[tombert]

That's fair, I guess I thought you meant suing out of existence.

It's tough to say. Annoying Linux people like me tend to have horse-blinders on towards the rest of the world (hence the constant meme of the "Year of the Linux Desktop"), so it's tough for me to speculate with any kind of objectivity.

That said, Steam Decks seem to be selling pretty well, and people don't seem to mind the SteamOS part of it. I think that there's a chance that Linux will be a permanent fixture for Valve now. I don't think they're going to overtake Microsoft, but I think that "Steam Deck" is a viable enough of a target platform for game studios to develop against that it's here to stay.

[ThatPlayer]

> Steam Decks seem to be selling pretty well, and people don't seem to mind the SteamOS part of it.

I think part of that is because of its form factor already limiting the device. Like how Android and iOS are fine on a phone or tablet, but I doubt most people would want it on a desktop computer.

Not talking about the Linux part, but the real test with the Deck is whether or not it'll stay a target platform with its low performance and Valve not releasing a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve's Steam Deck verified program already checks performance on games and newer games like Horizon Forbidden West and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are failing.

[tombert]

I think the Deck might occupy a similar spot as the Nintendo Switch, in that it's not the most powerful console out there, but it's portable and nice, and it's a good enough target.

I think especially for indie games, which are typically less demanding than the big new AAA shoot-at-stuff games, the Steam Deck might be an "unofficial standard" for quite awhile.

Though I don't work in the games industry, so I'm talking out of my ass. Again, I'm an annoying Linux person so take what I say with a grain of salt.

[ThatPlayer]

I don't disagree about its spot, but I think the "unofficial standard" will still be the Switch because it has sold 150 million units. Valve haven't released sales numbers on the Deck.

Like you say, indie games are less demanding, so even the Deck can be overkill. I remember the Vita being the indie target before the Switch. So many good indie games got ports to the Vita.

[tombert]

I think the Deck has the advantage simply because it’s that much easier to develop on and for a PC than a console. At least I would think so, you would have access to more tools and libraries and debuggers than you would with a dedicated console.

Since the Steam Deck is still fundamentally “just a PC” [1], it has the advantage not really requiring specific “ports” of the games? At least that’s how I think of it, again I don’t work in the games industry.

Of course making stuff “Deck Compatible” might require some specific work to make sure stuff can run on it at a playable framerate, so it’s not completely free, but it does get the advantage of inheriting pretty much every last-gen PC game automatically.

[1] in the sense that it’s running a fairly standard Linux kernel on x64 hardware, with typical desktop Linux features available.

[pjmlp]

So far, they are targeting Windows and let Valve do the needful, instead of actually targeting SteamOS.

[tombert]

Are you saying that Microsoft might make some change to their API that would be difficult or impossible for Proton to replicate? Otherwise I don't see the issue with targeting Windows and letting Proton handle the compatibility.

[pjmlp]

I am saying Proton represents Valve's failure to make SteamOS attractive to game developers, many of which are already targeting existing Linux APIs via Android NDK.

Also note that PlayStation makes use of FreeBSD, yet another UNIX based system, even though they use their own proprietary 3D API.

What Microsoft might do, there are legal and technical options they can take, remains to be seen what.

[tombert]

> I am saying Proton represents Valve's failure to make SteamOS attractive to game developers

Sure, but I also think it was a matter of getting a huge library of games available on the Steam Deck immediately. Instead of waiting for every GameCo to port their game over to SteamOS, which may or may not happen no matter what (the console world is full of entropy from what I can tell), they can get like 90% of every single game on Steam available on the Steam Deck right away. I don't know exact numbers, but the Steam Deck might have the largest technically-compatible library of games out of any portable console at this point, although a lot probably aren't well optimized for it.

But of course, this leads to Proton also being a crutch; if you know that Proton is going to do a decent enough job running your game on Linux, there becomes little incentive to spend extra time and money getting a native Linux port on there.

It's tough to say. IANAL, but I feel like if Microsoft were going to do anything about the API emulation scene, they probably would have done something about Wine in the last thirty years. I think they're way more likely to do something funky with DirectX that is difficult or impossible to properly translate into a Vulkan shader, thus breaking compatibility with newer games.