On Monday, Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition was launched on Steam. Before the Kickstarter campaign there was a Greenlight campaign to put Leadwerks on Steam, which it got through in just 27 days. Tomorrow I head up to Seattle for Steam Dev Days.
On Monday, Leadwerks Game Engine: Indie Edition was finally launched on Steam. Before the Kickstarter campaign there was a Greenlight campaign to put Leadwerks on Steam, which it got through in just 27 days. Based on the success of the Kickstarter campaign, I decided to delay the Steam launch and try to get Linux done in time. However, there was one serious deadline I could not miss, and that was the Steam Dev Days conference next week. I knew we needed to have an actual product on Steam by then, and not be stuck in Greenlight limbo, so I went ahead and put what we had up, which is Windows-only. Steam keys were sent out to all Kickstarter backers who chose a software reward.
The launch went remarkably smoothly. Due to the limitations of the product (one OS, Lua-only) it made testing and updates much easier than if we tried to do a multi-platform launch all at once. There have been two patches, one to fix compatibility with Nvidia Optimus laptops, and the other to fix a few miscellaneous problems that didn't come up during beta testing.
The response from the early users, and from those of you who have tried it on Windows, has been very good. We seem to have hit the right formula with our combination of BSP brushes, navmeshes, Lua, and the flowgraph system. User engagement is high and I can tell that people "get it". We're starting to see content trickle out on Steam, and I can tell already this year is going to bring some really cool projects made by Leadwerks users. The decision to build a friendly workflow and focus on enabling user-generated content was a good one, as we are already seeing some impressive stuff come out, after only a few days, like this high-res tessellated material from "Shadmar":
Now that you have a more concrete idea of what we're building, I hope you are more excited than ever to have this running natively in Linux. I am returning my full attention to Linux development now. There's nothing else I need to work on but this, and I am determined to have Leadwerks, editor and all, running natively in Linux no matter what it takes.
Next week I head up to Seattle to attend Steam Dev Days for two days. I'm not giving any lectures or doing promotion, so it will be a relaxed trip with no prep work. This is going to be Valve's conference for the Linux-based SteamOS. SteamOS is an open console operating system. 13 hardware manufacturers showed off their "Steam Machine" consoles at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.
My personal favorite is the Scan NC10:
Leadwerks (the engine) will reportedly run on these machines right now with no changes. I'll learn more next week at the conference and share what information I can with you.
I'm going to go ahead and call it now: Linux is going to take over the living room in 2014. Why?
Compatibility: Steam Machines are backwards-compatible. You can play your old games forever.
Market Segmentation: Steam Machines will eat the market from both ends. There will be extreme high-end models as well as inexpensive compact models.
Visibility: Traditional consoles get a big launch every seven years. Steam Machines will have continued releases, probably on an annual basis like cell phones.
You can watch the man himself, Gabe Newell, talking about it here:
Again, I would like to thank everyone who backed our Kickstarter project and had the foresight to realize Linux gaming was about to explode.
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