Subset Games [Official Site] are a developer I was especially keen to speak to about Valve's Steam Play system, since Into the Breach is included as a white-listed game by Valve even though they're working on a Linux version.

Into the Breach is an interesting turn-based strategy game about the remnants of human civilization being threatened by gigantic creatures breeding beneath the earth. They confirmed back in early August that Into the Breach's Linux version was in "active development", so I thought their viewpoint might be quite interesting given the situation.

They first made it clear they are doing a Linux version, then their programmer Mathew expanded on it a bit. Here's what they had to say:

I think Steam Play is awesome. It's an unfortunate reality that providing support on multiple platforms is non-trivial for many studios, and never launching on Linux would never be done out of malice. Everybody wants as many people playing games in as many places as possible. Steam Play provides that option for games that otherwise might not get full support. It's important for us to try to provide full support when possible, but it's also good to know that there's a way for people who don't want to wait to very easily dive into Into the Breach. It's not a final solution for Linux for us because we like to be storefront agnostic as well as OS agnostic. Not everyone uses Steam in the same way that not everyone uses Windows. And we try to support as many places as possible.

Hopefully some of our readers will find that as interesting as I did. Not being tied to any particular store or operating system is a good point to make about all this.

If you missed it, you can also see our interview with the creator of DXVK, one of the projects that makes up Steam Play. There’s also the chat with Linux game porter Ethan Lee as well. On top of that, our contributor Cheeseness also posted his own Cheese Talks article on his blog about giving some of his thoughts.

As a reminder, you can see my initial thoughts about it all here. I did speak to game porters Feral Interactive in that article, although they only gave one line about plans not changing (which is good to know). Aspyr Media didn’t give a public comment for it and Virtual Programming still aren’t replying to our emails.

Regardless of how it turns out, it’s interesting to see Valve put in such effort to push Linux gaming forward. They have reasons to do so, looking after their massive wallet being the obvious one as they want Linux gaming to be profitable for them, but when the result from their work helps a number of FOSS projects and supports a platform we all enjoy using it’s hard not to appreciate it.