ARK: Survival Evolved switches away from Linux Native to use Proton

They've pushed Proton to the point of it effectively becoming middleware.

Isn't that the point for Valve? It ties Linux to the Steam ecosystem garunteeing sales income.

It's a genius move.

I exchange money for support. In other words -- money in exchange for expecting my product to work.

What's support? Like what do we mean by that? People throw the word around and I'm not sure everyone's talking about the same thing. Is "support" a native release (regardless of quality or availability of future patches)? Is it updating the game to work with Proton/wine but only having a Windows version? Is it just sending out patches over time and hoping Valve keeps proton updated?

To me, support means a games works and future issues may be addressed. Wether it not it uses a translation layer doesn't really matter to me.


Last edited by denyasis on 12 July 2022 at 2:55 am UTC

They've pushed Proton to the point of it effectively becoming middleware.

Isn't that the point for Valve? It ties Linux to the Steam ecosystem garunteeing sales income.

It's a genius move.

Not at all. Steam makes it easy to use, but it isn't a requirement to use Proton at all.

They've pushed Proton to the point of it effectively becoming middleware.

Isn't that the point for Valve? It ties Linux to the Steam ecosystem garunteeing sales income.

It's a genius move.

Not at all. Steam makes it easy to use, but it isn't a requirement to use Proton at all.

Correct, but that's a minority of people. Most will use it via Steam. It appeals to convenience and does it well. That's the point.

It's a shame the developer didn't move to Vulkan API for the game. It really could have used it instead of staying on DX11. No point doing it now with ARK2 just around the corner I guess.

ARK: Survival Evolved....... also known as the answer to the question of where did the free space on my hard drive go???....... 125.95 GIGGARYDOOS!!!!

Wait till you install the Modding SDK, my 500GB m.2 is almost full 😅 (PC).

Isn't that the point for Valve? It ties Linux to the Steam ecosystem garunteeing sales income.

You can still use Proton outside of Steam. Bottles outright support using Proton + Steam Runtime. Pretty sure Heroic does as well, and so does a few other runners. And there's also the Wine builds that clearly benefits from Proton, like Wine-GE and Wine-Tkg, which is used as base for other builds like Wine-Lutris and Bottle's Caffe.

What Steam is selling is pretty simple: the It Just Works experience on Linux, for both consumers and developers. For Linux as a platform, what it's offering is an integrated platform that can be used downstream as well (not just the Deck- we've seen their OS being used by other handheld PCs and I know at least two distributions based on SteamOS 3.0).

That's the crux of what Steam is doing. They're not just doing one thing, they're creating an integrated platform that developers can target without THAT much additional work, they created a hardware+software combo that is genuinely compelling to mainstream users even if they don't care about the ideas of Linux (which is what drive most of us to tolerate the hassles of Linux), and they even created a framework that other vendors can take to use for themselves.

The real genius is that they're all so integrated to it that it's more of a hassle to separate them all that it's much easier to just use Steam and what they put out. It's a strategy that's definitely born from the corpses of several failed projects, tuned to really appeal to everyone who hasn't already set in their mind about certain things (for example the "No Tux, No Bux" crowds as well as Tim "muh EGS" Sweeney).

It reminded me of Android and Chrome. Sure, you can separate a lot of Google stuff from it, but they appeal so much to people that at some point they become entrenched. Even Microsoft is basically doing the same with Game Pass. I think that's the only real way to grow and sustain a new platform these days.

You can enable compression on the ARK folder and it all shrinks down to 30-40GB I think.

I'd rather see the awareness AND SKILLS for Linux grow in developer studios.
This is quite the opposite. :/

But that's not the choice we have. The choice we have is between Proton and very few good quality Linux builds plus a few crappy ports.

It's not like Ark had a good Linux build they ditched for Proton. Ark Linux build was barely playable (I'd say: unplayable). People were manually selecting the Windows version anyway. Valve verified the Proton version on the Deck, knowing how broken the Linux build is.

Valve are fully responsible for the current situation as they require every game sold on the Steam Store to have a Windows executable, as per their developer documentation.

Ok, are you suggesting that Valve is the blocker for studios releasing Linux builds of their games?

Something I feel like mentioning here with respect to Proton and WINE:

I go out of my way to favour Linux builds of games when I'm making purchasing decisions. If the game has a native Linux version I will typically buy it sooner and at a higher price than I would otherwise. For example I bought both Slay The Spire and Dicey Dungeons during their Early Access phase BECAUSE they had native Linux builds. And I'm really grateful to those developers because I really liked and enjoyed those titles.

Moving on, there are games which "could" have been built on Linux natively, but that hasn't happened and I have held back from buying those games until there is a substantial sales reduction. I held back on The Witcher 3 until it was 80% off, I held back on Shadow Warrior 2 for a similar discount. I still haven't bought Serious Sam 4, Dying Light 2, Doom Eternal - because their discount is not low enough for me to go ahead and buy the non-Linux game.

Croteam and Techland both released Linux builds of their earlier games (Serious Sam 3: BFE, Dying Light) and they presumably made the decision due to poor return on Linux sales (or whatever) to not apportion development man-hours into cross-platform builds. I completely blame the developers/publishers for this, and *NOT* Steam Deck or Proton.

Thankfully, Proton and WINE allows me to play assorted Windows titles on my Linux desktop, with great ease. I can fire up Steam, Heroic Launcher, Lutris and enjoy whatever titles I desire. Windows or not. I view the open-source community about Freedom - i.e. Freedom to use my computers as I see fit. Freedom to choose to play a Windows-only title if I want to play it. For purposes of Freedom, I'd rather be able to do these things than be forced to boot up Windows in order to enjoy them.

Other people's free choice might be to purposefully not play a game if it isn't natively supported. That's their choice - They are imposing restrictions on themselves. If it works with WINE or Proton, then I'll play it that way, no problem.

Imho bad ports are not an argument against native versions.

It's going the way lots of us expected with Proton.

can you name GOOD linux ports which dropped linux support because of proton?

you still have new linux games as you can read on this site every day. there are still games like Volcanoids, metro or valheim
i mean metro worked perfectly fine with proton. some here already played it with proton and still they made a linux port
same goes with amnesia and many other games

and there also are devs who dropped linux support before proton exists. WITCHER 3 I AM LOOKING AT YOU!!!! or phoenix point

so i dont think we LOSE native games. we lose crappy linux ports and still can play the game in all its beauty with proton

Valve should be pursuing GNU+Linux native games and Vulkan, however they're the largest vendor of Windows games, so nothing will change going forward.

Maybe it's time to reignite the "No Tux, No Bux" movement?

did this "movement" ever worked on any game? imho devs just ignored it
what they do NOT ignore is the steam deck and proton. very old games get a PROTON fix out of the sudden

i do NOT think valve should force devs to make linux ports. i think valve should lower the cut for games with VULKAN. because vulkan works better with proton. (you all know the benchmarks with vulkan games. they run on linux like on windows. sometimes even better) and that saves battery life and the environment

the steam deck made devs support linux/proton. (who would have thought, that we can play an EA online game like APEX on linux in 2017)
next step is to make them use the OPEN API
and the we can talk about native linux games


Last edited by mylka on 12 July 2022 at 7:17 pm UTC

It's a shame the developer didn't move to Vulkan API for the game.

If you are only targeting Windows, you'll keep developing with DirectX as it makes no sense at all to switch to Vulkan.
And that is a huge issue that people saying "I don't care if it's native or proton" don't seem to understand or, like Liam and Gardiner Bryant for example, understand but choose to ignore, hoping it goes away "once market share blah blah blah"...

I myself am in that latter camp, because I think market share is indeed going to blah blah blah . . . or at a minimum, has a much better chance of blah blah blah than we ever had without Proton. But right now with the Deck, which could not exist without Proton, we are already beginning to see market share blah blah blah.

Valve are fully responsible for the current situation as they require every game sold on the Steam Store to have a Windows executable, as per their developer documentation.

Ok, are you suggesting that Valve is the blocker for studios releasing Linux builds of their games?

If said game doesn't have a Windows executable, Valve will not allow it on the Steam Store.

That's not what was asked. But you know, I think there actually was one game on the Steam Store a few years ago that was initially Linux-only. So I find myself wondering if you're actually right about that. Frankly, it wouldn't be the first time you said something about Valve that was simply inaccurate.

Not that it matters much--essentially nobody was ever going to be releasing games that weren't Windows, 'cause it's a monopoly. If the rule you're claiming exists, its intent was probably "No console games" or something.

Imho bad ports are not an argument against native versions.

It's going the way lots of us expected with Proton.
Instead of supporting games without native binaries,
fewer and fewer developers are willing to port their games.
This is a problematic dependency on Proton.

I'd rather see the awareness AND SKILLS for Linux grow in developer studios.
This is quite the opposite. :/

Valve are fully responsible for the current situation as they require every game sold on the Steam Store to have a Windows executable, as per their developer documentation.

They've pushed Proton to the point of it effectively becoming middleware.

Then of course there's Microsoft, who set the standards for gaming with DirectX and other technologies. And what happens when Microsoft make it so that Windows games APIs can no longer be translated by Proton?

Valve should be pursuing GNU+Linux native games and Vulkan, however they're the largest vendor of Windows games, so nothing will change going forward.

And then you have James Ramey, head of Codeweavers who said (on record) that Proton would pave the way for GNU+Linux native development. He has nothing to worry about though, as he's profiting from the money Valve throw at his company.

Maybe it's time to reignite the "No Tux, No Bux" movement?

That kind of strategy nets you no games on linux. The combined amount of "bux" wielded by linux users is insignificant compared to the rest of the market.

Linux needs MARKET SHARE before it will be worth a developer's time to make native linux titles. Proton is the stepping stone to break the chicken and egg catch-22 problem of no native linux titles because no linux market share, no linux market share because no native linux titles.

It is to Valve you owe gratitude for getting thousands of games playable on linux, and for growing their market share, and they've only just begun with the latter. Being a member of the Khronos group, Valve is also partially responsible for Vulkan. I cannot understand the lack of gratitude.


Last edited by wit_as_a_riddle on 12 July 2022 at 6:59 pm UTC

It would seem to me, that regardless of whether it's a native port or only supported through Proton, some of these games are eventually going to face regressions. Native is no guarantee of reliability, as seen in ARK's case. Buying games to play on Linux is inherently unreliable because the platform is unstable. Even Proton, which is more stable than Linux as a platform, still faces regressions like Deep Rock Galactic did last month.

No Tux, No Bux makes no sense in this context. No one, save for a handful of indie developers, cares that much about making sure their games keep working on Linux. A native port is a poor indication of which developers care, as in the case of ARK.

It's not hard to see why everybody likes Proton. Game developers don't have to put much, or any effort into supporting a Linux playerbase who naturally doesn't expect their support. Linux users don't have to rely on the developers to support them to continue playing the game. It's a win-win. Being a Linux user means accepting that 99% of the time, the vendor expects you to be using Windows or macOS, and you have to find a workaround to get it working on Linux—they're used to this shit.

Valve have built-in a workaround that has a very low amount of friction most of the time, which is impressive, but I don't think that any amount of duct tape will be able to obscure the indifference of developers toward Linux.

Valve didn't try hard enough getting developers to code GNU+Linux native games as they're selling Windows games. Heck it's telling when the Steam Machines actually shipped with Windows installed because Valve are inept and cannot be trusted to actually deliver or maintain a GNU+Linux based distro.

Just look at the mess that is SteamOS 3.0, shipping with out of date packages and security holes big enough to drive a truck through.

The SteamOS 3.0 security holes suck, yeah. Especially with retbleed out there right now. That's a good thing to bring up.

But "Valve didn't try hard enough getting developers to code GNU+Linux native games as they're selling Windows games", Do you honestly, with 100% conviction, expect any company that has a platform as big as steam, to go "hey let's suddenly lock this store away from 98% of our userbase because we really don't like windows"?

The only other notable storefront most people know about that even supports linux at all is itch.io, yet you're acting like even after everything they did, valve just doesn't care about linux or something, even though they released a whole PC form factor with their own spin of arch.

Don't get me wrong, valve is a company, they're not our friends, they're not a big sibling, so this isn't a "how dare you not be grateful to [company who tried to push paid mods with only a 25% cut for the actual creators of said mods at one point and is currently selling TF2 lootboxes]" fanboy post, I'm just genuinely perplexed at what you exactly expected them to do that they're not already doing.

Linux needs MARKET SHARE before it will be worth a developer's time to make native linux titles. Proton is the stepping stone to break the chicken and egg catch-22 problem of no native linux titles because no linux market share, no linux market share because no native linux titles.

The real world problem I see with this argument in the current situation is that if we would reach a much higher market share by devs just using Proton, they "learned" that it's not really worth investing additional resources in native ports and just stick with the Proton way.

How about not aggressively pushing Proton as the perfect solution to both developers and end-users.
Dropping the requirement that every game sold on the Steam Store has to have a Windows executable.
Make it so every game sold has to have a GNU+Linux native executable.
Mandate all games use Vulkan for their graphics API.
Stop farming out 90% of the work to outside parties.
Ban third-party launchers.
Mandate all games use SIAPI for control inputs.
Ban games that switch to an Epic Exclusivity agreement.

Shall I continue?

That's not realistic, all that would do is piss off developers and make them go to other stores like epic and for longer.
The only thing they basically can do is offer a higher cut to developers who make linux versions, which would be nice, but even that is kind of pie in the sky stuff, and outside of that most of the stuff that you're suggesting is like a child's view of how game development, storefronts, and publishing work, or at the very least "It would be so cool if I had a billion dollars"-tier wishful thinking.

The only valid part of your post that is actually realistic is dropping the outright requirement of needing a windows executable which does seem like something that isn't really necessary, if the dev wants to deal with review bombs from ignorant windows users that can't run their game they should be allowed to.

if we would reach a much higher market share by devs just using Proton, they "learned" that it's not really worth investing additional resources in native ports and just stick with the Proton way.

This is ***quite possible***.

However, I know for a fact there will be continue to be a dearth of native linux titles without good market share. Devs and studios need incentive and it's just not going to happen without the market power.

Valve has a lot of levers to pull, and if they can get some reasonable linux market share with Deck and perhaps other systems, they will get a very big lever to yank on. I'm gonna hope for the best 🤞🏻

Make it so every game sold has to have a GNU+Linux native executable.
Mandate all games use Vulkan for their graphics API.
Stop farming out 90% of the work to outside parties.
Ban third-party launchers.
Mandate all games use SIAPI for control inputs.
Ban games that switch to an Epic Exclusivity agreement.

Shall I continue?

So either this is a parody or you want Valve to go out of business. I refuse to believe you don't understand the real world repercussions of making moves like that. Or wait, maybe you work for Epic??

It is quite the list, please continue 🤣🤣🤣