Just yesterday Steam launched the first public iteration of it’s new feature: Steam Play. Steam Play utilizes a modified version of WINE called Proton, with bundled functionality from the Vulkan API and the DXVK project. It currently only officially supports a small number of games, but will be expanding this list in the near future.

Steam is also trying to support the adoption of this feature among developers by sending them statistics from user wishlists. Currently, if you want to “vote” your support for a particular Windows game on Linux, you’ll need to set SteamOS/Linux as your only preferred platform in your Steam settings. Once done, any Windows-only games you have on your wishlist will be used to send priority data to the respective game developer letting them know what the demand is for their game on Linux.

This is admittedly not the most perfect solution to capturing the full interest in bringing games to the Linux platform. For example, once you select that you’re preferred platform is SteamOS/Linux, you’ll have to work a bit harder to actually see the Windows-only games you want to add to your wishlist. This also doesn’t account for users who (very commonly) have settled for dual booting Windows. If you already own a Windows-only game, there isn’t currently a way to cast your “vote” for making it Linux compatible, presumably because the developer and by extension Steam have already made their money off of you for that title.

Another concern others have is with how this will affect the number of Linux-native games. Many are arguing that this will have a negative impact on native Linux ports as developers are now more likely to develop for Windows first, and simply ensure compatibility with Steam Play. I would completely agree in the short term, but I believe it’s likely still a net-positive in the long term. Even if developers stop making native Linux ports in favor of Steam Play, the Vulkan translation is so efficient that most games only lose a small amount of performance vs. the native game. This is more than acceptable for most people, and I foresee many at least trying Linux for this reason, if not completely switching over from Windows. As it stands, there is a significant population of people who are either interested in or already using Linux, but that still keep an installation of Windows handy for gaming and other vendor-locked software. If these users start gaming increasingly on Linux, it will eventually become a first-tier platform which in turn will incentivize developers to create native Linux versions.

All things considered this is a huge leap forward for Linux gaming. If you haven’t tried this feature out you can find out more directly from Steam here, and be on the lookout for more discussion of this as well as potential benchmarking of native-Windows performance vs. Steam Play games on Linux from me in the future.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you tried it out? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.