Close scrutiny of the Steam port for Mac OS X led to the discovery of evidence which suggested that a Linux version might be coming soon. Sadly, Valve marketing vice president Doug Lombardi dispelled these suspicions in a recent interview during which he confirmed that the company is not actively working on Steam for Linux.

Steam is a popular digital content delivery channel for computer games. It allows users to purchase and download games from a wide range of mainstream vendors. The service is developed and operated by Valve, the company behind Half-Life, Portal, and a number of other well-known games. Steam was originally only available for the Windows platform, but Valve officially launched a Mac OS X version earlier this year.

Linux hardware news site Phoronix discovered that a shell script in the Mac OS X version of Steam includes a conditional expression that checks to see if the user is running Linux. There are also some strings that refer to Linux in several of Steam's binary components. These bits of evidence strongly indicate that Valve has at least experimented internally with a Linux port of Steam.

It's possible that the company began evaluating Linux portability and decided that there wasn't enough business value in pursuing it to completion. The total number of desktop Linux users is a considerably smaller audience than Mac OS X and Windows. It's also worth noting that a big chunk of Linux desktop installations are probably never going to be used for gaming (netbooks that don't have sufficient hardware capabilities, university computer labs, free software enthusiasts who are ideologically disinclined to purchase proprietary software).

Despite the fact that the number of Linux users who are interested in buying games is relatively small, there is a lot of evidence that members of this demographic are eager to open up their wallets to vendors who support gaming on the Linux platform. This group of gamers is going to be disappointed by Valve's decision.