Our great sponsors
-
-
Pine
:evergreen_tree: Aimbot powered by real-time object detection with neural networks, GPU accelerated with Nvidia. Optimized for use with CS:GO. (by petercunha)
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
I'm someone who still mostly avoids non-native games but I don't send hate mail and most likely will just ignore your game so you won't hear from users like me at all. I don't draw a hard line but there a many reasons why I prefer native games:
* Proton is a very useful tool, but it is and will always be chasing a moving target. Any game update can break Proton compat and Wine/Proton is complex enough that updates do sometimes regress support for some games. Do I really want to invest (time wise and emotionally) in games that could just stop working?
* I want my platform to be officially supported. That does not mean that every niche issue needs to be fixed but I should at least be entitled to a refund if I cannot get the game to work or if it stops working due to game updates - without any limitations.
* I also care about Linux getting better and better supported long term. I care more about making sure that I have a free and open platform in the future than I care about being able to play any particular game now. The best way for that to happen is more people developing for Linux. Maybe Proton will help by allowing more people to switch their primary OS to Linux, increasing demand for Linux SW, but ultimately I think living off Microsoft's scraps will not end well for Linux and direct support is needed. Anti-cheat already shows that emulation without developer support has its limits.
* Somewhat relatedly, I want more developers to be exposed to open source operating systems and software with the hope that they see how having full source access to the entire stack and liberal licenses for distributing modifications benefits everyone and will extend that philosophy to their own software where possible - and games are a particular type of software where the code of most games is pretty much worthless to competitors by the time the game is released but making it available can greatly benefit users through greater potential for modification and better options for long term maintenance.
* I like being appreciated. Do I really want to financially support someone who writes me off as a statistic? Sure, game developers need to eat and I understand that that sometimes means not being able to support minority platforms, but if profit is the only thing you are concerned about then being in games development is probably not the best way to achieve that anyway. Maybe you don't care about my platform - and that's fine, we can't all care about everything - but then it's only fair that I don't care about your game.
Meanwhile I have over 500 unplayed native games in my Steam library and, even with Proton, enough native games are being released that I will most likely never catch up. I do use Proton - like vanilla Wine before it - when there is something that seems interesting enough (mostly older games that have stood the test of time) but generally I just don't feel a need to. Even if I were to run out of native games and had to resort more to Proton, I am also much more willing to pay full price or even preorder when it comes to native games.
> I don't have time to track down audio issues for some random Linux version for 0.001% of players
Then don't? If you don't think it is worth your time to fix certain issues then you can always say that and people can get a refund if that is a deal breaker. Are you not going to release Windows builds because you can't work around some weird hardware issue or third-party tool messing with your game for 0.1% of your Windows users?
One good way for dealing with support load is to enable your community to do the grunt work for you by having a public issue tracker. This works especially well for the Linux community where more people will be used to reporting bugs rather than asking for support but is even something that I would suggest for Windows-only software as well. Valve has been using GitHub for this: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux
Maybe check out some existing ones before confidently making such a claim? E.g. https://github.com/petercunha/Pine. IIRC there are even high quality image recognition-based aimbots for sale; can’t find them right now.
> Add on the fact that these programs are black boxes by design, and all of the sudden a company essentially has free reign to do whatever they want with your machine under your nose.
Unless you run flatpak, nix, lxc containers, or some other process isolation scheme, all programs on eg. A debian desktop have this sort of free reign. It’s not uncommon for accidents to happen that take out chunks of a system[0].
0: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue...
Obviously their motive is to sell games, but their priorities likely don't currently include Apple's hardware as a result of wanting to compete in the console market and wanting to twist away Microsoft's near-monopoly on PC. Not everyone is a Linux user, but there are lots of people who would be willing to use it if it was sufficiently packaged. The Steam Deck is likely to be exactly that.
Fine, they want to sell games. They can still sell games to Mac users. If the back catalog isn't quite there, that's probably not a huge deal, as it's not exactly where the most money is made.
Could they go ahead and license Crossover, today, for every Steam user that tries to open a 32-bit game on macOS? Probably! Could they slap together a distribution of Proton for Mac? Absolutely (and for a time, it existed)!
But my guess is that the Apple juice just isn't worth the squeeze. It's probably not super important to their strategy, it's probably not going to yield back enough profit to be worth it, and if it were really so easy I suspect they would have furthered their work on Proton for Mac (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344).
If I may, I suspect your angle on this might be slightly askew at least from my perspective. Almost all the major game engines are now supporting a native vulkan/linux renderer. I'm running in godot 4 right now. If anything, watching things like glorious eggrolls proton and the dxvk repo [1] I think the people working at the direct translation level are causing more eyes on vulkan than it would otherwise be getting.
My actual concern for proton/wine on linux is security related. The binary game space is a security nightmare, and enabling the windows side to run with very little compartmentalization is going to be a security disaster.
1. https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
A few links gathered from a quick google search as a primer:
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97
https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html
https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-...
https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_...
https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header
In other words: there are a lot of steps and a lot of gotchyas to doing this that you're glossing over. Linux userland libraries are generally designed with the intention that an army of third-party maintainers will integrate all of this desperately developed software together and place it in a repo. Naturally every distribution wants to do things a little differently too, and they have a habit of changing it up every couple years. When you try to step out of that mold things unsurprisingly become more difficult. Whereas Windows, Mac, Android, etc. have been designed since the beginning not to require that sort of thing and it is consequently a much, much more straightforward process.
I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary? Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?