Ethan Lee to put FNA into 'maintenance mode indefinitely' while working out a deal to work on Steam Play's Proton

Ethan Lee, the programmer responsible for creating the FNA project along with porting 40+ titles to Linux is going to put FNA into 'maintenance mode indefinitely' and hopefully work on Steam Play's Proton with Valve.

This won't come as a shock to anyone who read our previous article, the one where we spoke to Ethan Lee about his thoughts on Steam Play. To save you clicking around (still a great read though), he said this in it:

[…] I would really like to spend the time that used to be on FNA and maybe try to work as an official Proton developer, if somebody lets me do that.

Shortly after our article went up, Lee sent out a Twitter post hinting at it for those who didn't see my comments in the previous article. So it looks like our little chat helped push this forwards.

In his lengthy post on Google+, he did expand on what his plans are for it this time:

As for what's next, I'm still in the mood to save old games, so I'm currently figuring out a deal to work on Proton as an official developer alongside my usual Linux-native work. If we do figure something out (a bunch of background stuff has to happen before we get the paperwork drafted, let alone signed), I'm going to be working on Wine's migration to FAudio as well as Wine's .NET support, which should help out a lot with games that have C#-based launcher programs.

Personally, I couldn't be happier if it means another proven developer is able to get their hands even dirtier to improve Linux gaming with Steam Play's Proton.