| Steam being 64bit is minor issue really, the problem is that the vast vast vast vast vast vast vast majority of games on both Steam and Windows/Proton and everywhere else are 32bit. 64bit being the majority of new stuff is really mainly a Linux/Mac thing. On Windows (and thus Wine and Proton) most stuff (i'm including everything here, not just popular applications) is either 32bit only or 32bit/64bit hybrid - 64bit only is very rare. Even in games where you are more likely to see 64bit, it is often something you see on big AAA games that need it - most smaller games are 32bit, even stuff released recently. As an example here are some recently released games on GOG from my account: "Corpse Party: Sweet Sachiko's Hysteric Birthday Bash", "Tsioque", "Dex" and "Pillars of Eternity". I'd list more but i do not have much free disk space to check the exe files (and my current computer is weak so i do not buy new games much), but these are games released the last 3-4 years or so (the first one was released just a couple of months ago) and they are available only in 32 bits. In terms of non-gaming software, almost everything out there on Windows is 32bits. In general if a program doesn't benefit from being 64bit (that is, need to use a lot of memory), chances are it'll be a 32bit executable. And of course these are just recent things. On games alone, just my GOG library is ~550 games of which only a tiny few provide 64bit binaries (and i expect my Steam library to be similar). On a personal note, whenever i release something on Windows, unless i have a reason for it to be 64bit, then i release it as 32bit - it will run in more systems (be it natively in older computers - note that netbooks/ultrabooks with 32bit Windows were sold until recently - or via VMs) and use less RAM (i think i read recently that there was an attempt to make something like x32 on Windows that would solve this, but i can't find it anywhere and anyway that would only work in future Windows versions whereas a 32bit program will work practically everywhere). 32bit code, at least on Windows, will be here for pretty much as long as a CPU on the 8086 lineage exists. And for as long as you want to run Windows code on non-Windows OSes, you'll also need those OSes to support 32bit code. |