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A comment on Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks... by johnnyanmac on Monday September 21, 2020 @02:17PM (#24546634)
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.
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Re:Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks... by gpderetta on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @05:32AM (#24552580)
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.

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Re:Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks... by sangnoir on Monday September 21, 2020 @03:09PM (#24547192)
That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed
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Re:Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks... by epicide on Monday September 21, 2020 @05:42PM (#24548794)
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.

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Re:Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks... by ntauthority on Monday September 21, 2020 @04:26PM (#24548061)
... 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.
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