Thank You, Valve

So you expect Valve to prioritize a client that will only be usable for a minority of a minority (Linux users that understand what 32-bit and 64-bit are and are OK with excluding games based on an arbitrary 64-bit only restriction) while there is no pressing need for it since you can run 32-bit Steam on pretty much any distribution after installing a couple of extra packages?

For desktop Linux you can rely on glibc, OpenGL, Vulkan, X11 (even with Wayland) and OSS/ALSA/Pulse() being present. That is really all you need* to run a game and there are plenty of libraries that you can ship with your game if you want their functionality, statically linking them when possible. This approach has been shown to work since 1999.

(*) Audio subststem devs' insistence on reinventing APIs is disappointing, but just use SDL or OpenAL Soft or whatever to abstract it for you or tell your users to use the available compatibility tools.

I'm someone who still mostly avoids non-native games but I don't send hate mail and most likely will just ignore your game so you won't hear from users like me at all. I don't draw a hard line but there a many reasons why I prefer native games:

* Proton is a very useful tool, but it is and will always be chasing a moving target. Any game update can break Proton compat and Wine/Proton is complex enough that updates do sometimes regress support for some games. Do I really want to invest (time wise and emotionally) in games that could just stop working?

* I want my platform to be officially supported. That does not mean that every niche issue needs to be fixed but I should at least be entitled to a refund if I cannot get the game to work or if it stops working due to game updates - without any limitations.

* I also care about Linux getting better and better supported long term. I care more about making sure that I have a free and open platform in the future than I care about being able to play any particular game now. The best way for that to happen is more people developing for Linux. Maybe Proton will help by allowing more people to switch their primary OS to Linux, increasing demand for Linux SW, but ultimately I think living off Microsoft's scraps will not end well for Linux and direct support is needed. Anti-cheat already shows that emulation without developer support has its limits.

* Somewhat relatedly, I want more developers to be exposed to open source operating systems and software with the hope that they see how having full source access to the entire stack and liberal licenses for distributing modifications benefits everyone and will extend that philosophy to their own software where possible - and games are a particular type of software where the code of most games is pretty much worthless to competitors by the time the game is released but making it available can greatly benefit users through greater potential for modification and better options for long term maintenance.

* I like being appreciated. Do I really want to financially support someone who writes me off as a statistic? Sure, game developers need to eat and I understand that that sometimes means not being able to support minority platforms, but if profit is the only thing you are concerned about then being in games development is probably not the best way to achieve that anyway. Maybe you don't care about my platform - and that's fine, we can't all care about everything - but then it's only fair that I don't care about your game.

Meanwhile I have over 500 unplayed native games in my Steam library and, even with Proton, enough native games are being released that I will most likely never catch up. I do use Proton - like vanilla Wine before it - when there is something that seems interesting enough (mostly older games that have stood the test of time) but generally I just don't feel a need to. Even if I were to run out of native games and had to resort more to Proton, I am also much more willing to pay full price or even preorder when it comes to native games.

> I don't have time to track down audio issues for some random Linux version for 0.001% of players

Then don't? If you don't think it is worth your time to fix certain issues then you can always say that and people can get a refund if that is a deal breaker. Are you not going to release Windows builds because you can't work around some weird hardware issue or third-party tool messing with your game for 0.1% of your Windows users?

One good way for dealing with support load is to enable your community to do the grunt work for you by having a public issue tracker. This works especially well for the Linux community where more people will be used to reporting bugs rather than asking for support but is even something that I would suggest for Windows-only software as well. Valve has been using GitHub for this: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux

There is never any 100% monopoly in other sectors either unless it's something government enforced where only one company is allowed to do something. What matters is that a significant amount of consumers do not have a choice of dealing with with the company in question if they want certain types of things. That is true in tech if you define the "type of thing" narrowly enough and is true nowhere if you define it broadly enough. The debate of where you draw the line is independt of the terms used.

> The worst thing that's ever happened to me from pirating games is the keygen having loud unexpected music.

You mean the best thing, right? <3 chiptunes