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Continuing our monthly look over the data dumps provided by ProtonDB, the unofficial reports website for tracking how well Steam Play games run, here's the July 2019 instalment.

July was a pretty quiet month right up until the end, with Proton 4.11-1 being released. Hopefully bringing on more compatibility, although we won't really see that until next time due to the release date. It was a pretty exciting release though, with some working being done to help anti-cheat systems. Valve also updated the whitelist as well.

This time, let's start by going over the overall stats on ProtonDB for all titles. Going by their data, there's currently:

  • 1,082 - Platinum
  • 1,138 - Gold
  • 733 - Silver
  • 397 - Bronze
  • 482 - Borked (Broken)

Now a quick look at how many reports in total have been going into ProtonDB monthly as far back as the data goes:

Still getting thousands of reports, a healthy amount although nothing close to the first two months where there was a bit of a scramble as people went to report all kinds of games. Now it's more focused, with people going back and re-testing their favourites and some new releases as they come.

The more interesting measure, is the type of reports we're seeing coming in. With the majority of them continuing to be at Platinum which is impressive:

Next up, we have a list of games that have been getting the most reports. This list is basically an interesting look into what are perhaps the most popular Steam Play games and many entries aren't exactly surprising, with several titles constantly there like Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Path of Exile and it's going to take some really big releases to knock some of them off:

Name Number of reports
Grand Theft Auto V 49
Warframe 37
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 35
DOOM 33
MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD 27
Path of Exile 26
Prey 26
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 25
Wolfenstein: Youngblood 23
Elite Dangerous 21
Grim Dawn 19
Fallout 4 18
The Elder Scrolls Online 16
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice 15
Risk of Rain 2 15

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the notable new title popping up there with 23 reports, as it was released on July 25th with a lot of excitement.

Going into the deep end, what games saw a lot of Platinum reports across July? Not only is this another interesting way to see what's popular, it's also a good way to find some safe games to try out with Steam Play.

Name Number of platinum reports
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 29
DOOM 22
Prey 17
Grim Dawn 16
Wolfenstein: Youngblood 14
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night 13
Risk of Rain 2 12
Path of Exile 11
The Elder Scrolls Online 11
Wolfenstein: The New Order 11
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 11
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice 11
Deep Rock Galactic 11
NieR:Automata 10
Grand Theft Auto V 10

As for games that only started getting reports on ProtonDB during July, here's the top ten based on the number of reports being at a Platinum level.

Name Platinum
Wolfenstein: Youngblood 14
Break the G̵amè̢̢͘ 5
Love is Dead 4
Atma 3
Killsquad 3
Hot Shot Burn 3
Totally Reliable Delivery Service Beta 3
Automachef 3
7th Sector 2
Paperbark 2

A breakdown of reports by Linux distribution used:

Finally, a little insight into the CPU/GPU being used from the reports:

For those interested, the public data is stored here on GitHub. See you next month for another quick look.

We're also closing in on the first year since Steam Play released—crazy! We'll have something to say about that on the day.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Koopacabras Aug 7, 2019
Quoting: Philadelphus
Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: EikeSo, BTW and IMHO, having to set environment variables would be gold, not platinum.

Something not all submitters appear to honour. I see a lot of platinum reports that still mention a specific setting. So I expect the realistic number of platinums to be lower in favour of gold.
Yeah. I see Age of Empires II regularly gets a bunch of platinum ratings, despite the fact that I needed to delete a launcher file and rename the game executable to get it to run, making it a solid gold. (It's possible this has changed since I got it working several months ago, but even back then people were rating it platinum.)

I get that sometimes it can be difficult to figure out the exact rating for a particular game, but in this case it's easy: if you have to do anything other than "click Play" to get a game to run, it's not platinum. :) And that's not a disparagement of the game or Proton or anything, as some people seem to think it is; what we need are accurate reports, not ones made through rose-colored glasses. Windows users switching to Linux because they read all their games were literally "click'n'play" are not going to be pleased to find out that's not actually the case.

Except that is not that simple there are a lot of games that you hit play and it runs perfectly fine, but have some network issues, like the one I'm playing right now, Just Cause 4, online mode works it does login into the server but the leaderboard doesn't work. So a game could apparently run fine, even after testing a decent amount of time, but afterwards some issues appear. This is why anticheat support is needed, anticheat systems don't like wine, (my guess is that's the reason I got banned from the leaderboard).
I bet there are thousands of games with the same problem, they run fine mostly everything works except global scores, leaderboards ( or multiplayer ).
I don't know how the actual mechanic of the anticheat systems is but my guess is that everything has to be hashed and checksumed, so 1 bit of difference could result in a ban.
My point is that you could get banned after some period of time, so at first glance the game runs fine. And I think that it already happened that games that were working fine with no reason proton gamers started to get banned.
Apart from anticheat you need to add to the mix, developers that don't want to support linux (even with proton), we haven't seen that much, but I'm sure that's gonna happen at some point, simply the developers could add a lock-in to disable the game if you are running proton/wine.


Last edited by Koopacabras on 7 August 2019 at 6:19 am UTC
Philadelphus Aug 7, 2019
Quoting: BrisseAre you sure that's necessary? I remember having to do that in Wine a few years back, but in Proton, at least the latest version, it just worked, including the launcher.
I'm sure it was necessary in the sense that those are the steps I had to take to get the game to run, and I got them from some reports on ProtonDB so I know I'm not the only one who had to do them. :) That being said, you've caused me to consider that it's possible that that's the minority experience, and for most people it really is click'n'play. I also haven't tried reverting the filenames and trying again with new versions of Proton, so I suppose I'm at the very least a bit out of date, and if it truly is working like that for most people now I'm certainly happy about it. :)

Quoting: chancho_zombie
Quoting: PhiladelphusI get that sometimes it can be difficult to figure out the exact rating for a particular game, but in this case it's easy: if you have to do anything other than "click Play" to get a game to run, it's not platinum. :) And that's not a disparagement of the game or Proton or anything, as some people seem to think it is; what we need are accurate reports, not ones made through rose-colored glasses. Windows users switching to Linux because they read all their games were literally "click'n'play" are not going to be pleased to find out that's not actually the case.

Except that is not that simple there are a lot of games that you hit play and it runs perfectly fine, but have some network issues, like the one I'm playing right now, Just Cause 4, online mode works it does login into the server but the leaderboard doesn't work. So a game could apparently run fine, even after testing a decent amount of time, but afterwards some issues appear.
Yes? I agree with that. :) I'm not quite sure what you're saying isn't so simple. What I said was that "If a game requires you to do anything more than click the Play button to start it, it shouldn't be rated platinum," not "If clicking the play button launches the game without you having to do anything else, it should be immediately rated platinum." To put it in formal logic, clicking play and having a game start is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for it to be rated platinum. A game could start fine and still have all kinds of weird bugs or performance issues when run with Proton, and of course it should be rated lower as a result with some explanation of what the problems are.
Trias Aug 7, 2019
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Quoting: dreamer_It is impossible to write browser extensions for it due to technologies used.

Are you trying to do something complex? Because this simple extension (shows Proton rating in Steam store) works just fine...

Quoting: dreamer_ProtonDB decided to do a pretty stupid thing and store Steam System Information in a cookie file (ok) and basically never invalidate it (not ok). In the result, we get a disproportionate view on driver versions and likely other information in there as well.

Well, this is a strange thing, yes. And a lot of tracking is also disturbing...
dreamer_ Aug 7, 2019
Quoting: TriasAre you trying to do something complex? Because this simple extension (shows Proton rating in Steam store) works just fine...
I was talking about extensions for ProtonDB to implement missing functionality on ProtonDB site.
monnef Aug 7, 2019
Quoting: dreamer_
Quoting: monnefMeasured https://www.protondb.com/help (to not pick up images and other page specific stuff) and got 1.9MB (transferred only 642kB), so nothing extraordinary, just average compared to an year old stats, so probably bellow average now = lighter than average.

This is probably the least important out of the points I listed. But just so we are clear. Clear cache, visit main page (help page size is rather meaningless): 2.6MB transferred, 5.8MB of resources, 31.51s of load time. Now navigate to "Explore": 6.3MB transferred, 12.8MB of resources; now click "Lack reports": 13.1MB transferred (!), 21MB of resources (there is NO information shown on this page aside of 50 small thumbnails - where does 13.1MB of compressed data come from? - this is not normal). Each visited page adds several more megabytes.
I have looked at it and most comes from game "headers" (images), some rather large - e.g. "Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links" has 1MB. (My results were slightly less than you posted, probably because content changes. I had cache disabled entirely in FF.) This doesn't seem to be really a problem in ProtonDB, it just uses images from Steam. The page is probably optimized only for desktop, so there doesn't need to be any special considerations when it comes to content and script sizes. To be honest, I don't think the creator is doing much/any profit from the page, so it is no wonder it's done in nice and comfy tech without too much thought for optimizations. I myself often use open source (similarly to ProtonDB also freely provided to others) toy projects to test new tech and usually don't really go too far with optimizations unless I have troubles with performance. BTW I for one really like sharp images (which results in bigger file sizes), so many pages are ignoring HiDPI users...

Quoting: dreamer_
Quoting: monnefI don't see any unusual tech, it seems to be an SPA in React with css modules and/or css-in-js. Sure, it won't be trivial to write userscripts/addons for it, but since they seem to retain some readable information in css classes (as prefixes), it shouldn't be too hard to collect all classes at start, build translation table and use this table later.
There are no "all classes at start". They are loaded dynamically, each click generates hundreds, maybe thousands of classes with new prefixes.

I tried, I failed, lost several hours. I just want to have a link to PCGW for each game - next to e.g. GitHub search link (e.g. via PCGW search) - this was my first feature request to ProtonDB (almost a year ago) but it was never implemented. React is designed to make this *borderline* impossible. If you know how to do it, or have an example of webextension working with a React page (any extension, any React page), I am all ears.

Quoting: dreamer_I agree with other points. I hope it gets better...

I am definitely salty, as I was quite active on ProtonDB Discord until ~January 2019. I lost hope :(.
I hacked together a small userscript (tested in FF with Greasemonkey and Chromium with Tampermonkey). I hope by PCGW you meant PCGamingWiki. It's not much tested and made very naively, a brute force way (better, a bit more difficult approach would be watching current URL, possibly more performant but more complex could be using mutation observers), but I didn't want to spent too much time on it. I hope it will serve its purpose :).
dreamer_ Aug 10, 2019
Quoting: monnefI hacked together a small userscript (tested in FF with Greasemonkey and Chromium with Tampermonkey). I hope by PCGW you meant PCGamingWiki.

It works exactly how I wanted, thanks! :)
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