A look at the top 100 Steam games on Linux - January 2022 edition

Valve is making a huge mistake though trusting game developers/publishers to just enable anticheat for Proton on their games. I still think hardly any of them will bother. Does not matter how easy Valve makes it.

What exactly do you propose as an alternative? Valve can't put working-on-Linux anti-cheat into other developer's games. They can't de-list games that don't work on Linux, since for all the strategic importance that Linux gaming has for Valve almost all of their money comes from Windows gamers. They can't ban anti-cheat from Steam and make the choice into put your game on Steam and have a load of cheaters, or put your game onto the store of an anti-cheat vendor and don't. Valve did succeed in encouraging developers to make native Linux games, but they couldn't entice the majority, and those games didn't have anti-cheat despite native anti-cheat having worked for years.

The carrot of making it really easy to do and the stick of not having the exposure of being on a highly desirable device are the tools that they have available to them.

Valve already did their part. It's not their responsibility. Consumers should just know where the blame lies. It's not the fault of Valve or the operating system, but falls squarely in the laps of the devs/studios now. But maybe Valve should not have bothered since seemingly nobody else is going to.

As for enabling it and potentially dropping in loads of cheaters. Linux users make up just 1% of Steam, not all of whom will be playing all the games, and I can't imagine too many of them being cheaters. It's a gamble for sure, but a fairly low risk one.


Last edited by rustybroomhandle on 4 January 2022 at 4:06 pm UTC

No one is being defensive here, except perhaps you? I can't say I've ever had an issue installing a game through Steam. It really is the most basic feature. Did you open a bug report? Can we see it?

You seem like you are since you have such an issue with what I originally wrote that you felt the need to reply to my comments now twice lol. If I'm being defensive, it's about the fact that we're painting a false picture for new Linux users of the reality of the situation.

I feel like a broken record with you, so for the sake of not arguing I'll leave this as my last comment since you can't seem to comprehend the reality of this situation. LTT LITERALLY says this in the Youtube videos that this community pretends to praise, that ProtonDB Gold rated titles were not working for them or had major play-ability issues.

Yet we're going to just lalala, close our ears and shut out eyes from the truth. I'll give you a specific example, in AoE2, even thumbed up ratings all write about how the 'arrow keys stick', what does that mean? That's the infinite acceleration I'm talking about, any actual AoE2 player who tries to play this game will be at a severe handicap, and simply put you will not be able to play this game competitively (like it's meant to be played) from just this one minor bug that's confirmed through out both positive and negative reviews on ProtonDB. Yet this game carries a 'Gold' rating on it, despite it needing tweaks to play multiplayer, despite Alt-Tab making the game change to a Windowed mode, despite a very crucial input bug.

So if I'm a new user and I see a Gold rating on a game, I'm not expecting all this headache...to me this is a Bronze/Silver title, but who am I to say!

And yes Liam, I do leave bug reports and put my experiences on ProtonDB, and in fact mine are much more detailed than the average user I'll let you know. There are so many users who just thumb up a game and say it works without writing any details about how they got it to work. And BTW you write 'Thousands of reports', on what the whole website of ProtonDB or one game? These things matter, because on one game like It Takes Two there are 63 reports and many of those are updated reports from the same user which makes it closer to 50 something...LMAO.

You should really be nicer to someone who makes up 2 percent of your ProtonDB reports, tsk tsk. ;)


Last edited by [Linux] tayshady on 4 January 2022 at 3:10 pm UTC

tayshady]You seem like you are since you have such an issue with what I originally wrote that you felt the need to replay to my comments now twice lol. If I'm being defensive, it's about the fact that we're painting a false picture for new Linux users of the reality of the situation.

If you don't want debate or replies, don't comment at all. Honestly, I don't get the attitude. You're getting rude.

tayshady]And yes Liam, I do leave bug reports and put my experiences on ProtonDB, and in fact mine are much more detailed than the average user I'll let you know. There are so many users who just thumb up a game and say it works without writing any details about how they got it to work. And BTW you write 'Thousands of reports', on what the whole website of ProtonDB or one game? These things matter, because on one game like It Takes Two there are 63 reports and many of those are updated reports from the same user which makes it closer to 50 something...LMAO.

Okay. So link us to your bug report about failing to install a game, like I asked you for?

tayshady]You should really be nicer to someone who makes up 2 percent of your ProtonDB reports, tsk tsk. ;)

Nicer? You're the one being passive aggressive and overly defensive here. Stop it.

Phasmophobia just recently seemed to fix the voice comms with Proton.

That's awesome, I thought they were dependent on Cortana with this one, does anybody knows which changed to made it possible?

Its not about the percentage of games that work, its about the name of the games that don't.

I agreed, my based opinion says:
1 game with 100.000 players is more important than 100.000 games with 1 player

It will be an unpopular opinion but Valve would have been better off shipping Windows on the Steam Deck out of the box and just not locking down the bootloader for anyone who wants to install linux.

Totally disagree on this one, the whole point in all of this for Valve is to be independent than any third party company decisions (aka Microsoft), and they would also have to put a windows license embedded in the price. It's not like Valve can just "crack" windows inside Deck like most of the people who install Windows on Steam Deck will do.

new Linux users which is exactly what Steam deck owners are. I'm very proud of the community and of Values support. Also, don't forget most of this was started because Microsoft's Windows 8 days when they were talking about walled gardens like IOS. Things have changed, but from what you can see with the large cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, big tech companies like Microsoft are on a vendor lock in rampage. Now is the time for open hardware and platforms like Steam deck because even one year from now may be to late.

That's fine buddy, and I a hundred percent agree that gaming on Linux has hit huge milestones, but I also believe writing things like 80 of the top 100 games on Steam work on Linux is setting up for a lot of backlash from people going in with this expectation lol.

Valve is making a huge mistake though trusting game developers/publishers to just enable anticheat for Proton on their games. I still think hardly any of them will bother. Does not matter how easy Valve makes it.

Yeah, at this point I'm not so much hoping for hidden work on Proton to be suddenly released before the Deck comes out as I am hoping for behind-the-scenes bribing and strongarming of key anti-cheat users to bloody well enable Linux before the Deck comes out.

Imo we should temper expectations. And unless something PERFECTLY works across multiple distros and hardware writing 'Works with Proton' is extremely misleading and setting up new users for failure.

The key "new users" in the current context will be the new Steam Deck users . . . and if a game works on any distro/hardware combination we can be pretty sure it will work on the Steam Deck--in some cases games may work on the Steam Deck and no other Linux setup.

Looking at the list, the two things I noticed were a) how fantastic it is that so many popular games run in Linux these days, and b) how far away from average my taste in games is. I don't own a single one of the Top 10 games, nor would I even think about buying any of them. Maybe except New World, if it wouldn't suck, or have a chance to brick the type of GPU I have. :D

Anybody have some recent experience with Red Dead Redemption 2? Looking to get it this year. :)

I bought it over Christmas and while it worked with the latest Proton GE and a lot of graphical tweaking (using Pop!_OS), ultimately it was occasionally choppy and the sacrifices I had to make in graphics made it disappointing to play.

I ended up dusting off the Windows 10 partition to install and play it. Felt dirty

how many of those are online games that work thanks to valve anti cheat aproach?

how many of those are online games that work thanks to valve anti cheat aproach?

So far, 1. Some of those have announced they will be switching on anticheat for Proton, but even then it's only a tiny few.

EDIT: there is 1, not 0


Last edited by rustybroomhandle on 5 January 2022 at 9:49 am UTC

I don't know to what extent it gets and it might just be an impression, but it feels like there is a tendency where Protondb shows some/many games running better on AMD gpus, probably powered by Valve's Steam Deck development. This is something that I witness a lot more often, lately.

Based on that, not taking into account the AC support and considering all the efforts put by Valve on such a dedicated hardware, I suspect (obviously) that the Steam Deck will have the best support ootb, of all hardware configurations. We should keep in mind that the desktop support will always lag behind the Steam Deck. It's not by lack of efforts, it's just for obvious reasons (fragmentation/hardware combinations). 76% overall in what I consider a "worst case scenario" is great, imo.

It's been already a couple of years since I stopped believing in the "year of the Linux desktop" gimmick.

Of that list, Left 4 Dead 2 is the only title I play.

Keep in mind that some of the games on that list which are marked as "Broken (Anti-Cheat)" do actually work just fine as long as you don't try to connect to official servers. Case in point, Conan Exiles runs fantastic under proton and you can connect just fine to non-official servers (or run your own).

I'm not disagreeing with the "Broken" designation but just wanted to point out that it may run just fine with caveats. This is generally how games like this are classified on Proton and Wine's DB's - something like "Runs (with issues)" etc.

I wonder if there articles out there talking about how many of those games run on windows, lol?

But seriously, that's a case for some optimism. Hopefully the console works out ok.

I've heard some strange rumors about Valve holding onto an "internal" version of Proton that is supposedly much different to what regular users have access to, but I've dismissed it as people misunderstanding something about ProtonDB.

Valve 100% said they have Proton work that's not public, but we don't know if any of that has been released since. This was in a Steamworks video in July https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q_C5KVJbUw

At minute 2:21...
https://youtu.be/5Q_C5KVJbUw?t=141

I can see things improving on my side.
I have some games that were not correctly supported by Proton (Grid 2 for example) and they are now working perfectly with the latest Proton Experimental release.
I'm also confident we will have another compatibility boost this year thanks to the Steam Deck (mine is still listed at Q1, I can't wait to order it).

tayshady]That's the infinite acceleration I'm talking about, any actual AoE2 player who tries to play this game will be at a severe handicap, and simply put you will not be able to play this game competitively (like it's meant to be played) from just this one minor bug that's confirmed through out both positive and negative reviews on ProtonDB.

I'd expect that this kind of bug is distro-agnostic, and thus a very different case from what you initially said about games not installing or running reliably across distros (which is not really a thing unless maybe a specific distro has gone out of its way to do some very specific stupid crap behind the scenes - but then, the only real solution is to give that distro the finger and switch to a better one).

tayshady]Yet this game carries a 'Gold' rating on it, despite it needing tweaks to play multiplayer, despite Alt-Tab making the game change to a Windowed mode, despite a very crucial input bug.

ProtonDB is an unofficial curating/ranking system based on user reviews - the keyword here being "user", which can mean anything from "experienced dude who'd make an excellent professional QA tester" to "clueless LTT fanboy who can't tell their Windows from their windows" to anything in-between. Steam is going to be using their own curation/ranking system for the Steam Deck which will presumably utilize proper QA procedures, and thus games like AoE2 will never make it into the equivalent of "Gold" until they're properly fixed.

Oxygen Not Included is a gem.