A look over the ProtonDB reports for May 2019, over 5,000 Windows games reported working on Linux

ProtonDB, the unofficial tracker for checking the status of Windows games played on Linux through Steam Play has another data-dump available. Here's a look for May 2019. We seem to have also reached a new milestone lately, with well over 5,000 Windows games reported to work.

That 5K (5,200 exactly at time of writing) should be taken with a pinch of salt of course, as plenty of titles have only a few reports and as with anything generated by user submitted reports the accuracy of them will vary but it's still very impressive overall.

Anyway, here's our quick monthly look over some of the details. Starting with the total number of reports being sent per month. As we can see the upwards trend of reports being sent in has continued now for three months although May only slightly beat April.

To break those numbers down into something that's actually more useful, during May what rating where those reports getting? A lot of them Platinum, although quite a number of them also giving a Borked rating meaning the games tested simply didn't work.

What will be interesting to see is how the amount of Borked reports changes over time, something I will likely take a look at during next month for the June reports. Could be interesting to see given how the many Steam Play/Proton updates should bring better compatibility over time even with newly released games.

Of those reports above, what titles were people testing across May and submitting? Let's take a look:

The top two titles reported in May were MORDHAU released at the end of April and RAGE 2 released in the middle of May. If you remember, Valve/CodeWeavers actually put out a same-day Steam Play update to fix RAGE 2 which is impressive. Hopefully we will see more of that for big releases, I imagine the Halo games coming to Steam will see some attention quickly if they don't work at release.

Imagine being able to play Halo the day or week it releases on Steam, on a Linux machine. That thought both amuses and excites me.

How many of those reported were rated as Platinum?

Grim Dawn showing up isn't surprising, as Valve set it as free to play during the Spring Cleaning event. MORDHAU really does seem to popular, although with it being a multiplayer title I just hope all the people enjoying it don't end up seeing some ant-cheat problems in future. A Plague Tale: Innocence is another new one, released in the middle of May as well and considering how well it's being reviewed it's great to see people able to enjoy another brand new release on Linux.

And now for the usual breakdown of distributions people are using:

Usual note about "Other": lots of the reports don't include a specific distribution name. Where we're unable to properly identify them when scraping the data dump, we (GOL) bundle them together into Other. This can be caused by multiple things, so hopefully in future ProtonDB can make this clearer.

Finally, a little look at the GPU and CPU people have been reporting with:

Steam Play really does look like it's helpfully filling in the gaps for a lot of people. From being able to play various AAA games right at release, to enabling people to not lose access to their back catalogue of Steam games when switching to Linux (or testing the waters in a dual-boot) it's really great that Valve did this.

It's worth noting, that all of this is going on while Valve are yet to actually advertise the newer version of Steam Play on Steam directly. If you remember, Steam Play originally meant games that you purchased once to gain access to any build available (Windows/Mac/Linux) whereas now it's for running games through Proton. Valve also haven't updated the whitelist of titles since December last year, it will be very interesting to see just how far they wish to push it. Taking on compatibility for thousands of titles themselves (and with CodeWeavers help) is a tall order. On that note, I am trying to arrange an interview with Valve to get some more info about their plans, so stay tuned.

As a reminder, we also have a dedicated Steam Tracker Page to keep an eye on the Linux market share, languages and more. It has been updated with May's figures from Valve, showing the Linux market share for May at 0.84% which is an increase of around 3.7% based on April being at 0.81%. This is the highest it has been since September last year, so that's a positive sign showing a small upwards trend.

That's all for this month, see you again next month. You can find the ProtonDB data dumps yourself here on GitHub.