Comment on Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking

• chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Chicken and Egg. Linux is barely above 2%. When it breaks 10-20% market share, I expect companies will start making native ports more common.

  The fact that proton/dxvk/vulkan/wine let’s things just work with little to no changes is already pretty incredible.

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  • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Chicken egg problem is exactly why incentivizing (which is not the same as mandating) would make sense.

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    • akakunai@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      True, but even if Steam were to offer a x% lower cut on sales for Linux users if the developer makes a Linux-native build, it’d still not entice many to build and maintain a native port if they are only saving x% off a tiny y% of users. Other poster’s point being that incentives like this would actually become enticing to companies when Linux market share (Proton users) increases.

      Doubtful Steam is gonna offer a share cut on all sales when it runs on Proton for the 2% of userbase using Linux, and from that only a minority would care whether or not it’s native anyway.

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      • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Valve could start by releasing a Steam Deck SDK for Visual Studio that exposes an “Export to Steam Deck” option when targets the latest release of Steam Linux Runtime.

        Currently they offer Docker containers which is good but could be improved.

        Back when Steam Machines were a thing and Valve tried to only push Linux native games, game developers got placements on Steam Store’s landing page banner in return.

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• GoodEye8@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The benefit of Steam is backwards compatibility. The moment you force native porting you lose your greatest benefit. Since you anyway have to build backwards compatibility with Windows you gain nothing by incentivizing native Linux and the developers gain nothing from being incentivized to build native because their games will work through Proton.

  There’s no reason for Valve to incentivize native builds. It’s the devs that need to have an incentive to develop natively for Linux. And with the market share being what it is there’s no incentive for the devs either.

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  • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I see you don’t know about Steam Linux Runtimes which are backwards and forwards compatible. 1.0 (“scout”) is based on Ubuntu 12.04, so already 12 years of binary compatibility.

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    • GoodEye8@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about OS backwards compatibility, it’s user library backwards compatibility. Imagine if proton didn’t exist and you have 15 years of Steam library that has expanded on a yearly basis. You now buy the Steam Deck to play your library. What games can you play? I guarantee you couldn’t play 99% of your library because less than 1% of all games on Steam have been made natively for Linux. If you can’t play 99% of your library what’s the point of owning the deck? This is why Valve is pouring money into Proton, because Proton is the tool that gives users backwards compatibility for their library. Without proton the Steam Deck would be an utter failure.

      It’s also why they don’t need to incentivize native builds, because they already solved that problem on their own with Proton. Why put effort into having developers develop native builds when you could just put that effort into Proton and essentially get the same result (and extra benefits) without hoping the developers do something they didn’t want to do in the first place?

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      • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about OS backwards compatibility, it’s user library backwards compatibility.

        I never proposed to ax Proton, so I’m not the one here missing any points.

        It’s also why they don’t need to incentivize native builds, because they already solved that problem on their own with Proton. Why put effort into having developers develop native builds when you could just put that effort into Proton and essentially get the same result (and extra benefits) without hoping the developers do something they didn’t want to do in the first place?

        I explained several times already that game updates breaking Proton compatibility is a real thing that would not have happened with native games.

        Game developers develop for dedicated platforms other than Windows all the time. They’re called game consoles. Native games don’t just mysteriously break on updates or suddenly ban players because the game developer out of the blue decided that Proton is cheating. First launch of games doesn’t annoy with those stupid Microsoft runtime installer scripts, etc. Proper native games could be optimized the way console games are instead of relying on multiple levels of Windows compatibility layers (the newest BS Proton has to deal with is gamepad compatibility for launchers via a special input wrapper) – they are just a smoother experience all around.

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• lepinkainen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Proton is so good that devs have actually gotten better performance by dropping their native Linux build and just running a proton-emulated version in Linux 😀

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  • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And then they release an update for their game and it breaks on Proton. Happens every now and then. A proper native build would not have that problem.

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• bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It doesn’t really matter though, because Wine is mature enough that it’s not a hacky diy fix, it’s a viable solution. None of the games I play run any worse on Linux than they did on Windows, and some run better. The vast majority of people don’t care whether it’s native or not, they just want it to work.

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