Celebrating 6 years since Valve announced Steam Play Proton for Linux

Today marks 6 years since Valve decided to change everything, especially for Linux fans, with the announcement of Steam Play Proton. Thanks to it, the Steam Deck and Desktop Linux gaming have continued to thrive. Want a Proton beginner's guide? Got you covered at this link.

Heck, the Steam Deck never would have been a thing without Proton. Could you imagine it? Trying to market a Linux handheld without the vast majority of games people want to play? It was also only in February this year that Valve actually decided to give it a logo too.

Pictured - Proton's official logo

Thanks to all the work put into Proton from Valve developers, contractors and everyone who contributes to Wine development that Proton is based upon, we have a ridiculous amount of games where you can just click the Play button and forget about everything else in Steam.

Going by the official Valve Proton GitHub, there's been 66 releases of Proton during this time, and that's not counting all the interim updates to Proton Experimental and Proton Hotfix for quick game-specific fixes. The Proton changelog has seen 388 changes, although some will be text corrections, that's again showing just how much goes into it. It's an incredible amount of work when you think about just how many games are on Steam, and developers really love to do some weird stuff that Valve often has to work around. And let's not forget the likes of CodeWeavers, who employ people to work on Wine and Proton.

As for the current state of Desktop Linux and Steam Deck gaming overall…

Looking over the current numbers on ProtonDB, the community website where anyone can report how games work: there's 22,002 games reported to work by at least one person, 13,297 by at least two people and 9,751 that has three or more reports.

Going by Valve's own Steam Deck Verified system there's 5,297 rated Verified and 10,646 rated Playable.

Both ProtonDB and Valve's own ratings are only a small slice of Steam though, which has over 100,000 according to the Game tag on SteamDB. There's only so many games Valve can test officially and that people can report to ProtonDB, so there's likely thousands of games not reported by anyone that will just work out of the box with Proton.

Pictured - HELLDIVERS 2 on Linux

It's pretty amazing that we can play the likes of HELLDIVERS 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Grand Theft Auto V, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 4, Balatro, ELDEN RING, Hades II, Dead by Daylight, No Man's Sky and so many more at the click of a button in Steam now.

Now we just need more anti-cheat support, including from developers who already use anti-cheat that is supported to actually enable it. This is really the last major hurdle.

So here we are again, happy birthday to Proton, 6 years strong enabling gaming on Linux and Steam Deck to be an incredible thing.

Be sure to follow the Steam Play RSS feed for all Proton-related updates!