Valve on Porting Source Engine to Linux, Android Next

At the GPU Technology Conference, Valve recently talked about their experience of porting Source Engine to Linux.

The slides from the session are now available, you can have a look at these slides from here. 

According to Valve, both Linux and mobile gaming markets are growing rapidly and they are working on an Android port of Source engine. They also talked about some differences in Android and Linux development. However, their current focus is getting Linux + OpenGL implementation of Source engine as mature as possible.

Valve said that Linux is a stepping stone to mobile market. It is too complicated to directly port any x86-Direct3D-based games to Android. If their games work on Linux, porting to android is relatively simple and thus opens up the big smartphones and tablets market with relatively little effort. Ultimately their main focus is on OpenGL as a platform independent 3D graphics interface.

A detailed coverage on the talk and Android specific slides can be found on 4Gamer and Heise. 

Further details are available on reddit thread, where one of the Nvidia developers (who is helping Valve in Linux port of Source Engine) has done a mini 'Ask Me Anything' (AMA) session.