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PayPalFor GDC 2026, Unity revealed expanded official support is coming for Steam. This includes Native Linux, Steam Deck, Steam Machine and more.
To save you from having to watch through the video, I grabbed a coffee and noted down what they said. Directly from James Stone, Unity Platforms Team, here's what they said:
One thing I can talk about now is that we're bringing official Steam support into Unity. Now, I know you'll say "But I already ship games to Steam" and that's true. Thousands of developers have had success on Steam with Unity. The thing is, prior to Platform Toolkit, we've never actually officially supported Steam in the past. It's always been up to developers to integrate Steamworks themselves, and publish and support their titles on that platform historically.
And on Steam Deck, many of you have been finding success with Proton. But I think we can do better with a native solution. So, as I mentioned before our strength is highly performant native runtimes. So moving forward we'll provide not just build targets for Steam but also Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. We'll also look to make targeted enhancements to our Linux runtime to provide native performance increases and remove the need for developers to rely on Windows through Proton.
And look, as great as Proton is, it's simply something we don't have any degree of control over or ability to support. And we've actually made some native improvements to the Linux player that targets the Steam Deck hardware. Offering a potential improvement in performance over a build running on Proton and that's actually available today.
You can watch their full video below the Steam part starts around 40:11:
Direct Link
What do you make of this news? Quite exciting to see such expanded Linux support coming. Good news for developers too. Looks like Native Linux is back on the menu - at least for developers using Unity.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Is this the start of the Linux picks up mainstream developer mindshare thing?
Or is Unity just trying to have it covered in case that happens?
BloodScourge 4 hours ago
But I think we can do better with a native solution.Oh really? 🤔
But I think we can do better with a native solution.I hard disagree with this statement. Pretty much all existing Linux games suffer from various problems ranging from complete inplayability over control and gameplay/visual issues as well as crashes. Running games over Proton is vastly preferable to Native most of the time because the Windows API is much more stable than the Linux API. I myself have had so many issues with native ports that the Proton versions never have, that I've given up on them completely
Quoting: grigiWow, did not expect this.More the latter than the former, I expect. The last time we had Steam Machines announced we got 40% of games released on Steam having a native Linux build, and game engines stepped up their Linux support, based on the potential of a new market. Since those Steam Machines didn't really happen in the end, that support withered.
Is this the start of the Linux picks up mainstream developer mindshare thing?
Or is Unity just trying to have it covered in case that happens?
This time around I think there'll be less withering. The Deck is a proven market, and media are much more positive about Linux than they were then. Linux support is less acceptable to allow to drop than it was then. But the driving force to improve Linux support is the potential of a bigger future market, just as it was then.
Of course, back then, OpenGL support was about the same on Windows, Mac and Linux, so you could avoid duplication of work. Vulkan support on Windows isn't that great, and it's non-existent on Mac, so there'll be more platform-specific duplication of work this time around.
Quoting: StellaSo you think that native Linux apps/games are inherently bad. Why bother with Linux and not just use Windows in that case?But I think we can do better with a native solution.I hard disagree with this statement. Pretty much all existing Linux games suffer from various problems ranging from complete inplayability over control and gameplay/visual issues as well as crashes. Running games over Proton is vastly preferable to Native most of the time because the Windows API is much more stable than the Linux API. I myself have had so many issues with native ports that the Proton versions never have, that I've given up on them completely
It's what plenty of folks have been saying a long time. With Proton they can establish Linux as a proper gaming platform. Native solutions would eventually follow.
Once again, the biggest undoing of Linux games is the Linux gamers. Sigh...
Last edited by rea987 on 11 Mar 2026 at 7:30 pm UTC
GustyGhost 2 hours ago
Quoting: AsciiWolfSo you think that native Linux apps/games are inherently bad. Why bother with Linux and not just use Windows in that case?Proprietary games using GNU/Linux APIs are bad. For example, Egosoft's X3 uses a GTK2 application to launch and GTK2 is no longer being updated (it's even been removed from the official Arch repositories). Because it's proprietary software the community can't just take it over and update it to use GTK3 or 4.
I suppose a better way to put it is that native GNU/Linux games aren't bad, they just need more machinery to keep working than games targetting the Windows APIs (although of course one could just set up a system with ancient versions of everything, I mean that's Debian's entire shtick).
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