Quoting: lugaidstermany native ports feel like second class citizens even when compared to proton versions.

Creative Assembly (SEGA) even started to skip creating native Linux builds with Total War: Troy, they said Proton makes it pointless. However with their newest entry Warhammer III there will be a native Linux version again (Feral Interactive).

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/07/feral-no-longer-porting-a-total-war-saga-troy-to-linux-citing-less-demand-since-proton/

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Valve has 360 employees, quite far off of a megacorporation, take Microsofts 180.000, Apple 150.000, Sony 110.000, or heck, Ubisofts 20.000, EA 11.000... these are megacorporations. Valve is even taken prime example for an ultra-flat company structure, devoid of formal hierarchies employees flexibly join workgroups.
Their decision for open-source is unlikely out of some sort of ideal but rather lack of capability and capacity to make place for themselves in the tight market and for a proprietary ecosystem of their own, still it is nothing a megacorporation usually does, Alphabet be the extraordinary exception.

360 employees and 65.000+ games up for sale in the Steam store is how they don't have the capacity to actually deal with every product and developer as much as is their duty, let alone customer. Instead everything is automated farther than is good and any communication bears a lot of delays and yet is short.
Incidently the same goes for Google and their Play Store is likewise automated and filled with garbage.
Apple Store, Ubisoft Connect/Uplay, EA Desktop/Origin or Epic Games Store are curated platforms that select each game individually and thereby can provide proper support for each, and they are not huge dumps for shovelware.
However that also means most indie developers dont ever have the chance to appear on there.

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Quoting: BielFPsBut I wonder how they'll handle cases like Borderlands 2 that, while having a "performant" native build, the last DLC can only be played through Proton.

That's probably one of those cases they don't think of until someone brings it to their notice.

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Quoting: basedBlack Squad unsupported? That has to be a mistake, right? I'm playing it on Linux without issues, just gotta have BattlEye thing installed from the library

SteamDeck Verified also takes into account support for the handheld and onscreen controls and is just not the exact same thing as supported by Proton or even running on Linux natively.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: lectrodethe 10s of thousands of games in the steam catalogue (10,263 according to google).

64,364 [External Link] today. It'll be more tomorrow. That's just games; there's DLC and non-game software, too.

Unfortunately, the largest number is outright garbage, shovelware, asset flip, cashgrab. Just yesterday I came across an arguing between two indie 'devs' in the reviews for the game VILLAGE THE SIBERA [External Link] in their review [External Link] they link the UE4 marketplace items the developer of this game blatantly throws together to call it a game, on top he reuses these asset in more of his 'games', such as Ebola, Ebola 2 and guess what? Soon, Ebola 3 releases.
Well, the other doesn't simply throw together assets but they release garbage games as well, some Snake game looking like Paint in '98.
Not to lessen the work it requires to create seemingly simple games, but I'm not going to a market to be presented poorly homemade hobbyworks, or to a restaurant to have another visitor scramble together some eggs and sell it to me as a dish.

That's what you have with a open, automated platform like that, in a curated store such as Epic, Ubisoft Connect, Origin or the Apple Store you wont find garbage like that because they curate each game by hand.

When the surge of garbage began rolling in Valve put in place the Greenlight system, based on a public voting system games would be voted for or against being published on Steam, it was manipulated and therefor discontinued and replaced by Steam Direct, but truth is there's probably more trash being released on Steam than ever before.

So much for 65k 'games' on Steam, Valve should be forced to play each and every of them to see where they went wrong.

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Quoting: lectrodeThe vast majority of games for your average person's library is going to be "unknown" until valve's staff have time to extensively test all the 10s of thousands of games in the steam catalogue (10,263 according to google).

I don't know exactly how many staff they have testing these games,

Quite exactly one year ago the Steam store reached 50,000 listed games. ( https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/total-games [External Link] )
It counts over 200,000 AppIds ( SteamDB ), this number includes DLC, software, betas, public test builds/servers, internal and press releases, removed games (due to licensing or regulations games are removed from sale, such as Rocket League) etc etc

And as for the staff: Valve only counts 360 employees which is nothing compared to EAs 11.000, Ubisofts 18.000, Sonys 110.000 or Microsofts 180.000
So there you have it, that's why they are rather slow and unresponsive.

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The magic Seven

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyCool. Now imagine if the very operating system the thing ran on was open source too . . . oh wait. Um, and what if the 'secret sauce' it used to run Windows games was . . . oh, it is too, huh?
Valve is frankly a really weird company. I'm sure all the other companies look at it and think, to quote a certain Dr. from Austin Powers, "Not Evil enough".

It really is, except for Gabe Newell in the position of CEO there are no formally fixed positions in the company, employees flexibly join workgroups as necessary. This is called ultra-flat because there is no hierarchy and Valve is often referred to as a prime example for this company structure.
Moreover, Ubisoft counts 18.000 employees, EA 11.000... Sony 110.000, Microsoft 180.000... Valve counts 360, but is the largest games platform on PC with somewhere around 80% of PC games being on Steam.

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To this day commercial cheats provide the paying customer with private patched bootloaders that boot into a cracked Windows with disabled UAC allowing for undetected injection of hacks, bypassing VAC, PunkBuster and EAC.

Seeing the efforts these people take to continue hacking you would assume they would take the opportunity and have an easy one on Linux. Interestingly enough I've heard no complains about cheaters abusing the Linux version of CS:GO. It is secured by a custom version of VAC, a private blogger analyzed it (https://lwss.github.io/State-Of-Vac-linux-2020/) and apparantly it does nothing other than monitoring /mem /proc /cmdline and the gamedir for suspicious files/processes/signatures and therefor should be easily bypassed with a custom kernel.

I think Linux is generally too unattractive to gamers, but the Steam Deck might bring a lot of them to it, and if it is profitable there will be cheat providers.

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Just like it's "not possible" to implement crossplay for Vermintide 2, not even between Windows Store and Steam. Truth is it's "not possible" for Fatshark. They're a tiny studio, they're having their modeller do the animations right in their office with locomotion gear, you can see the guy moving if you watch closely in the game.
Their maps are all just one huge static model, that's why the game takes 100GB where a higher qualified studio takes 30GB with dynamic loading, their netcode is basic to say the least...
It's nice to have some insight, but Fatshark is not a good example for even an average studio.

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