On the day of Steam Play hitting the big one year anniversary (August 21st), it seems another milestone has been reached in terms of compatibility.
According to ProtonDB, the handy unofficial tracking website, over six thousand games are now working. At time of writing, exactly 6,023 "games work" (quote from their home page) against the 9,134 total of games that currently have user reports to see if they run or not. That's quite an impressive number!
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.
Since it's not explained on the ProtonDB website, I reached out to the owner of ProtonDB to explain how they get that "games work" number. They said it "includes all games with at least one gold rating or higher".
How about a question for you to answer in the comments: What does Steam Play mean to you? I'll start.
To me, it's many things. For starters, I do have quite a number of games not available on Linux, left over from purchases before I decided Linux was what I wanted to stick with as my main platform on PC. Some of them are old favourites too so having easy access to them now is a really nice bonus. On top of that, it means also having the chance to play thousands of games not released on Linux over the last few years if I wanted to.
For some additional fun reading: check out this blog post about a Wine bug from the lead Proton Quality Assurance Engineer at CodeWeavers, the company Valve teamed up with to create Proton. Great to see even more behind the scenes info like this.
Another point I want to make, is how Proton can keep older Windows games alive and kicking too and there's people doing just that. Not Linux gaming related but interesting nonetheless.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
... the product we had been developing together privately for over two years.
Quoting: EikeI don't know if it's already been covered, but I found this interesting...That's noted in our bigger Steam Play one year anniversary post.
... the product we had been developing together privately for over two years.
Thanks to Steam Play I also played few games I would otherwise skip, only because they are not available on Linux.
Nevertheless Aug 22, 2019
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 ;-) ).
Luke_Nukem Aug 22, 2019
Last edited by fagnerln on 22 August 2019 at 9:23 am UTC
Massinissa Aug 22, 2019
Quoting: ZlopezFor 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 :-)In my case, I can play Rocket League with real performance and bugless with Proton, the linux version is too bugged for me xD
Thanks to Steam Play I also played few games I would otherwise skip, only because they are not available on Linux.
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
Vulkan ports became less frequent because of Proton.
Comandante Ñoñardo Aug 22, 2019
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 :><:
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me