Does the existence of Wine compatibility layer discourages the creation of native Linux games?

The most honest answer is that Linux distros are fragmented to fuck so nobody can vorher. Proton is the best that could’ve happened to Linux gaming.

As a gamedev I never saw this as a big issue. Just run Debian Oldstable on your build server, link whatever you can statically, and you are good.

(However, I am talking on a purely theoretical level here - we only released one Linux game, and that was before I joined the company. I will explain our actual reasons in a separate post.)

link whatever you can statically

That would kinda mean you deliver every single dependency yourself, which kinda defeats the purpose of shared dependencies, which in turn proves my point that linux distros are fragmented to fuck. It also means you have to put actual effort into building your game for a userbase that was less than 1% before the steam deck came around.

So my point still stands - proton is the best thing that could’ve happened to linux gaming because it lets windows games run on linux with the dev putting only minimal effort - or even no effort - into making the game run on linux with near native performance. Hell, at times even with better performance.

It’s the Windows way. There applications typically also ship all dependencies. Either statically linked, or as a DLL files in their install folder.

It’s not a good solution, but for games that’s imho OK.

Create a post

From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it’s gaming you can probably discuss it here!

Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.

See also Gaming’s sister community Tabletop Gaming.


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

  • 1 user online
  • 62 users / day
  • 199 users / week
  • 431 users / month
  • 1.65K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.94K Posts
  • 46.1K Comments
  • Modlog