Comment by pjmlp
8 hours ago
Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios.
Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux.
Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,...
I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it wasn't for gaming and .NET, I would probably be on macOS instead.
Taking care of Linux deployments is part of my job, so I know pretty well how it goes today, don't need the have you tried standard Linux forum replies.
It's not practical for game studios to target Linux natively, the best they can do is ensure their game works fine with Wine (plus, this gets them BSD support!).
I have several games from 10+ years ago from Humble Bundle. The Linux builds all have quirks (my gamepad won't work on any of them). The Windows builds work fine with Wine (the same gamepad works on all of them).
Plus, given the lack of a stable ABI, I can't really run the Linux builds natively either, because they dynamically link some library which doesn't match on my host. I need some special chroot or container (which Steam can manage). Requiring a container isn't any better than requiring Wine.
It certainly used to be in Loki days, what happened is that there is no money in the game.
> Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios.
> Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux.
It is a huge hassle to make a new build to a new platform. You double build system, release management, and testing. Compared to just one plat. Games are complicated, and testing all the dynamic behaviour is also complicated.
Making just a Win32 build really saves resources.
Also Win32 has been a stable api for a long time. Linux apis tend to change, and old games don't get re-built. The win32 build is therefore also provably a lot more long lived, compered to anything you build on linux.
Thats also important because of the Dont Kill Games effort and so on.
That reasoning fails flat given the same studios have no issues supporting iOS, PlayStation, Swift and XBox, which are completely alien to what is used on Android NDK, APIs that are GNU/Linux compatible for 3D rendering, audio and asset loading.
Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.
> Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.
For a studio selling their games via Steam, there is no benefit in making a Linux build.
Their clients still need Steam to run it, and there's no practical different between Steam creating a container with a dedicate Linux userspace or with a dedicated Proton setup.
The audience that REALLY cares whether the game is Linux-native or not is likely the audience that wouldn't want to use Steam.
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> given the same studios have no issues supporting iOS, PlayStation, Swift and XBox
PlayStation and Xbox don't go and cause you constant churn, at least not in the same console generation, and maintenance churn on iOS is only bearable for app developers because there are so many people using it that you can afford to pay the extra effort.
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Microsoft releases new APIs too, but no one uses them, especially not games.
XDK, GDK and Agility SDK are also part of API updates.
WINE was not the first Windows on *nix implementation. Sun had Wabi which was Win16 and was also released for AIX, HPUX, and Caldera Linux.
While Linux may be a pain to release software for, had anyone been interested enough, a solution could have been found. No one cared because Windows was the market and everything else was a rounding error.
Yes, and?
Which game studios were targeting Solaris?