Following Valve's official January unveiling of the first round of Steam Machines, next week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco may prove to be a giant love fest for Linux game support. Today, German developer Crytek (creator of Crysis and Ryse) announced that its GDC presence will include the company's most public strides ever toward the OS that will power those Steam Machines. Crytek's GDC conference booth will come with its singularly named CryEngine game engine on hand, running with "full, native Linux support... for the first time ever."

That qualifier applies specifically to the latest CryEngine, powering the likes of Xbox One exclusive Ryse: Son of Rome and Turtle Rock's upcoming co-op game Evolve. The vague announcement doesn't explain whether all current games built with the latest CryEngine will immediately, cleanly port to Linux, and none of the company's GDC panels hint at conversations about such a topic. More importantly, the announcement makes no references to CryEngine 3, whose non-commercial licenses seem far more likely to produce indie-developed fare that will run on lower-spec Steam Machines.

Reports from last year indicated that Crytek was hiring new employees to build Linux support for CryEngine 3, though this announcement could mean that Crytek's job posting included an intentional engine-number error. We've reached out to Crytek for more information on the announcement, including whether this means that Ryse will beautifully bore PC gamers in the foreseeable future.