I feel for the Mac users in spirit: Linux users have often received the same answer ("There aren't enough Linux buyers of this game to justify the development/support costs of porting."). OTOH, Counter-Strike 2 actually has a native Linux build even without Proton, so, this particular title isn't a problem for us.
It would be weird for Valve not to support Linux, given that the Steam Deck runs it. They could of course use Proton to run it, but AFAIR (most of(?)) the previous CS versions also had native Linux support. (Not sure about Mac support in the previous releases?)
It would also be weird to me for them to not have linux ports of their engines after blogging about the performance and bug squashing benefits of doing so for previous game engines.
In any event, around this time they found a lot of optimizations porting to linux that they then back ported to the windows client. This was 10 years ago, so the zeitgeist in the company may have changed, but I've certainly taken to heart the idea that you should be cross compiling to at least one different target whenever you can to improve your engineering. The earlier you start the cheaper the cost of doing so as well. (This isn't the only company doing so at the time talking about gains of cross compilation either, and not just games)
You can still download and play CS:GO. Right click > Properties > Betas. I've used ti for playing a mod with friends that doesn't work in CS2 yet. Of course, there's less players now.
This happens all the time. I used to be able to play Rocket League natively on my Linux PC. Then Epic bought it and simply pressed delete on the Linux port.
As much as that sucks it might be possible to play. I use the Hero Launcher to play the games from Epic through Proton. IDK if anticheat might mess you up, but you might try that
Expect that you don't lose access to a game you have?
They didn't just release a new game: they literally removed the previous game people had and replaced it with a new, incompatible game.
They didn't have to do that, they could have made a new game entry and earned their new install base by... putting out something that was better than the last entry and letting the players decide?
But much easier to just remove the last entry.
It's the kind of nonsense people normally jump at developers for, but because Valve is apparently still the darling of the gaming world so people seem to be excusing it.
Apple kinda set the tone here with their depreciation of 32-bit execution modes and OpenGL, plus their general hostility towards open or cross-platform APIs. By removing support for the old way of doing things and refusing to meet in the middle with developer frameworks, you end up with a platform that benefits nobody but the license-holders. That's what happened with DirectX, an actually useful API that Valve invests millions of dollars in spurning anyways. Why would they kiss the Metal ring?
CS:GO still launches now that CS2 exists. Never mind the fact that the source code leaked, you can still install CS:GO from Steam or run a cracked copy without VAC support. Valve supported unofficial servers from the get-go, so diehard CS:GO fans on Mac can play any version they like for as long as Apple chooses to support it.
> Valve is apparently still the darling of the gaming world
Damn these alternative App Stores and their powerful competition!
This is an insane amount of noise to throw out for such a simple point...
Valve made a new game: Instead of releasing it as a new game, they abused a loophole to force said new game onto people's devices without them having any say in the matter.
In other words, a piece of software they didn't ask for is being installed, and the software they did ask for is now hidden behind workarounds.
_
Apple plays no part in any of that: trying to paint not abusing your digital distribution platform... as being equivalent kissing Apple's ass is nonsensical to the point of absurdity.
This isn't ass-kissing, this is me being a pedantic asshole so I can untangle your argument and refute the idea that people "lose access" to their game. I'm not fond of DRM when Apple or Steam does it, but the way Valve depreciated CS:GO is borderline unimpeachable.
- Everyone with auto-updating enabled got the new game installed by-default. Nobody lost access to anything but official game servers.
- The old game has support for third-party servers on every point release, leaving it perfectly playable today.
- Bonus points: A copy of the game's source code was leaked, enabling the community to unofficially support new systems if they want.
Mac users got the short end of the stick, but I find it hard to demonize Valve over it. The root of this entire complaint is that an auto-update didn't behave as it should.
Feel free to hate on whoever you want. I've heard a lot of people say that CS2 is bad on it's own merits, and that's fine too. I just don't think auto-updating to a broken build is some vast betrayal of confidence or anticonsumer row. It mostly feels like an example of how MacOS and it's users are getting left behind over petty business issues.
You're complaining about broken updates on MacOS. I'm having trouble parsing your arguement seriously in the first place; people have been warning against auto-updates on Mac for years.
Given that nobody had anything taken from them, I legitimately don't see how you could demonize Valve over this. There is no way for me to sympathize with you over this, as a Steam user or as a former Mac user.
So now you're conflating intentional breaking software by deleting it and replacing it to avoid having to fairly compete on distribution like every other new game release... with auto updates.
Pro tip: using blatant strawman arguments to troll works better if you don't go so hard in the paint defending them. The latter just makes you look incompetent.
My entire point was to break down your conflation that users would "lose access" to CS:GO. That is wrong, and you have not produced any evidence to contradict that. My "strawman" is not an argument at all; it's genuine shock that anyone who cares this much about auto-updates would use a Mac in the first place.
Normally I am on Valve's side, but I agree that them pulling CS:GO was a stupid move. Anyone else would have been torn a new one for doing that.
Even though its not as popular as the others, I just stick to CS:Source and CS:1.6. Can't beat the classics, and they have been around for so long that they aren't going to be taken away at any point.
I honestly don’t get this rationale though. Why is this different from Linux? It’s like blaming Linux users for using Linux and they should have used Windows instead if you really want to game.
How is it the same? Apple runs a closed ecosystem and has shown it doesn’t care for gaming for a long time so its user should know that by now. Linux is an open platform and the results show. SteamDeck is running on Linux and can run most Steam games. Macs still can’t. Apple users should take responsibility on this one.
I am now having a brief fantasy of a world where Apple pulls Proton into the OS as a Windows emulation layer for games and starts pushing their changes upstream just like Valve does.
I can think of many reasons why it would never happen but it sure would be nice. Not that I haven't been voting against Mac games with my wallet for years, I've had a Mac to get shit done with and a rotating set of consoles to play games on since about 2000, and very occasionally bought a point-and-click adventure for the Mac.
* Apple has billions of dollars and a hierarchy of decision-makers who could prioritize the R&D and implementation of making "gaming on Mac" a reality
* Linux is a distributed, community project without billions of dollars or top-down decision-makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
> Linux is [...] without [...] top-down decision makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
I'd say Valve is exactly that. Valve pays many developers their salary who are responsible for making almost all single player games work on Linux via proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d). Although they do push their changes upstream.
Kind of. But I wouldn't call Valve a top down decision maker for Linux. Simply a very talented contributor and influencer. And you always need to keep in mind that their work is still in the interest of supporting their proprietary platform.
No it's not. Valve is just a member of the community. It cannot for distributions to adopt anything. Valve cannot prevent kernel developers from making it difficult for them to improve gaming on Linux. Valve just does its own thing and offers up its work. They cannot force anything into Linux like Apple can with its OS.
To some degree, Valve can. It's a bit weird, but Valve basically is running its own distro on top of whatever Linux distro you're using. It's called the Steam Runtime and is quite literally just a bundle of things like specific versions of glibc. It exists as an attempt to prevent the usual versioning mess that comes with any form of binary distribution on Linux.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Steam Runtime is considered a bit of a mess on the technical end; Valve used to only test it with Ubuntu LTS, which caused plenty of issues for those on other distros or on newer versions of even Ubuntu.
IIRC Arch literally comes with a package whose sole job is to substitute certain steam runtime libraries that are known to cause conflict problems when used, otherwise you get fun X Window errors (or whatever equivalent you have for those on Wayland).
For the end consumer it isn't different. But in a pragmatic sense:
1. Apple has multiple teams of well paid engineers to solve any problem that arises. There's a lot more money in the game supporting Mac than Linux.
2. Apple has been shown to be hostile towards game development and make active decisions to make it harder to port to them, whereas Linix's most hostile issues arise from the proprietary nature of games vs. the open source nature of Linux (e.g. Package management, DRM, etc).
3. Linux makes concessions on its philosophies for games while Apple makes ultimatums. You can't ever trust that your game on Apple will work in 5 years, at least if you were developing in the 2010's. Meanwhile there are proprietary ways to deliver your game if you want to launch on Linux (not as sure about DRM but I've heard of solutions that simply haven't had mass adoption yet).
Much less, much much less. Imagine paying $4,999 USD for a device from a company with $2.8T market cap and blaming anybody except Apple for the drawbacks of your platform.
Apple's absolute top end models might go for $5,000, but then again, have you bought gaming computer components lately? I can't imagine I spent far off of $3000 for my gaming computer all things taken into consideration (besides peripherals of course.) I only have not attempted to tally up the cost because I fear it would make me sick. Without actually listing a real drawback to using the platform besides "software providers decided not to support the platform," you come off as one of those drones that mindlessly hate on Apple products only because you don't want to pay for them. And to be clear, I'm not even your supposed opposition, in that I don't even own any Apple products besides an iPhone SE (which are notoriously cheaper than flagship Android phones.) I just find the Apple hating bickering to be about as childish as the Playstation vs Xbox console argument.
And yes, I consider your comment to be childish bickering primarily because you don't have another argument besides "their product is more expensive than it's worth comparing hardware to hardware." Apple users understand that they're actually paying a premium for the software (the operating system), as well as the designed and usually fetching exterior (which to be fair does look nice, and I tend to prefer Macbook charging ports over Dell's old barrel ports.) Which, there is something to be said about an operating system that decided they don't want to run Java anymore. I'll grant that their software might have merit. Java web start apps are the bane of my enterprise existence.
You get a budget gaming machine for 1k these days, if that. The GPU almost steals your 1k budget by itself. Apple's new top end Mac Mini goes for $1300 and has a 10 core M2 Pro with a 16 core GPU, 16GB memory, and a 512GB SSD. More than enough to play Counter Strike 2 if Valve decided to support the platform. It's not comparable but not as outrageous as people say.
But again, you're still thinking in terms of money here. Where the problem isn't with how much the computer costs. It's completely irrelevant, actually. The problem for Mac users is that the software providers in question in this discussion don't want to support MacOS, which is a decision totally on them. I have no strong opinions against their decision to not support them if the user base just isn't there. There's no doubt that there are tons of MacOS users, they just might not be users that intend to game on those computers the majority of the time. But I do feel empathy for Mac gamers, as that was historically the opinion of game studios refusing to support Linux machines. And to be honest, it's still the case that Linux users are second class citizens when it comes to games that require an anticheat to run (many online FPS games fall into this category.) None of the big anticheat providers want to port their software to run on Linux.
You can play almost any game on ancient GeForce 1080 (i do) with decent fps, except Starfield and maybe some other poorly optimized titles. On windows, that is.
You can also play almost anything on SteamDeck (15W TDP max) on linux ($400 before discounts).
You can't really play 3/4 of game catalog on MacBook Pro M1Pro or newer ($2000+)
> Imagine paying $4,999 USD for a device from a company
A high spec Mac Mini is $1299 USD (10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 GB).
Anyone paying $4,999 for a Mac Studio/Pro is doing media creation for work and doesn't give a fuck about games or will have a separate console/PC for that. Those are workstations, not for gaming.
But that's the trouble: there's more than enough hardware in a Studio to game with. Saying that people who need a "media" computer don't care about games is silly. I used to run $5,000 PC's for CAD/FEA, and you better believe I ran games on it after hours. I've had high-end Mac laptops for software development work for 10 years now. I keep buying the ones with GPU's. They ALL suck for gaming. Not for lack of hardware! My $4,000 Intel MBP with a Vega 20 runs Elder Scrolls Online (NOT a demanding game) at 720p and 30 FPS. It runs BETTER if I force it to use the internal Intel "GPU". So I bought a $700 PC which runs the game at 4K, "high" settings, and an unwavering 60FPS. A friend just bought an M2 Studio. It manages to run the game at 4K, but < 30 FPS. On the fastest computer in the world, currently! I have another friend who boots Windows on a cheese grater Mac Pro to play World of Tanks. Lots of people WANT to play games on Macs, but wind up moving back to Windows.
IMO, this terrible situation is on Apple. They have the resources to fix this ecosystem, and buy a seat at the table, the same way Microsoft has, at so many tables.
Fair enough except for your example. ESO does not support M1/M2. It's running on Rosetta. Bethesda officially do not support M2 so obviously they haven't made any effort to make it run efficiently on an M2. How is that Apples fault? The hardware is there for anyone to use but Apple can not force developers to use it.
How did Windows become the de facto gaming platform? Microsoft made easier-to-use API's, and then subsidized developers to use it. I don't program against it, but it seems that Vulkan and Metal are reasonable to use. It's the second part I want Apple to do now.
Neither of those two reasons are why Windows became the de facto gaming platform.
Microsofts market share was nearly 100% in the 90s and that's how they became the de facto gaming platform. Because it was the de facto PC platform. Apple was a much smaller company and nearly went bankrupt in the 90s. Microsoft dominated for reasons unrelated to gaming and the legacy continued. Bill Gates was in court for antitrust violations. Apple focused on other niches besides gaming just to survive and avoid bankruptcy.
Mac only has 8% market share, hence Bethesda not caring about Mac. The market is just too small. Even if Apple had the worst possible graphics API, everyone would release games for Mac if it had the biggest market share.
Gaming in the 90's started out on OpenGL, which was and is cross platform. Ports for Quake were being made for things like SGI workstations, because it was relatively straightforward. Microsoft headed off further development in a cross-platform gaming environment by creating a Windows-only API, and making sure developers used it, with lots and lots of money. Windows became the de facto platform because Microsoft used their monopoly to kill off the burgeoning threat of an open ecosystem. If it hadn't done this, Macs and Linux could have been viable gaming platforms, despite their relative marketshares.
As I said the vast majority of games. For example Minecraft is not a native Windows application in any way. It just creates a window and then renders the entire contents of the window itself instead of using win32 to make an interface.
No, only a tiny minority of PC games run on the JVM. The vast majority are native and not running on any kind of VM. Even with the Unity engine the games are natively compiled.
I didn't intend to bring up the JVM. Minecraft Bedrock edition is written in C++ and renders the entire window contents and even has its own UI framework that it uses.
There's way more to it than GUI libraries. That is a native Windows application calling Windows APIs. You can't run that Windows executable on Linux without Wine/Proton.
Even a console application (no GUI) depends on operating system APIs.
> That's like saying you can't run Firefox without freetype. Requiring a dependency doesn't make you no longer native.
At this point you're just trolling.
Take notepad.exe and try to run it on Linux. It wont run because its Windows native. That's a native application. Same as 99% of games that aren't JVM based.
> How, by having a different OS? Sorry about that I guess.
> (If it had native Vulkan it wouldn't matter. The most effective strategy, the one Microsoft uses, is to buy all the game studios.)
By making their OS easy to target by game makers. There's no good excuse - Apple has access to the same graphics pipelines as everyone else. XPlat game engines have boiled it down to mostly a checkbox these days... so where's OSX? Apple has a lot of work to do before that's a reality.
> Calling Valve a game maker is a stretch;
You can't be serious, are you? Valve's titles are among the most popular games in the history of games. They may make most of their money through Steam, but to say Valve doesn't make games is ridiculous.
That wasn't even the point - Apple users will blame the actual studios/developers for not supporting OSX when the blame lies at Apple's feet.
Billions in annual profit, zero f's given about gaming on their platform. It's a choice - and one Apple users need to comprehend. Apple doesn't care.
Valve is not a normal company; there's no hierarchy and they're only capable of doing things if someone at the company decides to pay attention to it.
Do you remember what happened to TF2? It first degraded into an item trading game, then they abandoned it for years and it was full of bots. There's no reason Overwatch and Apex should've replaced it except that they stopped fighting for it.
TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
Counter-Strike is still one of the most-played games ever. CS:GO had an average of almost 1 million daily players while AAA Games like CoD Warzone hover around 200-500k.
DOTA/DOTA2 also rakes it in. They also have many very successful single-player games. Valve is a wildly successful game company - they just don't do the "yearly release" dance...
TF2 today is mostly unplayable due to bots and weirdness with their player matching game. I put a lot of hours into TF2 and the experience is almost unrecognizable today. CS:GO was, I think, completely outsourced to a third party. They still produce some game-like artifacts but primarily they're the owner and operator of the premier online games store
CS:GO is complicated - it started as a console port of CS:Source by a 3rd party developer, then was taken in-house and transformed into a full stand-alone new Counter-Strike game. So, it was indeed developed by Valve.
IDK anything about TF2 - but bots or not, 100k active daily players is nothing to sneeze at for a 16 year old game.
They are indeed the premier online game store - yes... but saying they are not a game developer is absurd. They don't release a new title every year, but when they do, it's a huge hit.
> TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
They fixed it again after people sassed them enough about it, but it was always a better game than Overwatch and there's no reason people should've been tricked into playing that.
(Though, I don't know if the people on right now are actually playing TF2 or just trading hats.)
Who else supports Metal? Oh, that's right - only Apple.
There's more to game support than just graphics API.
Apple chooses to make game support on OSX hard - and shocker... you don't get games supporting OSX. Who can we blame? Apple...
Just like Apple chooses to make Linux kernel support hard on M1/M2 and leaves it entirely up to volunteers to make it work. Who do you blame? The Kernel developers or Apple?
The Metal API is heavily documented and Apple provides a plethora of code samples in four programming languages, with literal step-by-step how-to guides on porting from OpenGL to Metal.
You can complain that they don’t support third party low-level frameworks, sure. But they definitely make it easy and inviting to support their homegrown solutions
Depends what you mean by "default". Windows ships with DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan support. Call of Duty runs on Vulkan by default, for instance.
Vulkan is notable as being new (doesn't have legacy baggage OpenGL and DirectX have), is natively cross-platform, and is often more performant than other options for modern games.
It's cross platform in that if you want, you can write implementations for other platforms. In addition to supporting multiple platforms in its current state.
The difference is that Microsoft is responsible for the DirectX API on Windows but does not have anything to do with shipping OpenGl or Vulkan for Windows.
Microsoft plays roughly the same role a Khronos (specifies the API, provide conformance test suite, provide an SDK, etc.) but when it comes to actually “shipping” DirectX, Microsoft doesn't have anything to do either, it's all on the graphic card vendor to ship DirectX drivers. As an example, for a while after its release, many people didn't have access to DX12 at all, just because their GPU didn't have DX12 drivers.
So the situation is much less different between DirectX and Vulkan than you make it sound.
qemu is dog slow, and it's barely working enough to get Windows 7 x86 to boot on a M2 (not to mention that the UTM guest tools are mostly broken, so no acceleration anywhere).
If you're judging how much sympathy people "deserve" by what they spend their own money on, you deserve even less.
Here's the most basic thing about purchases: People spend money on what they think is worth it. So the millions of Mac users decided the drawbacks of Windows/PC weren't worth the money.
I think you're missing some nuances of the conversation here. A lot of Apple buyers celebrate the fact that Apple intentionally prevents interoperability with large swathes of software. So if someone is complaining that software doesn't work on an Apple product, they don't "deserve sympathy" because they've deliberately chosen a product where that is ostensibly a selling point.
What? Who is "celebrating" that Apple prevents interoperability? Unless you're saying that buying a macbook is equivalent to celebrating all of Apple's decisions, a clearly false equivalency?
Every time the EU forces Apple to open up some of their platform (USB C, alternative app stores, etc) there's a top comment in the thread saying how the new change makes Apple platforms somehow "ickier", that they chose Apple because of the walled garden-ness that somehow makes it safer, and so on.
We are not talking here about people trying to uplift themselves or humanity around them, and get/give access to education, Internet, computing, etc. We're talking about people who dropped 2 grands to buy into an luxurious anti-freedom walled garden.
Who said anything about enemies. I just don't think someone that consciously bought into a exclusionary walled garden deserves any sympathy... because some external software doesn't work for them.
I sympathize with them but I also sympathize with Valve for being put in a position where they have to support an extremely close and opinionated platform that can change at any moment just because a trillion dollar company decides to.
Here's to hoping that with gaming on Linux gaining prominence (thanks in no small part to Wine/Proton and Steam Deck), Linux overcomes Windows as the go-to OS for gaming.
And Windows 10 can emulate the Super Nintendo. But multiple consoles are not as cheap as the Windows box you already have, more annoying to setup or stow, and don't have some little QoL addons, like freezing the game.
What you're emulating is irrelevant. What matters is which provides a better experience to you, the end user. One choice is actively being worked on, while the other (despite under-the-hood perf. improvements IIRC) seems to garner more loathing and disdain with each release.
Linux folks swearing for "Linux games" that are in reality Windows games running on top of a Windows emulation layer are the ones missing the forest from the trees.
Proton is just a new desktop application API for Linux, one specialized for gaming. While the win32 API is certainly not an open standard, it is a stable one, arguably more stable than even browser APIs, and obviously more stable than the various APIs offered by Linux.
Years ago I was optimistic that fixed shared library runtimes, such as the ones offered by Steam, would be enough to make native game development for Linux viable. But even with these, so many things simply break in places they should NEVER break, and can only be fixed by recompiling them (thanks glibc), so I no longer feel this way.
While my heart bleeds for open source, video games are fundamentally more art than function, so the expectation that the user (or the upstream maintainer, Steam) needs to be capable of recompiling them is simply unrealistic when considering the licensing & support required for this. Video games need a stable API, perhaps even more than most other types of software. A game built 10 years ago should continue to work when run today.
When considering all of this, along with the fact that Valve is the only large organization with the resources and incentive to fix this situation. The only real path forward Valve has here is to create their own custom desktop application API for Linux that goes beyond just a set of shared libraries and is fully integrated, meaning third-party game developers don't need get involved in the often messy inter-library politics the Linux community is accustomed too.
But if Valve really needs to go that far, why invent a whole new API for it? Why not just copy win32? That's the most popular API among game developers after all. In fact there is already a Linux runtime that not only supports win32, but actually treats desktop stability as a core priority: WINE. Why not just throw resources at that instead of making something new?
While I'm mostly speculating here, I suspect that this line of reasoning is what gave birth to Proton. It has also led to interesting situations, consider this: Elden Ring on release had/has a problem with micro-stuttering, this issue was patched in Proton very quickly, within the first week of release, but remains an issue on Windows to this day. This means that right now, Linux is the best platform to play Elden Ring on if you want the best performance and graphics. Much like video drivers are updated to fix bugs for individual games, Proton now fills this role as well, but with an even faster development cycle.
This highlights one of the key benefits of Proton: it scopes an entire Win32 runtime (wineprefix) to each game. A hasty hotfix for one game will not break another, each game needs to only pin the runtime that works, and no further tweaking is necessary. You simply cannot do this on Windows, Microsoft does not have this kind of flexibility.
A future where Proton outlives Windows, one where Proton expands the win32 API to include more features never supported by Windows, while I can't say it will happen, it certainly can happen, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
One thing that gets me with proton is that as you say it effectively 'crowns' win32 as the PC gaming platform, but it seems like a weird situation where MS control it and valve/codeweavers are constantly chasing them for any new/changed functionality so their sub-platform remains relevant. I think an opportunity has passed to divorce PC gaming (or perhaps "consumer real time 3D"?) from MS/windows because Valve don't want to take on all that responsibility, and no one else is interested enough to set up a consortium to pick up that gauntlet.
This is my cynical side, but I'm sure they don't mind the opportunity to get their store in front of people, both with the deck and by how closely knit steam is to providing gaming to non-windows PCs. In my view PC gaming is in a weird spot right now if you try defining "what is the platform?" Is it windows, is it steam (and all the other features it has), is it x86, how much can/should a game be 'portable' from one ecosystem or enclave of PC. There's also been issues with games like Starfield not working with the intel Arc GPUs until a few days ago that have me wondering (from a fairly naive point of view) how closely that aspect is tied to assuming nvidia/AMD are the only possibilities versus how well it was written to the abstraction layer, assuming intel were compliant.
If enough players play via Proton and want to stay that way, then the subset of the Win32 API that is well supported for Proton can itself become the standard. MS might add new APIs, but developers may choose to keep the old ones, therefore targeting the largest userbase.
Of course, MS might also start changing the behaviour of lots of APIs, deprecating them left and right, effectively trying to kill Proton. But that means they'll also kill their own backwards compatibility.
If, again, Proton becomes "popular enough", I don't see how MS can stop it short of finding some way of preventing developers from using old APIs in new applications (which would very likely be anti-competitive behaviour).
I've been a macOS user for 11 years now, but I hope that, however unlikely, Proton wins out :)
Isn't this the whole reason Valve created steam runtimes so that they could have native linux binaries with also long patch lifetimes? AFAIK they even select Ubuntu LTS releases so they can surf off upstream patching for longer.
Ubuntu's extended support even pushes that out to 10 years, and I imagine Valve could also do its own patching (or just ignore security concerns).
Nice thing w/ Valve is they allow you to use your distro's libraries or switch to the runtime, depending on how much performance you are trying to eke out of a game.
Odds are anything written a decade ago doesn't need cutting edge performance though.
I briefly touched on this but steam runtimes (aka shared library runtimes) in practice aren't as isolated as one would assume, an update to glibc is often enough to break applications targeting them. Furthermore, in practice many maintainers think little of video games and are often comfortable breaking them if it helps with the server side of things.
For evidence of this, look no further than Ubuntu, the basis of the steam runtime, dropping 32bit support and breaking all software (video games) that depend on it. Sure you can still use it for older stuff, but there is no future here.
Well. Microsoft is also dropping 32 bit support for Windows 10 in 2025. I guess that makes Proton some weird hackish abstraction layer over the continuously updated underlying linux libs.
Would be funny if Proton gets pulled into Windows releases to maintain support for legacy games as Microsoft shortens the length of their support.
Ah yeah, you're right. WOW64 appears to not be going anywhere anytime soon.
Although. I gotta say, I don't use windows much, but some folks I kind of helped out on the side were upgrading to Windows 8 and were completely unable to launch their 32 bit XP accounting software binary with every emulation flag I tried. (could just have been my inexperience on this, but wasn't finding anything in the support guides).
Oddly enough, it ran fine in Wine in virtualbox in a small ubuntu instance, so they ended up just using that in seamless mode.
So, at least from past experience that legacy compat is not 100% and I'm guessing games might be even more finicky than accounting software.
They are however (by dropping the 32bit versions of Windows) dropping 16bit support. Which still exists in 32bit Windows 10 along with NTVDM (AKA DOS emulation). So I guess it's the end of the line for MSDOS?
>But if Valve really needs to go that far, why invent a whole new API for it? Why not just copy win32?
I can think of at least two reasons:
Legal - APIs might be copyrightable in the future.
Control over changes - Not having to play ketchup every time Microsoft changes or updates an API. Windows APIs do still change and break applications they have compensated for this with application specific shims.
That being said I can't imagine what Valve would come up with. Maybe they could base something around Vulkan, Musl and Wayland.
Yes. But that's the thing - if more and more people play games on Linux (even through Wine), there will be more Linux machines around.
Developers might be more interested in developing for it if it is more than a footnote of an OS, possibly creating a positive feedback loop. Especially with companies such as Valve invested into it.
To those who might not be aware: Wine originally stood for "Wine is not an emulator", a recursive acronym that were popular in the geek culture a few decades ago. Same for KDE Desktop Environment and GNU's not Unix.
I guess this falls under "other features" but it's pretty common to emulate systems behavior via a re-implementation, or thunking calls to a copy of the original libraries, etc.
Oracle uses the verb "emulate" to describe branded zones, which function similarly, as well. I think it's semantically fine to call this emulation, it's just high-level emulation.
If Linux offer a layer of compatibility with Windows API, abd devs release games ensuring that the games run on that compatibility layer, the distinction of "but they don't release games natively for Linux" is largely irrelevant.
Linux is a better OS than Windows in mostly every way, and what held a lot of people from making the switch was the inability to run their game library there.
Nowadays, I can run the vast majority of my game library on Linux without any issues. In fact, older games are often better supported by WINE/Proton than by Windows itself. And the situation seems to only improve as time passes.
The biggest problem isn't the small market share (3% of desktop users is still a decent chunk of customers), but the lack of standards and fragmentation making good QA basically impossible.
This isn't relevant to game developers. Most game developers who nominally support linux will test on a single distro and release a single zipped or tarred binary (not even an rpm or a deb). Linux users are expected to sort out any issues they might encounter on their own distro, and linux users expect to do this as well.
So for example, I as a linux user download factorio_alpha_x64_1.1.91.tar.xz
This isn't a package made specifically for my distro. Was it tested with my distro? Almost certainly not. Do I care? No, not really. Might I have some trouble with it? Probably not, but maybe! Do factorio devs get flooded with hate mail for not packaging factorio as an RPM and testing every single release with every single long-tail distro? I think they don't. They might get a few nutjobs sending them letters but by in large the linux gaming community (as it were) has low expectations and is easily pleased with the bare minimum.
>Do factorio devs get flooded with hate mail for not packaging factorio as an RPM and testing every single release with every single long-tail distro?
Based on my experience (not game dev), Linux users are extremely polite, grateful and willing to bend over backwards (or even write patches themselves) to get things working.
This makes it even harder to tell them that you simply can't support their preferred configuration.
This is the factual reality of the matter. 300+ distros to test and you can't support them 100% of the time like you can with Windows or macOS and give a guarantee to your customers that it works on your OS.
Unfortunately, the Linux fans continue to ignore the worsening fragmentation issues.
Steam includes the Steam Runtime, a container-like environment that provides a single target for Linux game developers. In fact, it's commonly used by NixOS users to run proprietary software that wasn't built for NixOS.
Other than the Steam Runtimes there is also Flatpak as a container-like environment to target if you want a stable environment that is shared accross distros if you aren't specifically making a game that is published on Steam
Yes, but that's a very broad brush. Regardless of the distro people use either x11 or Wayland, this compositor or that compositor or no compositor, this or that driver, ....
So even if you manage to publish a deb, rpm and to the aur, QA is difficult.
The only reason Linux now sees support is because it tied in with Valve's desire for a handheld console and them wanting to rattle MS's cage a bit by showing how much better games ran on Linux. It worked; MS has devoted more effort in recent years to fixing gaming issues.
The number of Steam Decks pales in comparison to the number of Macs, which now represent 30% market share of desktops, while linux is still stuck around 3%.
Valve is more concerned with meeting games were they are, not where they hypothetically could be. In the case of Linux (more gamers on Linux than Macs, although it's close), Valve has additional reason to care because they view Linux as insurance against anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft. Clearly they don't feel the same way about Macs (makes sense, because their Windows customers could more readily switch to Linux than Macs). So if gamers are already acquiring Windows/Linux machines to play games, why should Valve waste their resources trying to bring about a hypothetical reality where gamers choose to buy Macs instead?
It's not Valve's responsibility to engage in pro-Mac activism. It would be weird if they were doing so.
> Valve has additional reason to care because they view Linux as insurance against anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft. Clearly they don't feel the same way about Macs (makes sense, because their Windows customers could more readily switch to Linux than Macs).
Agreed, and I think that's quite wise. When it comes to escaping tight-reigned dictators that can threaten your business, Apple is out of the frying pan an into the fire. Imagine if they invested heavily into macs and then Apple required all mac software to go through their store (with 30% cut of course) like they do on iOS? That would be disastrous
As I said, Linux has more importance to Valve than can be accounted for by its popularity because Valve sees Linux as a hedge against anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft.
Why? Mac users are cornered into exclusively a mobile device(MacBooks) and will more than likely purchase game consoles... or even just use remote play services(I use GeForce Now)
Windows users are already on Windows and Windows machines are much more open to dual-booting Linux... if needed.
Apple costumers get by with Apple's risible video game offerings, which still compromises mostly of waiting lounge pasttime shovelware and glorified slot machines, by buying computers from other manufacters (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Windows/Linux PCs, Steam, etc.)
Maybe of casual and gacha games. Unless iDevice users want to miss out on the highest selling [1] and highest rated [2] AAA games their only option is directing money to other companies.
The vast majority of mobile games are not really substitutes for PC games the way e.g. console games are, except in the super broad "Netflix: Our biggest competitor is video games because customers only have so much time" way.
There’s another problem with Mac gaming: even though Macs have a higher marketshare than they’ve ever had before, they aren’t owned by people who are expecting to use them for games.
Someone who is into the PC gaming scene already owns a gaming PC by now. If they own a Mac it’s probably their productivity machine.
It’s obviously an anecdote but that’s how I do things. I have a gaming PC and all it does is gaming. My Mac is for portable computing and general productivity. Even though I own a Mac and some of my games work on Mac (like Baldur’s Gate 3), I rarely if ever use that Mac for gaming.
I think it’s on Apple to put real money into changing that perception (and to make the OS a little better for gaming - for example, Windows handles window management for games better, Mac handles mice with scroll wheels terribly unless you get third party software).
Valve has supported Linux for over a decade[1], way before they made any hardware. It makes sense for them to not rely on Microsoft which have threatened their position as a gaming store before with UWP games appearing exclusively on Microsoft Store and the win32 platform potentially being killed off (which all turned out to be a flop in the end).
> The only reason Linux now sees support is because it tied in with Valve's desire for a handheld console
Valve have been improving/supporting Linux gaming for almost a decade[1].
Apple figured out that privacy is a marketable product. They don't do it because of altruism, they do it because it makes extreme amounts of money.
Likewise, Valve figured out that doing good by the customer is a marketable product. Gamer loyalty to Valve is an insurmountable fortress that no other storefront has managed to pierce. The likes of TotalBiscuit and AngryJoe galvanized the PC gaming community into one that does not tolerate anti-consumer bullshit, and anti-consumer bullshit Apple does.
> The number of Steam Decks pales in comparison to the number of Macs, which now represent 30% market share of desktops, while linux is still stuck around 3%.
Which is completely irrelevant to gamers. A substantial amount choose to have a console and no desktop/laptop machine at all[2]. Linux is trending up [3], while MacOS trending down (and in addition is installed on fewer gaming machines than Linux overall) [4].
MacOS is completely and utterly irrelevant to gaming - unless you're talking about Candy Crush and the sort. This is unlikely to change unless Apple has a radical change in direction regarding gaming; both in terms of hardware and business model. They have clearly and loudly demonstrated that they have no interest in either: you can't use GPUs with MacOS, and their fork of WINE is neither free nor upstreamed.
It helps that by and large gamers on PC are savvy enough to pirate if stores get too frisky. It's amazing valve managed to establish such a moat that they can take their 30% cut.
That's because even with their cut the price consumers pay stays reasonable most of the time (and there is the second hand market). Thanks to sales and events you won't be paying 60 bucks for a 5 year old game. But thats how it works in the Mac App Store (I guess we should be thankful its not outright subscription yet).
The reality is that developers follow Apple commercial practices on their platform (can't blame them) and it doesn't lead to an interesting competitive market. In fact I would argue that most peoples are getting priced out of the Apple market, they just didn't realise yet. It seems that their strategy is making and accommodating only luxury/premium priced products, so they are going to make a good amount of money for a bit but in the long term their technology will become irrelevant. And this is exactly what's happening with their M silicon despite what the general sentiment seems to be. Apart from lower power they are not actually that impressive in real world tasks and particularly not in gaming (optimised or not).
In fact after switching to their own silicon, Apple has mostly increased the price to access a particular performance level, and I would argue that previous Intel machines were better gaming machines at equivalent prices points. Without concerning yourself about prices one can see that in best case scenario (taking Metal benchmarks for reference and extrapolating when needed) :
M2 can be about as good as an AMD Ryzen APU destined to notebook/laptops (6800U)
M2 Pro seems to be in between a RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 and it would be a slightly slower RTX 3080 laptop.
M2 Max can be slightly faster than a RTX 3060 but slower than a RTX 4060 laptop ; it seems to be equivalent to the Radeon RX 7700S (AMD describe it as a notebook part...).
M2 Ultra is irrelevant because it doesn't provide real improvements in graphics performance.
Realistically the only way to get this low level of performance would be to buy a laptop (not too high end) or to go for pretty old or entry level desktop part.
Now if we talk about AAA games, M2 is pretty much useless, it is somewhat better than previous Intel iGPUs but that isn't saying much ; you still won't be able to run anything graphically intensive at 1080P in an enjoyable manner. M2 Pro could potentially run some of the less demanding games with a decent experience (around 60 fps stable) but it starts around 1.5K in a desktop form factor (naked, no K&M nor display) yet it perform worse than cheaper 3050Ti laptops (that have all those things !). In laptop form factor it starts at 2.4K but is generally much worse in gaming performance than a similarly priced/specced PC laptop. And it feels that talking about M2 Max in any form factor is a major waste of time because it starts at 2.4k for the naked desktop but you can buy a better performing (for games at least) desktop PC and still have money left over to buy a Macbook Air (not even the cheapest version). So unless you really need that power for a macOS only software that properly use the new arch it doesn't make any sense. Not only very few will buy but they won't even think about gaming on it. It is unsurprising, after all the M2 Max has barely more Gflops than the 550$ Xbox Series X...
Before their own silicon Apple was not particularly good at gaming (especially on the entry level) but at least if you were willing to pay you could access a decent level of performance. It wasn't very competitively priced but the premium was worth all the other benefits. For example an iMac 27 inch with a RX 5700 XT would cost you over 3K but it was worth it for the whole package (especially the display). Now even if you want to spend 3K on a mac, not only you won't get any package at all but the graphics performance will perform worse than this 3 year old iMac. And that is before talking about architectural optimisation problem and general support.
So I believe Valve sees that and decided (rightfully) that it wasn't worth their time. Previously it was just a matter of making a build that could run in the macOS GUI and it wasn't too much work because both GPU and CPU APIs could be almost identical. I'm sure there were some differences at compile time but it didn't ask for a large parallel port and a decent amount of customers could get a pretty good experience (high end Macs and eGPU users). But now they would need to maintain a parallel port that would diverge in significant ways (even if we just account for the GPU code) and on top of that even the most high-end customers would only get a performance that would be considered ok for mid-range/high-end laptop. It is just not worth it.
Considering that the 3nm A17 Pro isn't really the revolution it was touted to be ; this is probably the right move. Not only Apple hardware is becoming irrelevant to enthusiast but it seems it will not improve for a while (maybe ever) considering the A17 already has heat issues even though it isn't a whole lot faster it looks like M3 chips will run hotter and use more power without really closing the gap.
Reality is catching up to the Apple arrogance, you can buy monopoly power on a technical advantage once but eventually competition is going to come around. Now is the time and I think it is only the start. Most cross platform software that needs a significant rewrite won't get ported to Apple Silicon, it doesn't make sense considering the weak hardware.
They'll come and say : but it doesnt use a lot of power. Yeah I would be pretty mad if my slow small car would use as much gas as Porsche...
> MS has devoted more effort in recent years to fixing gaming issues.
Could've fooled me. Their first party title Halo MCC is riddled with bugs (crashes, textures not loading, etc.) and has cheaters flaunting super speed in multiplayer.
Delta Halo on Halo 2 is practically unbeatable on Legendary mode due to crashes, unless you use the original graphics. The big was reported to 343 years ago, I think back when MCC was still an Xbox exclusive, and they still haven't fixed it. And they don't give you any warning about it, you only figure it out after the game crashes halfway through the level for the 5th time and you decide to start Googling it.
