Steam Play - Play Windows games via Steam on Linux

It will give some devs an excuse to not produce native games, but on the other hand it'll help grow the base of Linux gamers, and current gamers can benefit in the meantime. The alternative (of not having improvements to WINE) doesn't drive the production of native Linux games, not in the way that a growing addressable market would.
 
This seems like an ok idea but as others have said it will probably mean developers will have an excuse to not put any time into developing linux native games.

Games developers might even use/re-purpose the tech to release non-native games across platforms like they did with cider (bundled wine) on mac os.

Benchmark example: GTAV (Cpu: i7 8700k Mem: 16GB Gpu: GTX 1080 Ti OS: Arch linux)
Looking at this benchmark it does seem pretty good with the right hardware.

I guess one good thing it does do is make wine more accessible for the average gamer.
 
The only thing that's stopped me more than just loading random distros, tinkering and then going back to windows has been the gaming issue.

I've tried WINE and whatnot but Windows has always just dragged me back with its ease.

Attract more people over by make gaming easy, well it can only be a good thing. I've always enjoyed linux distros, I'd be happy not to touch W10 at home if I can.
 
Oh. It seems that some people have managed to run Quake Champions on Proton (although some people get crashes). That is the only game I need to keep switching back to Windows for. This could be a game changer for me.
 
mortals said:
This seems like an ok idea but as others have said it will probably mean developers will have an excuse to not put any time into developing linux native games.

Games developers might even use/re-purpose the tech to release non-native games across platforms like they did with cider (bundled wine) on mac os.
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Honestly, short-mid term it doesn't matter. The reason I need to keep a windows installation is for gaming. If I can play my favourite games on Linux I'd prefer that, even at the expense of a few frames. If they can get 90% of games within 10% performance of Windows then people will switch. Most people don't care about the ideological difference between WINE and native games. Does my favourite game run or not?

If more people play games on Linux we should see better driver support for gaming hardware and more developers caring if/how their games run on Linux.

This breaks the catch 22: People won't switch to Linux because their games don't work, Developers won't won't support Linux because there's not enough market to make it profitable.
 
Tom B said:
Most people don't care about the ideological difference between WINE and native games. Does my favourite game run or not?
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That's been the crux of the issue.

Can I run my games as easy as I do on Windows or not? That's been my only reason for not using solely Linux. I don't care if they're Windows or native Linux.

Really interested to see how this goes. Fingers and toes crossed.
 
Tom B said:
Honestly, short-mid term it doesn't matter. The reason I need to keep a windows installation is for gaming. If I can play my favourite games on Linux I'd prefer that, even at the expense of a few frames. If they can get 90% of games within 10% performance of Windows then people will switch.
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Until they run into a problem maybe ...
Tom B said:
Most people don't care about the ideological difference between WINE and native games. Does my favourite game run or not?
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I think a bigger issue is will their favourite game be supported.
When they get a problem who do they contact?

If you are depending on community driven technologies to run games, who does the support?

Also there are a lot of other issues with using wine to run games like getting banned by anti-cheat software (more recently league of legends had this problem)

If developers want to profit from linux users they should also need to support linux development & linux users
Running AAA online games which have anticheat or DRM is still going to be a problem.

Hopefully this brings new gamers to linux but the reality is most gamers play games which have anti-cheat/drm included & most gamers also expect support.
 
I just ran Supreme Commander 2 on my laptop (Linux Mint 19, an old Thinkpad T530). I only tried the tutorial and it ran perfectly :)
 
mortals said:
Hopefully this brings new gamers to linux but the reality is most gamers play games which have anti-cheat/drm included & most gamers also expect support.
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I agree the DRM games are currently an issue but do gamers expect support?

I'm not saying they don't but whenever I've had an issue i've always looked to gaming forums for the answers.
 
Really great news. I personally have never used support for games, only for platforms as a whole, for example Steam/Origin etc. This definitely makes fully dropping Windows more of a palatable option.
 
Someone has made a compatibility tracker site where people can report how well certain games run using steam play.

https://spcr.netlify.com/ - Steam Play Compatibility Reports

Looks pretty good & could be a good starting point if you are curious about specific games.

It looks like most games with anticheat don't work (eg: paladins, smite, realm royale, PUBG)
Also anything with denuvo drm etc :(

I also notice a few games have "status: completely stable" but in notes it says "game crashes .." (eg: World Of Tanks)
 
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It occurred to me today that AMD GPU's are generally stronger in Vulkan than an equivalent NVidia GPU. Because Proton translates DX10 and DX11 calls to Vulkan it really does seem to make sense to stick with AMD now.
 
Hades said:
It occurred to me today that AMD GPU's are generally stronger in Vulkan than an equivalent NVidia GPU. Because Proton translates DX10 and DX11 calls to Vulkan it really does seem to make sense to stick with AMD now.
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Funny you should mention it, had thought of switching my NVIDIA hardware to AMD since i switched to Ubuntu mate. I haven't been interested in the big triple As for a long time and when I play games its usually smaller ones like Grim Dawn or PoE. That said Grim Dawn has always been a trouble maker on my 1080ti on windows with stutters even after the engine upgrade they did to the game but after switching to Ubuntu and using lutris and DXVK the game is running close to perfect with much less stutter and what feels like overall better frame pacing. How the **** that is possible i don't know, i certainly didn't expect anything other than a performance degradation, I'm certainly not complaining.
 
I think I am lucky in that, while I dont have the very latest Graphics, I do have an utterly ridiculous number of PCs, and they all have some form of O/S or another, be they Windows, Linux and a couple of Hackintoshes, plus one real one just for when I need to legally grab a new image of the latest POS version of MacOS.
But I have an utterly ridiculously large collection of Steam Games, and, I also have Steam installed on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and on the Linux and Windows Laptops too.
More recently I knocked up a SteamOS PC for a giggle ( almost a waste of time to be honest, but there you go )
Now, this has allowed me to play a fair number of games, in al lformats, plus I have tried a few games under WINE and they have all had varying levels of success / failure, but I have to be honest, and for the most part, Windows has always been that one step ahead... ( Sometimes miles ahead too ), however, I do have a few games that have been AWOL from my steam list, and for those, I have had to install them under Wine. I have also been using PLAYONLINX as I have found that to be VERY reliable in getting many things running that can be awkward. I can name a fair few games that dont like wine/PoL but this is not an issue for me most of the time. I just accept they dont like it and not worry about it.

Anyway, these new games, I have found, have suddenly had a bit of a boost in many ways... The games themselves seem to play pretty much the same as they did with maybe the odd difference, such as the disk speed, or even a few glitches within the game, such as the drawing did not quite go right, and so a door might not render quite right, or you can see through a wall etc... nothing Major, bot one looking for this sort of issue now, they have gone, so overall, its been a great improvement for me.

Right now, I am swapping over between Linux and Windows and if I had to drop one, it would have to be Linux, but right now... Linux is getting closer and closer each distro.
After playing with Mac, I am struggling to understand why people like the bloody things so much...
 
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