Beamboom is completely correct.

If you're a game developer, you have a certain number of employees, you pay them by the hour or by a salary, either way you're paying for their time. If they work 8 hours in a day, what do you tell them to do with their 8 hours? 8 hours working on content for the Windows market, or 8 hours working on content for the Linux market? Spend their time working on a Windows game that 96% of the PC market can buy, or tell them to develop a Linux game that 0.8% of the PC market can buy?

Thankfully games don't have to be developed from scratch when they're ported, it's not like the art assets or voice acting that needs to be redone. But there is a certain cost associated with porting to Linux, a certain amount of work. Linux becomes economical, when the time spent on Linux vs the return from spending that time on Linux, is greater than more time spent working on content or games for Windows. Frequently that is not the case.

On that grounds, we are not going to get publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision, etc, even touching Linux until it reaches more like 20% of the market. But we're not going to get to 20% if we don't have their games.

It's the ancient catch 22 of Linux, need users to get support, need support to get users. This is why we need Proton. Proton is a form of support, the support just comes from Valve instead of the developers/publishers. If Valve hold steady and play the long game with Proton, eventually it will bring users as well.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestSo previously I would point out that Valve only fund work that someone has started.
It's therefore only fair of me to look at this and point out that, I believe, this is instigated, developed, run by Valve itself.

Nice project. If it continues and becomes a more defacto backend for Mesa, I wonder what will happen with the llvm one. Doubt I'll be playing with ACO myself until it's more mature, but it's very nice to see this kind of investment.

...makes me wonder again what Valve are driving at. This kind of investment for a small market share platform? I don't believe it. They'll be wanting GNU/Linux (and it has to be GNU, there's no sense in not using the GNU components) to have a larger market share, so I'm curious what the plan is about that.

Yeah. I too think they must have something in mind. It's a nice thought; I hope they get it right this time.

I sometimes wonder if the original push for Steam Machines was sort of partly an experiment, or ended up that way--like either from the beginning or part way through they started to realize that the infrastructure they needed to make it work wasn't in place, but they'd already made some deals so they went through with it kind of half-heartedly while noting all the points of failure as a learning experience. If you want to learn what you would need to succeed at something, there's nothing like trying and failing, to rub your nose in it.

I agree, it felt like Steam Machines and launching Steam on Linux, was more like an experiment, just throwing the snowball into hell to see what melts it first. Like a science experiment to test their ideas and identify the engineering problems they need to address. It's like ever since then they've been slowly progressing down the list of problems and issues that prevented Steam Machines from catching on and addressing each and every one of them. If that's their tactic, it's a clever one.

I'm loving their commitment more than anything. Most companies would have given up by now.

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Seriously, Valve, thankyou.

This is fantastic! This is really just cutting straight to the heart of gaming issues on Linux, tackling the real hard problems like improving minimal frame rates and eliminating stutter. This will have such a positive impact on gaming performance under Linux. Of course, it's just for AMD GPUs. NVIDIA, getting the hint yet? Open source your drivers if you want some of the open source love!

The work Valve & Friends has done or sponsored in just the last 12 months is amazing and had a fantastic and huge impact on gaming on Linux. You're all heroes!

Speaking of heroes, we hear yet again about this growing 'Valve open-source graphics group', which seems to be turning into a kinda 'avengers initiative' of the open source/linux gaming/graphics world. I'm loving it.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: BeamboomBut if I may ask:
From your perspective, all things considered, does it really matter if Proton or not as long as it works 100% out of the box and on par with native builds? I mean, it's less work for the devs (ergo more profitable per sale) and the same experience for us?

Hm.
* I don't like it.
* I'm disappointed by Linux native gaming not keeping the traction it had (which I only partly accuse Proton for).
* It's technically inferior. Having a binary wrapper fells bad (spoken as software developer).
* Except for the few whitelisted games, it doesn't entitle me for a working game. (Whatever that in reality might be worth for a port...)
* It feels plain wrong to run Windows Exes on Linux.

So... It's a mixture of feelings, technically based gut feeling, call-it-ideology, legal based bad feelings, ...

I don't want to be third class citizen in these aspects.

Though I don't know what to do it native Linux gaming keeps losing traction.

I might buy Windows 10, or I might use Proton (which I might hide from the sales statistic).
Dunno.

One positive of Proton on Linux vs Windows 10, is that at least when you play a game via Proton, it shows as a Linux sale.

That's better than it showing as a Windows sale, and reminds the developers that Linux gamers are playing their games. We may not have a userbase large enough to alter their business decisions or justify native ports in all circumstances, but at least showing up as a statistic on their revenue charts, even if that revenue is only 1% of their total, gives them a tiny incentive to not doing anything to explicitly lock us out of playing their games on purpose or accidentally, if it can be avoided.

Shipping a native Linux version of a game can be expensive. But sometimes making a game compatible with Proton doesn't involve extra work, or testing, or development. Sometimes it's just a matter of choosing 'Option B' instead of 'Option A' when there are two ways of doing something.

A great example is the current issue we have of video playback in some games and WMF. There's no reason why the developers couldn't pick an alternative format to wmv, which is currently an issue, due to patents among other things.

There's a possibility a developer might see Linux gamers trying to play their games, notice the issue that the WMV format creates, and think to themselves. "Hm. Well it's too late now to re-encode all those videos into a different format, but perhaps on our NEXT project, we might use a different format. Maybe WebM.".

That would pose no additional work for the developer, the videos have to be encoded into at least one format, why not pick the format that might just slightly increase the number of sales, even if it's only by 1%?

Those tiny changes in decisions and behaviour, can mount up over time. In that instance, boom, there's a developer already leaning away from a locked down format, and leaning towards a more open format. That's one less issue the developer would face if they decided to port their next project to Linux. Little changes in behaviour like that could eventually build up, until a developer realises that porting to Linux would be very little extra work at all, because they're already choosing to use development solutions that are strongly compatible with Linux by targeting Proton.

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Just going to leave this here, platinum rated game compatible with Proton just released a native Linux port of their game. [External Link]

Clearly Proton existing didn't kill that native port. In fact, likely because the game had a platinum rating, it probably got a stack of Linux gamers as a result, Linux gamers who looked at ProtonDB and said "I'll buy anything platinum since that seems like a safe bet'. The devs would have seen those stats before doing their Linux port.

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Quoting: mike456

Quoting: gradyvuckovicGo Godot! Woo!

Best thing about Godot is that first class Linux support. Editor and Game Engine. Even the exported Windows games run perfectly through Wine/Proton on Linux as far as I can tell, from testing my own projects.

Wait, you say you can create Windows .exe from Linux? What about MacOs?

Yup! You can export to Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and HTML5, from Windows, Linux and Mac.

I work on Linux, and I regularly export Windows *.exe versions of my projects and send them via discord/dropbox to a person I make stuff with. It's awesome being able to just compile to any platform from any platform.

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What about GPU memory? Any change there?

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: gradyvuckovic

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Although, they did tweak this for higher earning games in December last year so for games that earn $10 million it's reduced to 25% and 20% at $50 million.

That's per publisher/developer, not per game.

For real?!

Holy crap I've been quoting that wrong then, I thought that was per game?!

If that's per publisher, then practically all of the major publishers are already at 20%?! What on earth is Paradox even complaining about?

Wrong. It is per-game, not per developer.

From Valve's post on it:

Starting from October 1, 2018 (i.e. revenues prior to that date are not included), when a game makes over $10 million on Steam

*emphasis mine

Ahh thankyou, I was questioning myself there, whew.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Although, they did tweak this for higher earning games in December last year so for games that earn $10 million it's reduced to 25% and 20% at $50 million.

That's per publisher/developer, not per game.

For real?!

Holy crap I've been quoting that wrong then, I thought that was per game?!

If that's per publisher, then practically all of the major publishers are already at 20%?! What on earth is Paradox even complaining about?

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Go Godot! Woo!

Godot is such an awesome project, they are working furiously on that project, just look at the commits on their github. They're blazing through fixing issues, they've fixed over 1800 for version 3.2. This project is really going somewhere, I feel like this project is where Blender was at maybe 5 years ago.

Best thing about Godot is that first class Linux support. Editor and Game Engine. Even the exported Windows games run perfectly through Wine/Proton on Linux as far as I can tell, from testing my own projects.

I'm really hoping this project gets the support it deserves, it could mean really positive things in the long run for both game developers and gamers.

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