulders of giants but allowing others to use your shoulders. It's one of the major reasons some people are so vocal about open source. For example once Oracle bought Sun many people were concerned over the future of Oracle/Sun owned MySQL so it has now been forked several times and MariaDB appears to be the most dominant version.
 
Last edited:
I wonder if EA will follow suit and start supporting Linux with Origin. They seem to be copying Valve so far in adding Mac support.
 
I guess it would ideally run a stripped version of windows but the cost of the licenses would bring the cost of the box up to much.

It will be interesting to see how many devs start making games work on linux and it might force microsoft to realise pc gaming is THEIR market and they should be doing what's best for THEIR customers instead of focusing on consoles.
 
arknor said:
I guess it would ideally run a stripped version of windows but the cost of the licenses would bring the cost of the box up to much.
Click to expand...
I hear this a lot but given even I can buy a single copy of Windows 8 from OCUK for £60, which suggests to me OCUK probably pay <£50 so i can't believe a large volume OEM pays much over £25-£35 per Windows medialess image installed on devices they ship. Seems pretty cheap to me and no where near the £100 extra some would have you believe. If Steambox is an awesome device as Valve claim wouldn't you pay an extra £30 on a £500 machine to not have to fiddle around with linux AND have your entire windows gaming library available? Likely yes, but then you wouldn't be locked into steam for the games ;)
 
Last edited:
chaparral said:
Does anyone know yet if it will be possible to install and play games non steam games on the new steam OS that coming out ??
Am guessing this is not going be possible..:(
Click to expand...
Depends on valve

The current linux steam client has this ability but as I doubt anyone on OcUK has actually seen/used steamos no one can give a difinitive answer

The steam reveal thread for the most part seems to be the blind leading the blind and people trolling
 
chaparral said:
Does anyone know yet if it will be possible to install and play games non steam games on the new steam OS that coming out ??
Am guessing this is not going be possible..:(

As I have some games that are not available to buy on steam..
Click to expand...

If SteamOS is just a customised Linux distro, then yes.

However you'll need to have a working knowledge of Linux yourself, and Wine if you want to run (some) Windows games.

SteamOS will 100% not be based on Windows. 100%. Don't even know why people are suggesting this.
 
FoxEye said:
If SteamOS is just a customised Linux distro, then yes.

However you'll need to have a working knowledge of Linux yourself, and Wine if you want to run (some) Windows games.

SteamOS will 100% not be based on Windows. 100%. Don't even know why people are suggesting this.
Click to expand...
The OP didn't mention windows games, there are plenty of linux non-steam games.
 
mortals said:
The OP didn't mention windows games, there are plenty of linux non-steam games.
Click to expand...

The thing is, anyone who plays Linux games already knows the answer to the question he posted :)

So I guessed that he hasn't used Linux, and is asking about playing games from his (Windows) Steam library.
 
It says right on the SteamOS page:
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
Click to expand...

Its Linux based. And has the ability to stream games from another PC. This is where it gets interesting, can it only stream Steam games? Or could you add a game to steam as a non-steam game, and stream it like that? To me, that's the more interesting question.
 
You can add any game to steam in theory, it will launch other titles. I dont know if that means they intend to include all others in their strategy but seems like they'd like to build on the big picture idea and keep you in their 'bubble'.
They are targetting a console type audience, trying to bridge pc and the tv gamer who doesnt want hassles of setup, steam does make things easier so they could make a lot of money possibly
 
Thinking about it, I bet it will be exactly the same as OnLive was. The only downside of OnLive was the latency, the technology itself was fine. You have a main PC running Windows with steam, which is capable of running the game, but instead of streaming that game over the internet and getting all the latency that's involved with sending the picture, reacting by pressing a key, and waiting for that to be received by the server, you're instead dealing with it on a LAN where latency isn't an issue.

Which would surely mean that any game where you can get the steam overlay working (Including non-steam games) would surely be capable of doing this, as it isn't something that needs to be coded directly into the game or anything like that. Though Valve could easily limit it just to steam library games anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom