Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the feeling people hit a bad game or two and stopped checking, so I just want to say native ports actually work fine in my experience, both before and after Proton's birth. Terraria, Garry's Mod, Valve's own titles, and Starbound should all work fine to name a few. I fear we'll get fewer proper native ports because of Proton, so it's hard for me to get excited about it. Especially with how it seems to be on by…
Looking over the Linux ecosystem, I would say that Linux itself has far more blame for the lack of native ports than the developers do. Developing for Linux is complicated, requires constant intervention, has frequent compatibility gotchas, has little "best practices" established, among other issues. Games are complicated things - name one native Linux port that works just fine on Fedora 37 when it was built for Ubun…
That really depends on what you mean by "built for Ubuntu 16.04". If you mean compiled on Ubuntu 16.04 with the default toolchain and just the resulting binary dumped on Steam then sure, that might not work today (but even then, the Steam runtime might be old enough). If you mean released when Ubuntu 16.04 but using best practices (bundle what you use except base system libs, statically link what you can including the C++ stdlib, don't export symbols you don't need) then I can go find many such games.
> For an example of this, read Mike Rose about the game Defenders. Linux was 0.8% of sales, but over 50% of technical complaints.
Complaints or bug reports? Because the culture about reporting bugs is very different between Linux and Windows. Personally I prefer people telling me about problems with my software. And if your problem is that this creates too much work to track the bugs then do what valve did: Create a public community-curated bug tracker.
> Whereas, if they dumped it for a Proton build, the onus is no longer on them for a working Linux build or for compatibility issues on Linux - its way easier to just say YMMV.
And if it does break then the Linux players are left without recourse unless the game is big enough that Valve makes it a priority. As a user I am going to keep rewarding those developers that at least pretend that they will give a shit if their update breaks the game for me.
> Blaming developers for the lack of native games is like the pot calling the kettle black. Until Linux becomes a decent platform to build for, developers aren't interested in rewriting major parts of their games every time the Linux community has a new idea.
There were many native ports during the Steam Machine gold rush. And many ports being done by a single person in not too much time. I remain unconvinced that the lack of ports is really about technical issues (even if I agree that there is room for improvement) but rather about lack of business interest due to the tiny market share. Don't tell me that you can squeeze your port into the limited hardware and arbitrary restrictions of a handheld console but can't manage to wrangle library dependencies. It's about incentives, not the size of the problems.