Drift Into Eternity now available for Linux on Steam

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The "Top 100 of the Indie of the Year Award 2015" game Drift Into Eternity is now available for Linux in the Steam store. The announcement describes the game as being an "open beta" due to lack of testing. The full version of the game requires a payment. A almost fully working demo version is available for Linux (and Windows). The only difference between it and the full version is the ability to submit or save scores, you can not do those things with the demo version. Everything else should, in theory, work. In practice the game doesn't actually launch.

Drift into eternity demo.jpg

The demo version of the game is a 1 GB download which requires 3441 MB when it is installed. It was, according to the Steam page, originally released in December 2016. That raises the obvious question: How did it get a "Top 100 of the Indie of the Year Award" in 2015?

The "Linux/SteamOS version available" announcement states that:

"This is still an "open beta" state for Linux/SteamOS because we lack of testers."

Their claim that there is a "lack of testers" appears to hold water. We installed and tested the game and it doesn't even launch..

Do note that the Steam store page for "Drift Into Eternity" does have a Linux version listed and that page has a "Download demo" button which can be used to install the demo version. There is also the option of buying the non-functional Linux version for 19,99€. Steams "Drift Into Eternity Demo" page does not list any Linux version; you will need to go to the "Drift Into Eternity" full game page and download the demo from there if you would like to check if it actually launches on your machine(s).

Linux's Steam marketshare was less than 1% in July 2019 which isn't exactly encouraging developers to make Linux versions. It is great that some independent game developers bother with Linux versions even so. But.. it does not really help all that much when the games don't even launch.

published 2019-08-04last edited 2019-08-04

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