Valve officially confirm a new version of 'Steam Play' which includes a modified version of Wine

I think this is great news!

I can see this discouraging some developers from making a Linux port, but these developers will likely be the same ones who are on the fence about making a Linux port anyway. The ones who have been natively supporting us will likely continue to do so.

Knowing the Linux community, I 'm pretty sure we will still make it a top priority to support publishers like Feral / Aspyr / etc.

Quoting: NatedawgI think this is great news!

I can see this discouraging some developers from making a Linux port, but these developers will likely be the same ones who are on the fence about making a Linux port anyway. The ones who have been natively supporting us will likely continue to do so.

Knowing the Linux community, I 'm pretty sure we will still make it a top priority to support publishers like Feral / Aspyr / etc.

but now there is no reason to not buy a game because it doesnt have a linux version, feral business model is in danger.
We will see how things goes.

Quoting: edo

Quoting: NatedawgI think this is great news!

I can see this discouraging some developers from making a Linux port, but these developers will likely be the same ones who are on the fence about making a Linux port anyway. The ones who have been natively supporting us will likely continue to do so.

Knowing the Linux community, I 'm pretty sure we will still make it a top priority to support publishers like Feral / Aspyr / etc.

but now there is no reason to not buy a game because it doesnt have a linux version, feral business model is in danger.
We will see how things goes.

You seem to be assuming that Proton magically makes/will make everything work perfectly. This is still just Wine doing the heavy lifting in the background, and plenty of things will still be broken. A dedicated port means actual guarantees that all features work on the target OS at release and will be supported going forward. Those are no small benefits.

To give a real-life example, it took years before Guild Wars 2 on Wine became truly playable for me with only one graphical glitch, and recently it started crashing randomly every few minutes. Continued support would mean I can buy the game with confidence and not be locked out of it randomly from one patch to the next. That would make me more likely to keep spending money on it, instead of gambling with a purchase. Unless and until Valve or anyone else manage to make Wine perfect, there is absolutely still room for native ports.

Downloading fallout 4 VR, i dont expect to much xD but can be funny. Lets see


Last edited by bubexel on 22 August 2018 at 11:37 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: GuestIf it makes people feel better I can point out really great things Valve have done (mostly around Vulkan tooling and drivers). But I have to ask: if wine didn't exist, if dxvk didn't exist, would Valve have tried to create either?

You can ask the same thing about Linux and choosing it for their projects like SteamOS. Would they create their own OS to avoid Windows? That's the benefit of FOSS. You can use existing work and contribute back.

Quoting: GuestAnyway, Valve does this for Valve. Not for GNU/Linux. I hope people realise this. And yeah, Valve can be congratulated for investing things that help out, but the way I see it, the victory is not from Valve. It's from wine developers. From doitsujin and all who contributed to dxvk (which, yes, has some partial help from Valve). It's from open source tools that make this possible, it's from open source drivers that make this possible, it's from Khronos for the amazing work they've been doing on Vulkan. It's from Lutris showing that this is indeed possible. That's where my praise is.
That's why I don't feel the need to rave on about Valve - I'm too busy praising all the foundational and open source work that hey're building on. Valve have simply picked the best solution, and I do congratulate them on bankrolling things and helping improve that solution. It's just....hmm....to me, and I stress "to me", ranting about Valve ignores all the hard work that is being built upon, and I've never liked that.
So I just like to comment to make people aware of how awesome wine can be, how awesome open development is, and how great it is that GNU/Linux makes all this even possible.

Sure, it's all by those developers. But Valve funded them and without that funding, progress would have been a lot slower, no doubt about it. So Valve deserve credit for contributing to FOSS projects instead of their own walled garden / silo.

Do they have selfish motives? Likely, they aren't doing it just for charity. But result is still positive. A lot of progress in Linux itself is driven by major for profit companies who use that very progress for their own benefit. That doesn't make their contributions useless.

Actually....wine was already in pretty good shape without funding from Valve. Gallium-nine never had backing and was in excellent shape, though has fallen by the wayside it seems.
But this is really my point: people are praising for Valve for....good business choices?
I've never said their contributions are useless though - far from it. And their contributions help outside of themselves at the end of the day. I just find it odd how people are so willing to give credit to Valve for things that others have done instead. Give credit to both, I say.

This article is specifically about Valve integrating wine into steam, and about their funding of DXVK. People are praising them for these specific things. The notion that anyone's giving them credit for anything else seems to be something you're cynically reading into things yourself.

Quoting: KabouikNot sure if this has been posted, but I am 32 pages late and that is a bit much to catch up while I'm at work.

There is a community-driven list of games that run or crash with Steam Play/Proton, it is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ3_odz8JzEVK80vkku-b6FsICWb45xGf4VYnzYz5cNSMVQ-5BA2WoHBGAScw96MgLj1ONA7Cx0tyGa/pubhtml#

Since the official whitelisting process can take some time, is probably more conservative, and does not show what has been tested but failed, it might be worth posting this list in the GOL article so that people know about it. There are 50k reads on the article at the moment, imagine if even a small percentage of those people were documenting about the tests they are currently doing with their game library.

While the testing from the community is not necessarily exhaustive, seeing if a game fails terribly or runs smoothly on someone else's computer would help deciding whether to download 50 GB off Steam and try.

Quoting myself in the hope that Liamdawe sees my message.

StillLife 1 and 2 install well and play well, except for visual glitches

Quoting: Joeyboots80Wow. This is crazy. A lot of games I couldn't seem to get to work before now magically work with this steamplay feature. Can't say I'm mad about being to play more of my library without touching windows. :D

I noticed this too, some games that didn't work or wouldn't launch properly while running steam on WINE seem to be working now, somehow, but it could have been the steam client itself not working well on WINE

Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: edo

Quoting: NatedawgI think this is great news!

I can see this discouraging some developers from making a Linux port, but these developers will likely be the same ones who are on the fence about making a Linux port anyway. The ones who have been natively supporting us will likely continue to do so.

Knowing the Linux community, I 'm pretty sure we will still make it a top priority to support publishers like Feral / Aspyr / etc.

but now there is no reason to not buy a game because it doesnt have a linux version, feral business model is in danger.
We will see how things goes.

You seem to be assuming that Proton magically makes/will make everything work perfectly. This is still just Wine doing the heavy lifting in the background, and plenty of things will still be broken. A dedicated port means actual guarantees that all features work on the target OS at release and will be supported going forward. Those are no small benefits.

To give a real-life example, it took years before Guild Wars 2 on Wine became truly playable for me with only one graphical glitch, and recently it started crashing randomly every few minutes. Continued support would mean I can buy the game with confidence and not be locked out of it randomly from one patch to the next. That would make me more likely to keep spending money on it, instead of gambling with a purchase. Unless and until Valve or anyone else manage to make Wine perfect, there is absolutely still room for native ports.

Yep, I agree completely with this. A native port is typically guaranteed to work, especially a quality one from a AAA porting house such as Feral/Aspyr/etc. I just tried a few games with Proton. It's a nice tool, but it still has quite a ways to go, will probably be several years before it works most of the time, and will probably never work flawlessly. :)


Last edited by Natedawg on 23 August 2018 at 6:51 pm UTC

So I see in SteamOS I can use Steam Play when enabling the beta participation. However, I cannot access the "Enable Steam Play for All Titles" that is available in the desktop app. Is this hidden somewhere? Anyone figured out how to turn this on in SteamOS?

Also, Doom 2016 is flawless under Steam Play. Mind boggling that this is actually happening.