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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.

Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.

Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.

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There isn't much they can do to foster native Linux support beyond trying to increase the number of people gaming on Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you need to make the platform desirable to developers before they will start developing for it.

They can do an Apple/Sony/Google/Nintendo/Xbox move, "Want your game on Steam Deck? Support Linux".

They certainly have a better card deck than Loki Entertainment used to have.

This is the chicken-and-egg problem though. If you don't get the Linux/Steam Deck audience large enough first, then that tradeoff won't be worth it to developers.

Valve have the money to pay developers to make a Linux port or ensure it works with Proton (maybe they already do in some cases?), if they really wanted to put the heat on Microsoft. Well, any not owned or being published by Microsoft i suppose.

Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.

> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.

"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.

It will get more worse, with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan, just use DirectX, and the convinience of modern GPU programming tooling in Visual Studio, HLSL code completion with CoPilot, PIX debugger, and then let Valve have to worry about running it on Linux.

> with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan

Valve themselves seems to disagree with you here, considering they still have Linux native SDKs available for integration, and are releasing their own games with native Linux support.

I'm guessing if what you say is true, Valve would be the first to move towards that reality you paint, but we haven't seen that yet, I'm doubting we'll ever see that, but the ones who live will see I suppose :)

Valve will get their OS/2 and netbooks moment if they don't foster a proper native Linux games ecosystem, but yeah lets cheer for Windows games translation on Linux while it lasts.

Valve is actively contributing upstream changes to Wine with Proton. As long as they continue to do that the scenario you envision shouldn’t happen.

I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.

None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.

That is like saying the most valuable gaming API is Dolphi, MAME, or LinUAE.

Almost certainly more people playing 80s and 90s games through emulation than on original hardware, so .. yes?

Except the main reason is because 80s and 90s hardware is dead, or hard to come by and repair.

Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.

Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.

Not naive at all. I'm pretty well aware of the monetary incentives and that they're focusing on their own use case.

But the improvement has been so great (and so downhill in Windows camp) that now Proton is the performance benchmark apparently...

Yes, and it has provided enough heat that Microsoft finally decided it was time for the netbook-like reaction, so lets see how long it holds.

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