Comment by ivanjermakov

My guess is that this is going to shift rapidly for new games. Once the Steam PC launches, most new games will probably run fine on it. There's no logical reason for game studios to throw way significant market share over weird legacy crap related to "anti cheat". I expect the already significant amount of Linux using Steam users will grow to the point where game studios can no longer ignore it in terms of revenue and angry users and will actively test and ensure their games work flawlessly.

Of course one point here is that MS owns some of the more problematic game studios. Anti cheat here might be less about users cheating and more about them using this as a control point to ensure gamers keep on preferring Windows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't think MS has much of a moat left for gaming. And it will be tempting for them as well to tap into the few percent of Linux using Steam users for selling them games. They've long stopped insisting on windows for things like Office or SQL Server as well. The whole of Azure is pretty much Linux based at this point. So, they might dig in for a bit but they'll be under growing pressure to give in.

So you’re still rolling a 6 sided dice every time you try a new game as to whether it works at all, and half the time you need to tweak it still? That’s a reasonably large barrier to entry then. I have arch Linux but I still boot into windows to play games that are supposed to be supported because I got sick of playing through 20 min or so of a game for it to crash in a specific spot and I’d have to start over in windows if I couldn’t find a reliable solution. After that happens a few times in a few games, I gave up and now I just go to windows to play games every time so I stop running into issues.

I saw someone make a good point about this the other day that that 3% of games represents a much larger percentage of the gamer population - Pareto distribution comes into play with popular games where a small number of games account for a larger share of gamers' attention.

Valorant, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, Destiny 2 and Rainbox Six Siege are not supported on Linux, how much of those 30 games of 1000 are some of the most played games? I already name 20% of them.

To be honest, I've found ProtonDB to be way too optimistic when saying that games are "playable" (for example, a game running with no multiplayer still counted as "playable").