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Comment by adwf | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that AAA games take 2-3 years to produce, whereas Steam Linux has been out for only 6 months. There's a lot of inertia to overcome.

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Exactly. You cannot expect AAA games to come anytime soon on Linux.

AAA games can be ported from Windows to Linux in a matter of days if they already work well in Wine. When they don't, extending Wine to make them work is vastly cheaper than you probably think.

Running in Wine is not porting. It is using a intermediate layer. Porting means native code.

Wine absolutely can be a porting tool; Codeweavers offers porting services using this exact technology: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/

From a technical standpoint, Wine is extended to make the game work, that version of Wine is bundled with the application, and a script is included to run it without further user involvement.

I don't get why people still insist this sort of port somehow doesn't count. If it runs at full speed, shows up as a "Linux game" under Steam, and the user literally can't tell the difference, what does it matter?

Limbo did that and its performance was awful. No thank you.

Why does it matter if that compatibility layer sits in a system-wide library or in application code (as anyone would add if writing a program to target multiple kinds of system)? Wine is not an emulator, it's a free re-implementation of the windows API that runs on Linux.

Using WINE is not porting, it does not run natively, and this is not what Valve recommends to do.

It does run natively. You don't think it runs in an emulator, do you?

You lose a lot of raw performance with wine. Left 4dead ran on wine at probably half the framerate of the windows version. No thank you.

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