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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people have been working on wine patches that support EAC (epic’s kernel level anticheat). Recently some games have started producing good results with it.
If Epic allows the patches, then this is gonna be big. Lots of gamers are held back from switching to Linux only for a few games with EAC.
Yeah I know some people who will not switch until EAC games work, dual booting is too inconvenient for a lot (including me but I chose linux). I really think that once EAC works on linux then we will see a surge of new linux users.
There has been some new collaboration from laptop vendor Lenovo with Ubuntu and Red Hat: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/06/03/lenovos-massive-ubuntu-and-red-hat-announcement-levels-up-linux-in-2020/#195aa3817ae0 I think news like this might occur more frequently. At least I hope so.
I don’t see any reason why it should stop. A lot of companies are invested into Linux gaming, and stopping that investment for no reason would guarantee them a loss.
I’m not very thrilled about the prospect. Not only are games usually themselves non-free software, they require a boatload of additional non-free stuff to support them, some of which is borderline malware (DRM, anti-cheat, Steam, graphics drivers).
One can argue that the software portion of a game should be FOSS, but the games themselves don’t have to be. To put it simply: Make code free and open source, but art, music and gamedesign is optional. You don’t have to release those under a copyleft license. For me, that’s fine.
90% of the reasons why free software is important don’t apply to works of art, and no free software advocate is going to have a problem using non-public-domain assets on their system.
yeah that’s how i see it too. There isn’t much point in all this from a free software perspective. Just a way out for Valve in case of Microsoft locking down their platform as others have stated.
I mean it definitely helps to drag people kicking and screaming over to the dark side, since often gaming is the big thing that people would miss too much on Linux
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It’s gaining momentum, so I don’t think it will decrease.
