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

To begin 2022, let's take a fresh look at the current top 100 Steam games and see how well (or not) the run on Linux.

As part of a series we shall be doing, where we first took a proper look at this back in October 2021, including games that are both Native to Linux and Windows games that are run through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer. With help from ProtonDB reports to investigate.

Something to keep in mind is that while the top 5-10 games doesn't change too often on Steam, the rest do fluctuate quite a lot as it often depends on some of the bigger releases that appear. We are once again going by the numbers on SteamDB using their 24 hour peak-player count. Take this as your snapshot of how things are a month before the Steam Deck releases to see what you might expect to work or not.

Over time the compatibility is expected to increase thanks to native ports, more Windows-only games working with Steam Play Proton and now Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye have expanded their support.

Notes:

• Proton GE refers to the community-built version of Proton. So while it requires adding it manually (which takes all of 5 minutes), it still works. This is sometimes needed for games where videos don't work with the official Proton. Valve is working on getting them all working out of the box with official Proton.
• Rocket League works but was removed from Steam for new players. However, it does work with Wine (which Proton is built from) if you use something like the Heroic Games Launcher to get it from Epic.
• Sea of Thieves voice comms don't work.
• Phasmophobia just recently seemed to fix the voice comms with Proton.
• We did not count Myth of Empires, as Steam delisted it due to ongoing legal troubles.
• F1 2021 had some fixes for AMD GPUs lately but still seem pretty problematic overall.
• The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is Linux Native, but the latest DLC is Windows-only but that does work with Proton.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition works but online multiplayer can desync unless you do a small fix.
• Brawlhalla added EAC, which you can disable and they're trying to support Proton with it.

With not long to go until the Steam Deck releases, hopefully Valve still have a few releases of Proton to improve things further. Anti-Cheat continues to be the biggest hurdle for Linux gaming and the Steam Deck. We've not seen many titles at all enable it officially, with the current list being quite small. We do expect that to change if the Steam Deck is a success though, and we fully expect it to be - as long as Valve can get enough units produced.

A few false-flags have appeared over the last few months like Rainbox Six Siege suddenly working, however do remember that until Valve or the developer actually confirm it, they will likely (and it did) stop working due to the anti-cheat.

Personally, I've not been able to get DayZ to work myself (now it's supported) but I know plenty of others have. Even with the suggested fixes, I just get a black screen, which is a shame. In some ways Proton is still a bit of a minefield like that, hopefully a solution will be found.

The most important part — the numbers: we're currently seeing around 76% of the top 100 (based on peak player counts) as of January 2022 working on Linux with Native Linux games and Windows games in Proton taken together. So, things are looking pretty good ahead of the Steam Deck launch since it will use SteamOS 3 which is based on Arch Linux.