Comment by ecshafer
3 hours ago
Targeting DirectX and Win32 has become targeting Linux with how good Wine/Proton have gotten. I am able to play brand new games with no Linux support absolutely perfectly through proton. These games run better than games that had linux support actually ran on linux.
Ironically, Win32 has sometimes become more universal than native Linux binaries. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 released a native Linux version only supported on the Steam Deck, whereas the Proton version is verified for Linux almost everywhere. Win32 became the stable Linux gaming ABI.
Thus making Linux irrelevant as target to game studios.
For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters, if folks go out of their way to run on Proton, that is Valve's problem.
You're assuming no game studio would test their windows executable on proton, just because they develop on Windows. If there's non-trivial market share to capture by being "Deck verified" I don't see why that would be the case. Game devs develop on Windows for PlayStation, Switch, mobile etc. At least with proton they don't even need to cross compile.
I wouldn't go that far, I would suggest that any game studio interested in the next 10 years of PC gaming will need to at least start doing testing through Proton/Wine to ensure there's no clear/prominent bugs. It doesn't take a lot of vocal users to elevate or kill a game, and Linux usage has passed that mark at this point... Generally seismic shifts in politics are around the 8% mark in terms of overall population, and Linux usage in the Steam survey is close to 4% and some other metrics have Linux usage over 6%.
Literally half the gaming/hardware focused channels I watch have run at least one, if not several Linux Gaming videos and tests this past year... mostly in the past 4 months and mostly praising the state of Linux gaming. It's not going away.
Like they were making native Linux clients before?
And studios definitely check out their games running on Steam Decks via Proton now, so that's good.
> Thus making Linux irrelevant as target to game studios. For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters
I don't think so. I rather do believe that many game developers would actually love to give a more native approach for writing GNU/Linux games a try (to make this point more plausible: game developers are very used to game-console-native SDKs).
But what these game developers really demand is a very stable user-space API for everything that is necessary for writing games, which will work reliably on basically every GNU/Linux distribution, and will be supported for at least 20 years.
I think they'll still target Windows APIs and DirectX... but that they'll test much more heavily for Proton usage to ensure good experience.