They are fully dependent on Windows Games developed for Windows.
They are only working really hard not to pay for Windows OS licences.
The day they actually support native Linux games, instead of doing Windows API translation is when I believe they are actually serious about Linux games, and not saving OS licenses.
Valve got a scare with Windows 8 that they could be pushed off the platform.[0] It became clear to them that they were just guests in a house owned by Microsoft. That was in 2012, the first Steam Machine (running Linux) came out 3 years later and they've been working at it ever since.
It's not about saving the cost of a license, it's about guaranteeing their own survival.
As for "supporting native games," I take that to mean "sufficiently incentivize game devs to port their games to Linux." How would that work, or did you have something else in mind?
The cost of developing and maintaining Proton, Linux driver improvements, and their own Arch-based OS has probably exceeded the amount they saved by not shipping Windows on Steam Deck.
But what they got in return is a much more usable gaming operating system that doesn't constantly pester you about switching to Edge, using Copilot or draining all your battery for an update while you game
What they got in return is freedom from Microsoft's arbitrary OEM hardware requirements like having a front camera for Windows Hello, or having a TPM
What they got in return ultimately is leverage. As sibling comment mentioned, they were in fear that they could be kicked off of Windows by Microsoft. Now, Microsoft is the one in fear that if they ever kick Steam off, gamers now have a perfectly functioning alternative operating system to switch to.
> The cost of developing and maintaining Proton, Linux driver improvements, and their own Arch-based OS has probably exceeded the amount they saved by not shipping Windows on Steam Deck.
So far. Depending on Microsoft's continued benevolence is probably not a great business strategy when you're as big as Valve. You don't want to be caught with your pants down when MS wants their pound of flesh from your $8 billion company.
Assuming Windows games, developed for Windows, keep runing in Proton and Microsoft doesn't come up with specific Windows API requirements not possible in Proton, like plugging into Pluton that is now a requirement for upcoming PCs.
Seems this sentiment is coming up in every recent Proton related thread. Despite all the counterarguments offered each time.
The simple reality is that there are decades worth of Windows games that will never have a Linux version. Because of the studios being gone. Because of the source code being lost. Because of the licensing issues for dependencies, assets, music. If not for the Valve efforts people would always need a copy of Windows to play a good chunk of their libraries. At which point why bother with Linux? But with Proton the calculus changes. Most of those Windows-only games are now fully playable on Linux. Many people no longer need Windows and that's a huge win for desktop Linux adoption.
By this logic Apple should not have developed x86 translation for its latest Macs because it showed they are not serious about the platform and disincentivized devs from providing native Arm ports. Except we know that's not what happened.
I get the reasoning from your other replies. If Microsoft extends Win32 with some new API that cannot be reimplemented in Proton then Valve is screwed. So you want them to require a native Linux version from every game published on Steam.
However I really do not think Valve is in a position to dictate such terms. They have multiple competitors both in distribution and console space. Big names are already publishing on their own stores. Small indies can move to itch.io. Everyone else can switch to Epic. Steam Deck is already underpowered compared to recent Windows based handhelds. If it stops supporting Windows games via Proton then it is as good as dead.
I understand your idealism. But a step like this would kill gaming on Linux much quicker than anything Microsoft could do. Because Valve is the only big distributor even remotely interested in it. In contrast Epic is absolutely hostile to Linux. And they're the ones to gain the most users in case Steam fails.
> They are fully dependent on Windows Games developed for Windows.
Sure, but they don't want to be dependent on Windows itself. If they can run all those Windows games on another OS, that's a win. Proton is pretty amazing, even if it's not 100%.
And if game devs for some cataclysmic reason abandon Windows, they'll figure that out too.
Valve has little control on what other companies target. Their previous push for native gaming produced very little results: Valve ported all their titles, a few minor publishers released native titles and some porting companies ported some AAA titles, but it was only a drop.
Proton has caused a significant increase in Linux playable games. The side effect is that it effectively killed porting companies.
edit: also all porting companies were effectively using their proprietary equivalent of proton (although often inferior) .
TBH running through a Win32/DX API shim isn't much different than running through SDL, yet Linux games using the SDL are considered "native" but Win32 games running through Proton are not?
(the Win32 and DX APIs are also much more straightforward to use than wrestling directly with X11, Wayland, Vulkan and the Linux audio API flavour of the month)
Yet Proton game work better and with greater performance than most native ports, which are created once by third-party teams (i.e. Feral), never properly tested or rarely updated.
Soon Wine will have Wayland support and 99% of those ports that no one is willing to update will remain stuck on X11.
Good luck running a >20 year old native Linux game on a modern Linux distro without recompiling.
A Proton like layer would also totally make sense on Windows, assuming that support for older Windows APIs is better in Proton than on Windows itself (which isn't a far fetched assumption).
All of this already exists on Windows. They're already drop in DLL replacements that smooth out compatibility with older versions of graphics APIs among other APIs. And old support for old games actually isn't that bad on Windows 11. No one has heard of this game, but I could just boot up the old Japanese PC game Abyss Boat and it kind of just works. If I use a DLL replacement or something like dxwnd or dgvoodoo2 it's even better.
With a Direct Draw replacement like the one from WineD3D your game/software is not better; the game literally stop beings a Power Point presentation and gets fully playable.
But, by default, you'll get a slideshow in a game that would run screamly fast under a Pentium 3 and a Windows release from its era.
Not Valve's fault that user-space Linux is run by a bunch of unpaid headless chicken with no overarching vision, sense of momentum and direction, while Win32 is a rock-stable API that games are already using.
Until there is a Linus figure that coordinates the userspace and organises a common platform API with long term support for closed-source software, Proton is the only pragmatic choice.
Valve want to get off Windows ASAP, not necessarily waste money chasing windmills driven by silly ideology that native is better.
I love Linux, I have used it for 25 years, and even I accept that native games run WORSE than their Proton counterpart.
> unpaid headless chicken with no overarching vision
systemd, GNOME, mesa etc all have developers who are being paid by companies for their work (Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, SUSE etc). That said, you're not wrong on the 'no overarching vision' part, see Wayland.
> Linus figure that coordinates the userspace and organises a common platform API
Flatpak with the freedesktop runtimes are just this, that said some companies (e.g. Canonical) are trying to sabotage these efforts and Ubuntu not shipping with Flatpak is the biggest hurdle.
Flatpak is not a common userspace library, just a set of sandboxed functions (i.e. portals).
What we need is something that groups Qt/GTK, pipewire, part of systemd, part of flatpak, part of Wayland into a single library, a bit like Win32 is. And the guarantee that it remains stable even for closed source projects. For example Linux is free to change its internals and requires everything to be open, so drivers can be adapted whenever the APIs change. This is not good enough for a desktop API.
Maybe because there is a large backlog of old games that will never be ported to Linux? Have you considered that game developers and not valve are responsible for providing a Linux port of their game and so far have managed to do a worse job than a DirectX implementation for Linux?
The collective time spent on developing proton is probably less than a dozen high profile Linux ports.
The latest commit to proton 9.0 is three weeks ago. The latest commit to an experimental branch is 3 days ago and it is just an update of a wine version and no other commits. A lot of proton commits just update a version here and there.
The focus is certainly not on proton. It is simply very cheap to work on it, because it is highly effective. The steam deck probably cost them more software and hardware developer hours than proton.
It's unfortunate but win32 has stable ABI. Such thing can't be really said about glibc and dynamic linking. Many old linux game binaries simply don't work or need tinkering to get them work.
the majority of users have no idea what OS is actually running on their steamdeck and don't want to worry about it.
Proton makes it possible to maintain a large library of older games on the platform.
Like any Steam user since Half-life 2, I must have accumulated over a hundred games in my library.
I think Valve knows better than we do what users want.
So? How is a game fully running on Proton not a native game?
Wine's version of the Windows API isn't conceptually different from any other cross-platform technology here. You could make a similar purity argument against using the Unity engine since most of its games end up being primarily on Windows too.
I used to port games to linux (from windows). There is just a huge amount of work porting each game, even if the tech used is somewhat cross platform to begin with. Game devs in general (and the people funding them) are just not interested in doing that work; they have more than enough work just getting the game to ship on their primary target platforms. And at least back in my day, native linux ports sold extremely poorly.
Aside from that there is a huge catalog of games using DX 9-12 and other windows-specific APIs that is just never going to get ported and that even valve would never be able to get source code for. Most of that source code is essentially unobtainable and in some cases has passed through multiple IP holders such that whoever owns it now (most likely a big company like EA or microsoft) doesn't even know what they have, let alone how to build it or even where the archives are.
An additional fact is that nowadays many older games have communities that have modded them unofficially by resorting to DLL injection and other hacks - these hacks can work under proton with the windows executable, but would fail on with a native linux binary. An example is oblivion script extender and its many cousins for that family of bethesda games. Many of the more advanced mods for those games require the capabilities of those low level hacks.
Even as someone who tries to predominantly buy games with a native Linux version, it's not something I really want. If I have some desire to play a game from 2008 again, I'm glad Steam will still offer me the Windows version.
Why, though? What difference does it really make besides significantly reducing the cost of “porting” games?
If anything, due to Wine, Proton etc. “Windows API” is almost a pseudo opensource way of developing cross-platform content. There are significant downsides but on the bright-side it’s extremely stable considering to most stuff on Linux.
Could you help me understand why that is a pity? Seems like Valve’s adapter pattern is a great development tool to get Linux games without dev studios spending excessive dev time/money on it.
I can think of one thing, which might not be what parent meant: the incentive of developing for linux, or paying porters like icculus and flibitijibibo to build a native version goes out the window, and the need for their kind of craft goes away.
Frankly when the SteamDeck launched I hoped that game developers will start treating it as they do any other console and build specifically for it, but sadly Proton prevented that from happening.
I don't think Proton has prevented anything. In fact, without it, and the back catalog of Windows games it makes available on SteamDeck, I doubt the handheld would have been as popular. SteamDeck was successful enough to get a re-release in the form of the OLED model, which is a big success for a Linux handheld. The longer Valve remains committed to the platform, and the more devices they get into the hands of consumers, the more attractive native Linux games will look to developers.
The people I mentioned in my comment clearly disagree with you, and frankly they have more of an incentive to be well informed about the situation. See the twitter link I posted to your comment's sibling for Ethan Lee's impressions from three years ago.
Also, I never argued against Proton having been a boon for Linux gamers, but I tried to present an opposing point of view that usually does not get taken into account.
Like I mentioned in the other comment my impression over the past 3-4 years is that the number of native linux ports has dwindled to nothing and that is most likely due to Proton making them unnecessary.
In my experience, the Linux ports never got any attention from the devs either way. They'll usually have worse performance, not be on the current patch and in at least one case, Binding of Isaac Rebirth, not be compatible with the DLC as the DLC works in some hacky way on the windows version.
Without Proton the steam deck would not be popular enough to warrant any Linux ports either way. So Linux ports would be doomed regardless.
The real travesty is steam, with the recent introduction of WoW64 in Wine, is now the only software that requires me to run 32bit binaries on my desktop. Real annoying.
In your opinion, why is the "trust in Proton" not considered "developing for Linux"?
Is your argument specifically about the game developer's mental model for Linux's priority, or something core about the Proton abstraction layer?
All software runs on some abstraction. So specifically, if the game developer prioritized a Linux port by explicitly testing Proton, would that be enough for you to consider the game "developed for Linux"?
The consumer artifact for a game developed for a platform is a binary that can run natively on that platform.
Regarding games, that is a binary that targets the ubuntu based Steam Linux Runtime. That's what I meant when I said that devs should be able to target it as a regular console SDK.
I think it's a longer term play.
Step 1) Establish a large enough non-windows userbase with great compatibility tools
Step 2) Studios and especially game engine developers notice linux install base
Step 3) Some tangible benefit to running natively, if only stability, pops up and the userbase is now large enough to care about it
Step 4) Engines, and then games get better native support
> @flibitijibibo (Jul 16, 2021): Don't look at me - I'm just trying to figure out how much time I have left, either way it's pretty clearly finite
Also some anecdata from someone that pretty much bought all native linux releases from Steam since the linux version was released: in the past 2-3 years there were barely any new ones, outside of Valve's own titles maybe.
> The day they actually support native Linux games
Not "the day a majority of their library is linux native"
As others mentioned valve has been developing their games as linux native already, what do you expect them to do? Force every single developer to support all the platforms possible? Delete all the games not linux native?
> They are only working really hard not to pay for Windows OS licences.
In what way are they supposed to be paying for Windows licenses? What do you even mean by that? You aren’t required to give 30% to MS to ships Windows apps (nor macOS)
If anything they are trying to build a moat, good-luck playing Xbox games on your Steam Deck if you don’t go out of your way to install Windows. Making them affectively a monopoly for now.
Valve doesn't ship Windows on the SD, hence doesn't need to pay a license for it.
Nothing prevents MS for porting their launcher to SD and running the games on SD.
> The day they actually support native Linux games
They do, and have for a long time now, for nearly all of their own releases. There's not much more they can do than that; they don't control what platforms other companies want to port to.
Sorry, but are you saying you believe Valve is responsible for the development of every game on their store? In case you're just genuinely unaware, games are developed by a variety of people and studios completely separately from Valve.
Yes, and they opt to sell video games from most anyone who opts in to their store. Fundamentally, that is their business. What you're asking of them is beyond unreasonable because it fundamentally goes against what they do and it would immediately kill their business in its entirety if they stopped selling 99% of games. Then we wouldn't even get Proton and Linux would be truly dead for gaming.
What you're asking of them is akin to complaining that Apple sells tech instead of dishwashers when fundamentally that's so far from what they do that it's absurd, not to mention that if they suddenly stopped selling all tech their business would obviously die. I feel a bit foolish for even entertaining this because what you propose is so obviously outlandish to me that I'm about 85% sure you're just messing around to get a rise out of people.
They are only working really hard not to pay for Windows OS licences.
The day they actually support native Linux games, instead of doing Windows API translation is when I believe they are actually serious about Linux games, and not saving OS licenses.