You Can Play Over 2,600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play (tomshardware.com)

At the end of August, Valve announced a new version of Steam Play for Linux that included Proton, a WINE fork that made many Windows games, including more recent ones ,such as Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3 and Dishonored, playable on Linux. Just two months later, ProtonDB says there are over 2,600 Windows games that users can play on Linux, and the number is rapidly growing daily. From a report: When Valve Software launched Steam Play with Proton, it made it easier for gamers to play Windows games that hadn't yet been ported to Linux with the click of a button. Not all games may run perfectly on Linux, but that's also often the case with Windows 10, which can not play older games as well as previous versions of Windows did, even under Compatibility Mode. In only two months, the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600 -- more than half of the 5,000 Linux-native games that can be obtained through the Steam store.

Comments

Microsoft should sue

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam is illegally stealing Windows and letting cheap freeloading Linux losers play Microsoft's games! They should sue!

Not the right metric.

[Holi]

Not a fair metric when 90% are crappy clones of each other.

Better metric would be, how many games that I want to play work on Steam on Linux, I promise you the number is far, far lower then the Hackers Quarterly.

Re:Not the right metric.

[Greyfox]

The number is much higher than the previous status quo. Remember the bad old days of Loki Games? That was the late '90's, so some of the younger readers might not have been born then. I bought several of their titles back then. They did a Linux convention in Denver in '99 and their CEO was complaining that it took three engineers three days to figure out how to set up a multi-display X11 setup for a flight simulator. They finally threw in the towel a short time later.

Back then, the prognosis for commercial games on Linux was "Whoever wants to port them and Loki." There weren't many who would port them -- Id Software for some of the quake titles are the only ones I can think of. And sure, there were some other options -- you could install mame and play some emulated coin-op and console games. There were some open source ones, graphical and not. There was still a pretty healthy Xtrek community back then. But if you wanted a machine to play games on, you installed windows. Funnily, OSX was in pretty much the same boat as Linux. A few more publishers decided to port to them. But you didn't really buy a Mac to play games anyway. And they were really terrible at pushing 3D. The early aluminum tower would cook the video card to death over the course of a couple of months if you actually tried to.

Fast forward to today, you can confidently install steam on Linux and reasonably expect a new title to just work. Take No Man's Sky. Good example, fairly recent game, pretty unique, works great. Borderlands 2, Stellaris, Factorio, even the old Railroad Tycoon 2 work great, for just a random selection that I have installed on my laptop. About the only thing I've tried installing that absolutely didn't want to work was the 64 bit version of Skyrim.

And a lot of the titles that didn't work before work great with wine. I used to run the 32 bit Skyrim that way. Wine will also run Wow and Eve online flawlessly, again a huge step up from the bad old days.

I still need to test it with the HTC Vive VR and my most commonly played titles for that. If that works even remotely well, I could consider formatting Windows 10 off my gaming system and installing Linux instead. That would have been impossible before now.

Re:Not the right metric.

[TheSunborn]

Now I don't know what kind of games YOU want to play. I guess there might be an issue with missing games if you like 3d shooters since a lot of these seems to be missing.

But all the games I personally want to play, such as XCOM2, Civilization 5 and 6, Darkest dungeon, Thea, Total war: Warhammer, Cities: Skylies and rim world and Factorio are available.

Only game I sometimes miss are "Endless space 2" and there are repports that it does run perfectly on Wine but i have not tested that.

Actual Proton Page

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that want to look at the ProtonDB site.

https://www.protondb.com/

Re:Linux Desktop is DEAD

[jedidiah]

> Ah yes, the small niche market of 99% of business desktops and the vast majority of home PCs.

So what? I probably wouldn't be satisfied with ANY of your other consumer choices either. You probably have no taste what so ever.

The beautiful thing about a free market is that I don't have to be held hostage by your stupid choices.

Although your FUD is simply out of date. Microsoft is entirely optional these days.

You may even find the non-WinDOS games on Steam to your liking.

A surprisingly high number of good games

[mykro76]

For those labouring under the assumption that these counts are inflated with crappy games, I collected some stats on the 4500 best games on Steam. These are the ones that Steam flags as "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" based on aggregated reviews. Of those, 1500 are supported natively on Linux and another 1500 are playable without much trouble in Proton. It's also become clear that most of the reports being submitted to ProtonDB are for the better, well-known games. Hardly anyone is submitting reports on the crappy shovelware games.

Re:But...

[higuita]

Nethack! and Dwarf fortress!

two of the best games ever made and run perfectly in linux