Apr 21, 2020 23:00:00

What is the achievement of the compatibility layer 'Proton' that makes Steam games playable on Linux?

Valve, the operator of

Steam , which is extremely popular as a PC game sales platform, has developed Proton, an open source software developed to bring the PC games sold on Steam to a wider range of users. Proton is an open source compatibility layer developed to make games for Windows playable on Linux, co-developed with software developer CodeWeavers, and the source code is published on GitHub. It is reported that such Proton has brought about 6000 PC game titles developed for Windows to Linux so far.

Proton Has Brought About 6000 Games to Linux So Far – Boiling Steam
https://boilingsteam.com/proton-brought-about-6000-games-to-linux-so-far/

Proton is a compatibility layer developed by Valve that allows PC games for Windows to run on Linux-based OS systems. It is open source software and the source code is available on GitHub. Has been created has become the base of the Proton in order to native operating software for Windows in a UNIX-based OS Wine in, 'Proton is Wine of the fork has been described as'.

GitHub-ValveSoftware / Proton: Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components

ProtonDB is a collection of data about Proton and Steam. According to this ProtonDB, the following graph shows the game titles released on Steam since the release of Proton in August 2018 and the “% of platinum games” among them. The platinum game means 'a game that can be played immediately on Linux without any modification by using Proton'.

In the graph below, the horizontal axis is the time axis and the vertical axis is the number of titles. Between the launch of Proton and April 1, 2020, 11,100 game titles have been released on Steam, of which 50.4% are platinum games.

According to ProtonDB data, the number of platinum games as of April 21, 2020 is 6502.

Proton was released in August 2018, so even 2 years have not passed since the article was created, but 6500 platinum games have appeared in this period of less than 2 years. This number 'provides far more games for Linux' than any company that ported games for Linux, said Boiling Steam, a foreign game media company.

Furthermore, according to ProtonDB, about 100 or more games every month can be classified as platinum games that can be played on Linux without modification. In addition, as Proton continues to improve since its release, the proportion of games that ProtonDB considers platinum games continues to grow, meaning more than half of the newly released games can now be played on Linux. I will.

Note that the operations required to enable the game to be played on Linux using Proton are simple ones such as 'add launcher flag' and 'change the name of the executable file (.exe file) in the directory'. However, if the game cannot be executed without doing this, it is defined as 'a platinum game cannot be evaluated'. Therefore, it seems that more game titles can actually be played on Linux using Proton, and Proton's achievements are more than the numbers.

That's why Boiling Steam praises Proton by saying, 'So far Proton seems to have been overwhelmingly successful.'