Valve is investing a lot of resources in Wine/Proton. dxvk is being actively maintained which is very good. Same with Vulkan.
For how long do you think this can go on? I can’t think of it as a profitable venture which is unfortunately necessary for a project to have a long life. Especially with many newer AAA games not having Wine compatibility (correct me if I am wrong here) because of reliance of DirectX 12 or some ring-0 level anticheat. With the hegemony of Microsoft on consumer PC market and especially PC gaming, I don’t know how long the current momentum will persist, though I am grateful for the work done so far.
I know that my view is colored, but as someone who lurks on the Linux newbie and Linux gaming subreddits, there’s quite a bit of activity in both, and a lot of people that are either converting to Linux or want to. There’s a lot of people that are increasingly unhappy with Windows that still want to be able to game.
PC gamers tend to chase performance, and there are starting to be games where running on Linux is getting higher framerates. If -that- trend continues, we’ll keep seeing more conversions.
One thing that will help is purchasing games that have out-of-the-box Linux binaries. If there’s money on the table, there are capitalists that will take it.
Are there any recent examples for games with Linux binaries? I remember buying UT3 back in the days, and they never delivered the Linux version that was promised… 😃
I’d have to check Steam; I’m not the type of person who follows new AAA games on PC (I have a console for that), but better than 95% of the games I’ve bought have Linux-native clients. I run Linux exclusively on desktop, and don’t care to futz with WINE.
There’s lots of indie games that have Linux binaries. The game engines Unity, Godot and Unreal are very popular among indie devs and all support Linux in principle (if you add libraries to your project without Linux support, then it obviously doesn’t work anymore).
For AAA titles, I’ve also lost track. It used to be special when a AAA title ran on Linux, now it’s special, if it doesn’t run, but that’s via the use of Proton and the Windows binaries.
I know, Paradox Interactive frequently publishes games with native Linux support, e.g. Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings.