ProtonDB, the unofficial website that gathers reports of how games run with Steam Play on Linux has another data-dump available, so here's another monthly run-down of the data.
Firstly, we've seen a nice increase in the amount of games reported to be playable. When I took a look over the data last month, ProtonDB was reporting exactly 5,200 as games that "work" which has now risen to 5,539 so the growth there is quite healthy.
Onto some other data, here's how many reports we're seeing being made by users over time:
I'm actually somewhat surprised to see less in June, since Steam Play Proton had 4.2-6, 4.2-7 and 4.2-8 all released in the same month. I usually expect people to go back and re-test, but thinking on it more unless there's something different to report it's not likely worth it if the game continues to work fine.
Here's a look at what types of reports people were submitting, to give us an idea of how well things are going in Steam Play land:
That's a very healthy amount of Platinum reports being sent in although a little less than May, but there's quite a big drop in the amount of "Borked" reports (910 in May, 907 April) too.
Let's dive a little deeper and look at the actual games being reported across June:
| Name | # of reports |
|---|---|
| Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night | 60 |
| The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | 43 |
| Path of Exile | 40 |
| Grand Theft Auto V | 37 |
| MORDHAU | 31 |
| Warframe | 29 |
| My Friend Pedro | 27 |
| DOOM | 27 |
| Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice | 22 |
| The Elder Scrolls Online | 19 |
| Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2 | 18 |
| Rising Storm 2: Vietnam | 18 |
| Katana ZERO | 17 |
| Grim Dawn | 17 |
| They Are Billions | 17 |
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night being the big new one, released on Steam on June 18th it's not really a surprise to see it so high up, especially since they cancelled the Linux version that was promised during the Kickstarter. Thankfully, as you will see below Steam Play saves the day a bit here.
Now let's break that down a bit further, what games were getting a lot of Platinum level reports this month?
| Name | Platinum # |
|---|---|
| Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night | 42 |
| The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | 39 |
| MORDHAU | 25 |
| My Friend Pedro | 19 |
| Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2 | 18 |
| Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice | 18 |
| Path of Exile | 17 |
| DOOM | 16 |
| Risk of Rain 2 | 15 |
| Age of Empires II HD | 15 |
| Grim Dawn | 15 |
| Polygoneer | 11 |
| Deep Rock Galactic | 11 |
| AMID EVIL | 11 |
| Grand Theft Auto V | 10 |
Nice to see that the recent release of My Friend Pedro (June 20th) also seems to be working well going by the number of reports.
Something a little different that I've not tried to parse before, is to look at games that only appeared on ProtonDB in the month we're looking at. In this case, these are the top 10 titles with the most Platinum reports that are newly reported (not released) in June:
| Name | Release Date | Platinum # |
|---|---|---|
| My Friend Pedro | 20 Jun, 2019 | 19 |
| SpaceEngine | 11 Jun, 2019 | 8 |
| OCTOPATH TRAVELER | 7 Jun, 2019 | 7 |
| Muse Dash | 20 Jun, 2019 | 7 |
| Devolver Bootleg | 10 Jun, 2019 | 4 |
| Sankaku Renai: Love Triangle Trouble | 31 May, 2019 | 3 |
| Sinking Island | 4 Oct, 2007 | 3 |
| Cris Tales (demo) | 2020 | 3 |
| Rescue HQ - The Tycoon | 28 May, 2019 | 3 |
| Monster Girl Island: Prologue | 20 Jun, 2019 | 3 |
That's it for the actual games but what about hardware and software? As for what Linux distribution the reports are coming from, here's our usual look over that:
As well as the CPU/GPU people are using:
As a reminder for those not aware, we're running a dedicated Steam Tracker Page to keep an eye on the Linux market share, languages and more. Recently added tracking for Russian language use on Steam and more will be added over time. It will be updated with the June market share details once Valve update it.
With Valve continuing their commitment to Linux gaming, I'm still very interested to see exactly how they will be advertising Steam Play on store pages as they've yet to announce any details on that.
For those interested, the public data is stored here on GitHub.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: gojulThe only thing with Proton is that you should not play in full screen mode.what do you mean?
Quoting: Mr. PinskyI am still waiting for .wmv playback support. It's blocking a lot of games. Apparently, there is work ongoing on it upstream in Wine (Media Foundation implementation), but it's not yet ready.
even worse, some games are rated platinum when dont even have support for playbacking the cutscenes, intro or ending of the game.
sigh.
i dont trust protonDB anymore.
Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI guess in 2020 We gonna see a new batch of Steam Machines.the brand is dead, no one would purchase an valve branded console after their steam machine fiasco.
Valve has until the EOL of Windows 7 for to polish SteamPlay and make it 100% compatible.
Quoting: fagnerlnI see some Platinum rating with a lot of workarounds, and some "borked" games that the game runs.if the game runs for many people but crash on your machine, why would you rate it platinum?
but i totally agree with the opposite, platinum dont mean platinum at all (as i said in my previous comment)
Quoting: gradyvuckovicI'm with you on everything except app distribution. Maybe it's just that I have a simple use case, but for me there are two sources of applications on Linux: The distribution's "software centre" thingie, and Steam. Steam for (non-open source) games, software centre for everything else; I've never had a use for a closed source application that wasn't a game, and it's been years since I had a reason to try installing something that wasn't in the software centre. So out of those two, Steam is identical to what Windows people use, and the software centre is way easier than what Windows people do. Far as I'm concerned, advantage: Linux on that one.Quoting: KimyrielleI would be super scared about the state of Linux gaming without Steam Play. Let's be honest, our platform isn't gaining any momentum whatsoever. We're still stuck at the same 1% market share we had before Linux gaming became a thing. And not only has no further major publisher entered the Linux market in years, we're reading more and more developer comments about Linux not being worth it and them questioning further releases for it. I get the idea that it's not a perfect solution and native ports would be preferable, but at least this way we can play these AAA games that nobody seems to port to Linux. Call me happy!
My thoughts on some possible reasons why:
- The UX of many distros is still very poor. If a brand new convert from Windows picks something like Arch for their first Linux distro, they're going to have a bad time and ask "why the hell would anyone even bother with this?". And by UX, I don't mean just the UIs, although a bad UI is of course included in a bad UX. But also the websites of many distros are poor, there's often poor documentation, and not a lot of beginner friendly content, like videos on how to perform common tasks. New users are often left to just 'figure stuff out' for themselves, and while some Linux users may like that, it would definitely be turning off new users.
- App distribution on Linux is still a bit of a mess. Just look at the length of the 'download' page for Lutris. For Windows that page would just be a single button, 'Download', and hence it wouldn't even be a separate page, just a button on the homepage. We can't seem to nail down what method to make the primary focus of app distribution and often devolve back to just terminal command instructions for each distro. I'd like to see a survey targeting a wide number of people that asks the question, "What is your preferred means of application distribution?", and see if we can pick one, then focus entirely on making all applications available via that means, and integrating it well into every distro. If that's flatpak then focus on flatpak, if it's appimage, then focus on appimage. We just need to pick something and make it happen, and whatever we pick needs to be something other than entering terminal commands like a programmer adding dependencies to a project.
- Even if Proton became perfect tomorrow, it would still take years for us to reach even 5%, because people are hesitant to change something when it works and often completely unaware of Linux's existence or anything happening on Linux. People often take a 'if it aint broke don't fix it' approach to PCs, so the only time to grab a potential Windows user and bring them over to the dark side is when something breaks on their PC, or when they hate the next version of Windows. I don't know how we advertise Linux without becoming 'annoying' but that's something worth tackling.
- Even if Proton became 'perfect' tomorrow, and could run every Windows game flawlessly, there's still one more issue Linux faces: All that achieves is making Linux on par with Windows in terms of number of available games, that still doesn't make Linux superior to Windows for gaming. To the typical user who doesn't care about Linux, what reason do they have to switch to Linux? Linux will need to become 'superior' to Windows for a large number of users first before we get huge numbers of converts.
- There's also still a lot of hardware support issues when it comes to gaming. We got the basics now of course, when it comes to supporting GPUs and such, but stuff like gaming mice/keyboards, customising RGBs, etc, we still don't have many nice solutions for that stuff.
That said, we have gained a little bit of traction recently, and there are always going to be a number of people who will be keen to switch away from Windows even despite everything I've said up there. I think there's lots of reasons to be positive, but we still face a lot of challenges.
Sure, if you're an advanced user doing tricky things you might have reason to use other ways that are complicated--but then user friendly is no longer your primary measuring stick anyway.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 July 2019 at 7:23 am UTC
Quoting: KimyrielleI would be super scared about the state of Linux gaming without Steam Play. Let's be honest, our platform isn't gaining any momentum whatsoever.
QuoteWhy don't you stick with linux?
QuoteI want to play games tooThat's the argument I hear most. With most games available in an easy way, there is nothing holding back the more tech savvy, that need linux for their work.
The only reason I install windows, is to RE drivers, so I can run software on linux only :-). And it has come a long way... I really hated it, because the whole Microsoft clueless people world made my life as a software developer a living hell. These days, you can run bash, ssh and rsync, which is good enough to rsync the logfiles to a more userfriendly environment and process the logs.
Quoting: elmapulQuoting: fagnerlnI see some Platinum rating with a lot of workarounds, and some "borked" games that the game runs.if the game runs for many people but crash on your machine, why would you rate it platinum?
but i totally agree with the opposite, platinum dont mean platinum at all (as i said in my previous comment)
This is exactly what I'm saying, the game is only platinum if it works out of the box in your machine/distro.
Borked is to games that didn't run, but some people use it to games that crashes after a while, which is obviously bronze.
Mohandevir Jul 2, 2019
Quoting: KimyrielleI would be super scared about the state of Linux gaming without Steam Play. Let's be honest, our platform isn't gaining any momentum whatsoever. We're still stuck at the same 1% market share we had before Linux gaming became a thing. And not only has no further major publisher entered the Linux market in years, we're reading more and more developer comments about Linux not being worth it and them questioning further releases for it.
And it's not going to change, imo, unless a new hardware platform featuring a pre-installed Linux OS targeting the gaming market happens... And I mean sold in Gamestops, Bestbuys and Walmarts of this world, in store with lots of advertising, not just online drowning among 50 Windows offerings.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 2 July 2019 at 6:13 pm UTC
Quoting: MohandevirAnd it's not going to change, imo, unless a new hardware platform featuring a pre-installed Linux OS targeting the gaming market happens... And I mean sold in Gamestops, Bestbuys and Walmarts of this world (in store, not just online).And I don't think, in the coming Stadia-like streaming/cloud gaming revolution that's about to happen, that a new hardware option will ever be coming. In the short term, if Chromebooks can start to install and use Steam in the future, that might lead to a bump...
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