Chicken and Egg. Linux is barely above 2%. When it breaks 10-20% market share, I expect companies will start making native ports more common.
The fact that proton/dxvk/vulkan/wine let’s things just work with little to no changes is already pretty incredible.
Chicken egg problem is exactly why incentivizing (which is not the same as mandating) would make sense.
True, but even if Steam were to offer a x% lower cut on sales for Linux users if the developer makes a Linux-native build, it’d still not entice many to build and maintain a native port if they are only saving x% off a tiny y% of users. Other poster’s point being that incentives like this would actually become enticing to companies when Linux market share (Proton users) increases.
Doubtful Steam is gonna offer a share cut on all sales when it runs on Proton for the 2% of userbase using Linux, and from that only a minority would care whether or not it’s native anyway.
The benefit of Steam is backwards compatibility. The moment you force native porting you lose your greatest benefit. Since you anyway have to build backwards compatibility with Windows you gain nothing by incentivizing native Linux and the developers gain nothing from being incentivized to build native because their games will work through Proton.
There’s no reason for Valve to incentivize native builds. It’s the devs that need to have an incentive to develop natively for Linux. And with the market share being what it is there’s no incentive for the devs either.
I see you don’t know about Steam Linux Runtimes which are backwards and forwards compatible. 1.0 (“scout”) is based on Ubuntu 12.04, so already 12 years of binary compatibility.
I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about OS backwards compatibility, it’s user library backwards compatibility. Imagine if proton didn’t exist and you have 15 years of Steam library that has expanded on a yearly basis. You now buy the Steam Deck to play your library. What games can you play? I guarantee you couldn’t play 99% of your library because less than 1% of all games on Steam have been made natively for Linux. If you can’t play 99% of your library what’s the point of owning the deck? This is why Valve is pouring money into Proton, because Proton is the tool that gives users backwards compatibility for their library. Without proton the Steam Deck would be an utter failure.
It’s also why they don’t need to incentivize native builds, because they already solved that problem on their own with Proton. Why put effort into having developers develop native builds when you could just put that effort into Proton and essentially get the same result (and extra benefits) without hoping the developers do something they didn’t want to do in the first place?
Proton is so good that devs have actually gotten better performance by dropping their native Linux build and just running a proton-emulated version in Linux 😀
It doesn’t really matter though, because Wine is mature enough that it’s not a hacky diy fix, it’s a viable solution. None of the games I play run any worse on Linux than they did on Windows, and some run better. The vast majority of people don’t care whether it’s native or not, they just want it to work.
