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.

  • Ephera
    11·
    4 years ago

    Valve invests this money, because only having a market on Windows is dangerous for them.
    Microsoft has been promoting their own store and has even made a version of Windows available (“Windows S”), which if pre-installed by hardware manufacturers, can’t install programs from outside the Microsoft Store out of the box (so far, to my knowledge, there’s still always been a way of deactivating that S-mode, but you’d kind of expect that to change at some point). Microsoft of course also owns XBOX, so they might not be too worried about PC gaming being particularly good, and might also use that market share to strengthen their position on the desktop (by e.g. making XBOX games installable through their Microsoft Store).

    There’s also something to be said about Windows just holding the PC gaming experience back. There’s definitely people who prefer consoles to PCs for gaming, because they consider a PC too much hassle. And some of that hassle is caused by Windows with its forced reboots, slow updates, licensing fun, lack of security, malicious behaviour etc…

    So, I think, Valve will continue investing into Linux for the foreseeable future. It’s their only exit strategy, if Microsoft fucks them over and Microsoft is already causing them to miss out on some sales.

    • JaCrowe
      2·
      4 years ago

      This is the first I’ve heard of ``Windows S’’ - of course they would. I’ve only used Windows as a second OS to game since 2013 so my heads been out of the Windows world but the continuing trend that I see with users is things are getting much easier, but your freedoms only go as far as your wallet.