I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable.

I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.

If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.

I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux.

When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place.

The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2].

[1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine.

[2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.

That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed

Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a really strong adhesive.

It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.

... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.

Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one day, they announced they would not be making a Linux version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic exclusive for a year.

Is it fair to blame the developers or blame Epic?

Personally I think at the very least the developers deserve equal blame for accepting the bag of money from Epic.

Money is a strong motivator but the Phoenix Point devs chose to break promises from crowdfunding to accept it. I think that reflects worse on them than it does Epic personally.

I feel ya, I dropped it so hard I even forgot the game until reading your post.

> Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version)

Reminder: Valve was forced to double-down on SteamOS/Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.

Yes, but they have been owning that decision ever since. If that ever changes, I will reconsider. Until then they have me as a customer.