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On the day of Steam Play hitting the big one year anniversary (August 21st), it seems another milestone has been reached in terms of compatibility.

According to ProtonDB, the handy unofficial tracking website, over six thousand games are now working. At time of writing, exactly 6,023 "games work" (quote from their home page) against the 9,134 total of games that currently have user reports to see if they run or not. That's quite an impressive number!

It's worth noting though, that with little over nine thousand games currently reported, Steam does host well over thirty thousand so there's a huge amount that hasn't yet been tested.

Since it's not explained on the ProtonDB website, I reached out to the owner of ProtonDB to explain how they get that "games work" number. They said it "includes all games with at least one gold rating or higher".

How about a question for you to answer in the comments: What does Steam Play mean to you? I'll start.

To me, it's many things. For starters, I do have quite a number of games not available on Linux, left over from purchases before I decided Linux was what I wanted to stick with as my main platform on PC. Some of them are old favourites too so having easy access to them now is a really nice bonus. On top of that, it means also having the chance to play thousands of games not released on Linux over the last few years if I wanted to.

For some additional fun reading: check out this blog post about a Wine bug from the lead Proton Quality Assurance Engineer at CodeWeavers, the company Valve teamed up with to create Proton. Great to see even more behind the scenes info like this.

Another point I want to make, is how Proton can keep older Windows games alive and kicking too and there's people doing just that. Not Linux gaming related but interesting nonetheless.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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LungDrago Aug 23, 2019
Quoting: massatt212Once Mortal Kombat 11, Injustice 2, Street Fighter V and Easy Anti Cheat Works on Linux im making my 100% Move need to play Dauntless lol

Fighting games have always been tricky. There have been next to none on Linux. I'd play the hell out of MK11 if it worked on Linux too, but since it doesn't run at all I haven't bought it. I could clear out the cobwebs and boot into Windows...but...no. In the meantime, MKX and Fantasy Strike work well.
Liam Dawe Aug 23, 2019
Quoting: GuestDefine 'work' we talking gold? platinum? bronze? silver? which rating here?
I've been waiting on the creator of ProtonDB replying about that and they did today, added to the article:

QuoteSince it's not explained on the ProtonDB website, I reached out to the owner of ProtonDB to explain how they get that "games work" number. They said it "includes all games with at least one gold rating or higher".
rustybroomhandle Aug 23, 2019
Funny thing about Gold or higher, we've been playing Final Fantasy XIV, which is rated Silver. Silver means it doesn't 100% work, but in this case the only thing that doesn't work is the opening cinematic, which is viewable on the official YouTube channel. Once you do the necessary edit to make it skip the cinematic, everything else works great.

Re that video. It uses Widevine, which I'm pretty sure can possibly be made to work with Wine.

(Also, very silly to use a DRM format on a video file that you're going to upload to your official YouTube channel anyway)
Purple Library Guy Aug 23, 2019
Quoting: rustybroomhandle(Also, very silly to use a DRM format on a video file that you're going to upload to your official YouTube channel anyway)
. . . Yes. Yes, it is.
zkarj Aug 24, 2019
Quoteerror while loading shared libraries: libsteam_api.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Sounds like you didn't install all the necessary libraries from the repo. That shared library should be in the sub-directory of the Steam game. Try using a command line terminal to start the game (usually there is a script start.sh) after running the steam client, and that should show any relevant error messages about missing libraries.
Also make sure all the symlinks in steam client directory are not broken, per https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5101
tuubi Aug 24, 2019
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Quoting: zkarj
Quoteerror while loading shared libraries: libsteam_api.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Sounds like you didn't install all the necessary libraries from the repo. That shared library should be in the sub-directory of the Steam game. Try using a command line terminal to start the game (usually there is a script start.sh) after running the steam client, and that should show any relevant error messages about missing libraries.
Also make sure all the symlinks in steam client directory are not broken, per https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5101
Actually, this is easy to check on steamdb. In this case the library is right there in the base directory of the game and there's no start script.
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