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Valve officially confirm a new version of Steam Play for Linux, including a modified version of Wine called "Proton" - available now in Steam Beta
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- Authors
- liamdawe
- Published
- Aug 21 2018
- Word count
- 453 words
Also interesting: "What many people suspected turned out to be true, DXVK development was actually funded by Valve. They actually employed the DXVK developer since February 2018. On top of that, they also helped to fund: vkd3d (Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan), OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges, wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11 and more."
I'm excited to hear about how Linux sales numbers change, It would be great to see a big increase. A lot of Linux users used Wine already but now that this is tied in to steam sales numbers we may see developers look at making more games multi-platform; or perhaps the opposite could happen, as developers decide Proton is good enough and they just abandon migrating their renderers to Vulkan (especially as MacOS doesn't really support Vulkan either)
I think the most important thing to remember is that native game support for Linux was already rising dramatically in the past few years - in part thanks to world-class engines like Source, Unreal and Unity supporting Linux out-of-the-box, but also by indie devs choosing to support Linux regardless and also because Valve itself has been leading the market for a decade or so into this direction now, with other companies following suit.
The fact that now many triple-A games will work on Linux regardless of their original devs even intending for it to do so... is just going to be a huge (and I mean potentially mother-fucking huge as all hell) increase to this trend :O
Not only that but Apple has officially deprecated OpenGL as well. What the hell are they even thinking..?
Yep, any game made using a cross platform engine really has no excuse (I'm looking at you fortnite)
MacOS is definitely an annoying platform now. With Metal being the only officially supported graphics API that's yet another thing for inhouse engines to worry about.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux rise above MacOS on the steam hardware survey when historically MacOS has been more popular, especially now with Proton giving those on the edge of moving to Linux the push they needed.
That would be something to behold, indeed! Praise GabeN ヽ(´▽`)/
I like both Windows and Linux, but a hit to Windows would be nice.
We had some previous discussion of this here: https://tildes.net/~games/50h/valve_seems_to_be_working_on_tools_to_get_windows_games_running_on_linux
Official Steam announcement post: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1696055855739350561
Only thing holding me back from using Linux is native support for games. Valve has recently been improving their service for once, looking forward to more.
I realize this isn't a good reason in any practical sense, but I guess I'm switching back to Linux for the hundredth time in my life. I think I was just looking for an excuse, and here it is.
Even if this is just Wine, it's nice seeing anything bright in the future of gaming on Linux.
Very interesting that Valve gives zero fucks about including MacOS as any part of this... I wonder why. I'm pretty sure the Mac userbase is pretty much double that of Desktop Linux at this point in time...
I guess that's just part of their continuing effort of having their own home-made OS (SteamOS) and in that sense Mac is actually a competitor for them... but still, very curious move on their part :thinking:
Apple don't support Vulkan, and they just dropped support for OpenGL. To make games on Mac you now HAVE TO use Metal. If this whole thing is a rebellion against Microsoft for trying to lock down Windows more (and it very much is), then there's no way they'll support lock in via graphics API. You want games on a Mac? Dual boot with Linux. Try ElementaryOS, they're very OSX-like and can easily be made more-so.
Apple's demonstrated zero willingness to sell Macs with GPUs powerful enough to play AAA games at a price gamers are willing to pay for them. This has to be about giving the SteamOS/Steam Machine platform another shot, not about expanding into non-Windows PC users.
Valve is not that short-sighted, they don't begin to imagine this is a new shot to a OS that has absolutely no chance of thriving at this moment - and if it was, it would have been a huge investment with a likelihood of less than 1% of paying off.
What this actually is, is continuing to maintain an ecosystem where they're not dependent on Windows. Microsoft could choose to screw them over at any point in time in order to benefit the Microsoft Store (which for example is likely to have the new Age of Empires game as an exclusive).
Valve doesn't see the SteamOS as a success or a failure. It just wants it there and ready if they ever need it - because if they only decide to invest in it when shit hits the fan, it would be years too late to actually make it work. This is exactly the same reason why Valve started the whole Vulkan thing years ago and started supporting Linux in all their major games as well. They need a fallback ready to go.
I'd like to think this is also because Gabe Newell is a great guy and loves supporting Linux... but I'm really not that naive (even though this benefits the Linux community in exactly the same amount regardless of him being personally invested in it or not).
Seriously.. I have such a hard time seeing someone comprehending this as "giving SteamOS another shot". What could they possibly have to gain from SteamOS in and of itself........?
You answered your own question:
And,
SteamOS has always been Valve's trident missile. It's not being developed because valve thinks gamers are going to suddenly switched. It's there to give Microsoft pause before they consider abandoning support of win32 apps completely in favor of UWP (which was originally on their road map). If SteamOS hadn't existed, Microsoft could get full control of the PC gaming market and extort Valve for whatever they want; with their only recourse being possible anti-trust litigation.
Now, Microsoft knows that if they ever tried anything so shady, a not insignificant portion of those former Microsoft customers would just change over to an OS where they can continue to play their games. It's Valves form of a deterrence strategy.
Well, I hate Apple and Macs too but as far as I know the new macs have AMD 1070 equivalents and Linus actually said they were a reasonable price for the hardware, but I didn't really check the hardware enough to be sure about that.
The starts-at-$5,000 iMac Pro has a GTX 1070 equivalent, otherwise known as an AMD Vega 56. They are reasonably priced in the context of professional workstations, they are not reasonably priced in the context of gaming machines.
You could build an i5-8600k/GTX 1080 Ti box for $1,600 that would outperform that iMac Pro for gaming. It wouldn’t best the iMac in any other context, but it would be better at gaming for a third of the price.
Oh okay. Sorry, that's just what I heard. Shoudl've fact checked before commenting.
It might be more because of Apple's stance on open-sourced APIs, I'm not sure what their stance on Vulkan is but recently they depreciated OpenGL which killed a ton of cross platform games & implementations of Wine.
The main reason for Valve's move to Linux is to have a safeguard against the walled-gardens of Windows 10 and MacOS. They know very well that their window in those systems can close very quickly.
I just tried playing unsupported game (No Man's Sky) and it only crashed if it was in full screen. I set it up as windowed mode and everything worked great. I can even use my PS4 controller to play.
Ah. :/ I think the game info in WineHQ or Lutris database might be a good indicator on whether the game is going to work on Steam Play or not.