A look at how Steam Play is doing, based on the ProtonDB reports from July

Not every contributor reads the score guidelines on ProtonDB and there is definitely a bias toward platinum there (games that works but with a hack, games that works but no cutscenes or no multiplayer, or occasional glitches/crash and such).

The platinum score is definitely a little bit inflated right now. Since now the development is going on so fast it can't be helped, but when proton leaves beta it would be useful to have a redacted list of scores so that reviewers filter out the noise.

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: EikeSo, BTW and IMHO, having to set environment variables would be gold, not platinum.

Something not all submitters appear to honour. I see a lot of platinum reports that still mention a specific setting. So I expect the realistic number of platinums to be lower in favour of gold.

Yeah. I see Age of Empires II regularly gets a bunch of platinum ratings, despite the fact that I needed to delete a launcher file and rename the game executable to get it to run, making it a solid gold. (It's possible this has changed since I got it working several months ago, but even back then people were rating it platinum.)

I get that sometimes it can be difficult to figure out the exact rating for a particular game, but in this case it's easy: if you have to do anything other than "click Play" to get a game to run, it's not platinum. :) And that's not a disparagement of the game or Proton or anything, as some people seem to think it is; what we need are accurate reports, not ones made through rose-colored glasses. Windows users switching to Linux because they read all their games were literally "click'n'play" are not going to be pleased to find out that's not actually the case.

Quoting: PhiladelphusYeah. I see Age of Empires II regularly gets a bunch of platinum ratings, despite the fact that I needed to delete a launcher file and rename the game executable to get it to run, making it a solid gold. (It's possible this has changed since I got it working several months ago, but even back then people were rating it platinum.)

Are you sure that's necessary? I remember having to do that in Wine a few years back, but in Proton, at least the latest version, it just worked, including the launcher.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd for that information, Platinum = just works out of the box, I don't have to do anything. Gold = works once you do X.
For that purpose, it is entirely irrelevant if what you have to do is a Proton option or a game option or edit some config files. It either runs perfectly without doing anything, or it runs perfectly after doing something. At least as far as users are concerned, which should always be the goal of tool development.

I get that whitelisting isn't really possible if something needs to be changed about the game itself, but that is something to be discussed in Github Proton/Valve issues, not something ProtonDB should be decisive in.

And if all that is required to run a game via Proton on Steam is to set some Proton option, then that Proton option should simply be set by default when running the game -> thus, the user has to do nothing and the game "just works" -> Platinum. All other cases -> Gold or worse.

IMO it doesn't make sense for Gold to include every possible change needed from user. There's a big difference between changing installing/adding files to run the game and adding a Launch option like NO_D3D11 ESYNC FSYNC or USE_D9VK. There should be another rating like Titanium or something which is just for Environment Variables/arguments/Launch options. It would also be great if there were two ratings, one for how the game runs, another for performance compared to native.

Quoting: Avehicle7887Something to point out with ProtonDB is that even if a game is reported as Borked, these are to be taken with a grain of salt. Some reports mention a specific game may run with plain wine, while some others are so old they don't reflect current status.

Funny enough, the opposite is also true. There are games that are still listed as working (silver or so) but are actually completely broken since a later update (due to adding EAC for instance).

I recently submitted Empyrion as borked on Proton 4.11, however it works fine (minus EAC) on proton 4.2.

Also I'd like to say Risen3 works quite well with PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command%, even reshade functions! (bit of cache skipping going on tho)


Last edited by TheRiddick on 6 August 2019 at 10:58 am UTC

I've also noticed allot of people rating the game based on it's performance, they always note how it runs around 50fps and if you disable anti-aliasing etc you get 60fps. And based on that they give a game Gold rating instead of Platinum.


Last edited by BOYSSSSS on 6 August 2019 at 11:05 am UTC

Quoting: BOYSSSSS

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd for that information, Platinum = just works out of the box, I don't have to do anything. Gold = works once you do X.
For that purpose, it is entirely irrelevant if what you have to do is a Proton option or a game option or edit some config files. It either runs perfectly without doing anything, or it runs perfectly after doing something. At least as far as users are concerned, which should always be the goal of tool development.

I get that whitelisting isn't really possible if something needs to be changed about the game itself, but that is something to be discussed in Github Proton/Valve issues, not something ProtonDB should be decisive in.

And if all that is required to run a game via Proton on Steam is to set some Proton option, then that Proton option should simply be set by default when running the game -> thus, the user has to do nothing and the game "just works" -> Platinum. All other cases -> Gold or worse.

IMO it doesn't make sense for Gold to include every possible change needed from user. There's a big difference between changing installing/adding files to run the game and adding a Launch option like NO_D3D11 ESYNC FSYNC or USE_D9VK. There should be another rating like Titanium or something which is just for Environment Variables/arguments/Launch options. It would also be great if there were two ratings, one for how the game runs, another for performance compared to native.

The ratings sure aren't perfect.
Introducing more rating woulds likely lead to even more confusion and unclear ratings, though.

What could work is to split the single rating into multiple parts without subjective judgements required.
Only yes/no questions (+ the Proton version & system info & comment, of course), leaving no room for uncertainty.
1. Does this game run perfectly for you?
2. Did you have to to enable Proton flags?
3. Did you have to run the game with non-Proton parameters?
4. Did you have to take other steps to make the game run?

Of course you can't have too many of these, but going away from anything requiring people to give an unclear score sounds like an improvement to me.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 6 August 2019 at 11:32 am UTC

You could have 3 Ratings,

1) Game works how well from scale 1 to 10 (10 being as good as or better then windows)
2) Workarounds needed (section provides fields for people to define steps taken)
3) Borked, doesn't work.

That seems good enough to me.

There's another thing. I see people give lower ratings for games because they had to do something because of a game specific bug. I think the ratings are for proton specific bugs, not game specific and it doesn't make sense to give a lower rating for something that a Windows user also has to do.