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

Quoting: GuestThey'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.

Quoting: ElectricPrismI 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

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: GuestThey'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.

Quoting: randyl

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: GuestThey'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.

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderARK: 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).

Quoting: denyasisIsn'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.

Quoting: subI'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.

Quoting: GuestValve 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.