Steam Play passes six thousand Windows games playable on Linux, according to ProtonDB

I don't know if it's already been covered, but I found this interesting...
... the product we had been developing together privately for over two years.

I don't know if it's already been covered, but I found this interesting...
... the product we had been developing together privately for over two years.

That's noted in our bigger Steam Play one year anniversary post.

For me Steam Play is a way to play games with friends, who are still using Windows. Most of the games they are playing either didn't worked on Linux (before Proton) or the cross platform multiplayer is not working (I'm looking at Total War titles here, although the port made by Feral is running awesome). There is not much to be done about cross platform issues, but at least for other games we have Steam Play :-)

Thanks to Steam Play I also played few games I would otherwise skip, only because they are not available on Linux.

To me Proton is the logical and nessessary step for Linux gaming. One I never dreamed possible a little more than a year ago. It solves the problem of the backlog of Linux incompatible games and the problem of too few Linux releases (because of the extra efforts to support too few Linux customers) at once.
I'd even have no bigger problems if Linux gaming turned out to become Win32/Vulkan (at least until Windows is concidered unnessessary by the majority ;-) ).

Some people aren't really categorizing some games very well though. For example Carmageddon: Max Damage had a few Platinum ratings because it, well, runs. But it runs slower than a snail superglued to a bus stuck in a traffic jam.

Hey Liam, create an article encouraging people to login on SteamDB and look for the games in their library with lack of reports. I found some games that runs pretty well.


Last edited by fagnerln on 22 August 2019 at 9:23 am UTC

For me Steam Play is a way to play games with friends, who are still using Windows. Most of the games they are playing either didn't worked on Linux (before Proton) or the cross platform multiplayer is not working (I'm looking at Total War titles here, although the port made by Feral is running awesome). There is not much to be done about cross platform issues, but at least for other games we have Steam Play :-)

Thanks to Steam Play I also played few games I would otherwise skip, only because they are not available on Linux.

In my case, I can play Rocket League with real performance and bugless with Proton, the linux version is too bugged for me xD

not realiable at all.
on guilty gear, you can play the game, but the experience is incomplete, you cant watch the anime-ish introl or any other video from the game, because its on wmv format (and valve dont want pay royalites nor can convert then selves (they dont have the rights to change the game))

now this may look like an small issue for someone who dont care about animes but those persons arent the target audience for this game and this issue may affect other games in other unexpected areas.
an video being used as cutscene is an expected use, but some games use video as texture, for example, tombraider use it as an texture for the fire, so in some games you may have an completely buggy/incomplete experience due to this issue.

also, in some game the cut scenes are important to tell the story so you may know whats going on story-wise or how to advance in the game.

i hate to say that, but if you want to send an report and call it an platinum game, you NEED to play the game elsewhere (playstation, xbox, windows, dont matter ) to make sure you know all the features from the game and all of then are working fine.
hell you may need to discovery all the secrets from the game and make sure they are all working.

that is why an Q/A from valve or the game developer is important.
just imagine the "tri-force from ocarina of time" being possible to get all those years, but the problem was that people where playing the game on an bad emulator and never realized.

btw who remember back in the days with so many hoax about the tri-force being possible to get?


Last edited by elmapul on 22 August 2019 at 10:32 am UTC

Proton is great, but I'd prefer more source clones, or Vulkan ports to Linux.

Vulkan ports became less frequent because of Proton.

This is a necessary tool, even if the game has a Linux version.
Is very normal that a native Linux game doesn't want to work after an update...
This game I purchased for my mom is a good example :><:

I was tired of weak performance in two wine games (WoW and PoE) I play and installed window$ to check them out natively. Haven't touched the system outside of work since 2014. I can't help but to think I might keep dual booting for games. The performance is so much better for my weak and old notebook... :-(

Wine is great but it still has a long way to go. Using Lutris with DXVK, I get only 50~80% of windows performance in PoE and WoW, which is a costly trade for my Nvidia 840m notebook I'm not sure I'll keep accepting.

On native games, such as Dota 2 or factorio, there's no performance discrepancy, so I will keep gaming those under Linux for sure.

Steam Play is just the best thing happened for Linux gamers in the last year, no doubt.
I hope they will fix the issue avoiding me to invite steam friends from Sonic All Star Racing Transformed. Looks like Steam doesn't allow Linux users use the steam invitation system when using Steam Play.

Is very normal that a native Linux game doesn't want to work after an update...
This game I purchased for my mom is a good example :><:

Of course it's not normal. Have you reported that one to the developer?

Is very normal that a native Linux game doesn't want to work after an update...
This game I purchased for my mom is a good example :><:

Of course it's not normal. Have you reported that one to the developer?

Yes, and no answer.
This is the error
error while loading shared libraries: libsteam_api.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Some people aren't really categorizing some games very well though. For example Carmageddon: Max Damage had a few Platinum ratings because it, well, runs. But it runs slower than a snail superglued to a bus stuck in a traffic jam.

Nice simile.

It's worth noting though, that with little over nine thousand games currently reported, Steam does host well over thirty thousand so there's a huge amount that hasn't yet been tested.

Incidentally, that ratio probably hints at the amount of junk on Steam (but also probably a lot of less-known and older titles that people aren’t interested in testing and replaying at this point).

It's worth noting though, that with little over nine thousand games currently reported, Steam does host well over thirty thousand so there's a huge amount that hasn't yet been tested.

Incidentally, that ratio probably hints at the amount of junk on Steam (but also probably a lot of less-known and older titles that people aren’t interested in testing and replaying at this point).

Thirty thousand games is what I call overweight... Steam can fall due to it.
Is not the same, but is similar to the mid 80's game crisis.
Steam need a curated system.

If the prophet does not come to the mountain, then the mountain must come to the prophet.

Prophet = Games
Mountain = Linux

Once Mortal Kombat 11, Injustice 2, Street Fighter V and Easy Anti Cheat Works on Linux im making my 100% Move need to play Dauntless lol

Wine is great but it still has a long way to go. Using Lutris with DXVK, I get only 50~80% of windows performance in PoE and WoW, which is a costly trade for my Nvidia 840m notebook I'm not sure I'll keep accepting.

That's incredibly bad and much worse than expected, even by Nvidia standards. What's your CPU?