Market share and yes, Proton/WINE ultimately lessens the need for a native Linux port.
In a fair number of cases, even when there is a native Linux port, Proton/WINE has worked better than the native game.
If Linux gets to 5-10% of the market, we’ll probably see them come back for platform specific optimization reasons. However, without a larger market share and with the translation being so good these days, there’s not a lot of need.
On Steam store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/, all Linux operating systems combined have around ~2% users, compared to the MacOSX ~1.4%. This is only a recent trend, as for the longest run Mac had more Steam users than before. And building a native Mac game was more straight forward than on Linux.
Nowadays its completely different than before, thanks to Proton integrated into Steam. This means even though there is a higher percentage of Linux players on Steam, there is less reason to make native Linux games. That has some advantages: Windows binary through Proton has feature parity without the devs needing to understand the underlying Linux system and libraries, less work for the developers means higher probability of supporting Linux for longer time, thanks to Proton and the auto selection of Proton version for each game its also less worry for the end user. It does not matter what system libraries you have installed or what operating system you are using.
It would be nice to have, but in reality there is no real need for native Linux games from developers or for the end user / player.
It’s not about compiling, it’s about testing and support. Each officially supported version needs to be tested - which means having yet another set of test systems sitting around - and supported by the support team. And not only is Linux a splintered market in its own right, making testing and support a significant operation, but there isn’t the same kind of single-point OS support that you get from Microsoft and Apple.
It's more convenient to package things for wine than it is to support every flavour of linux. Being a cross-platform library for games is the one thing the windows API is useful for.
As others have said, tiny market, but also that it often requires more development for the Linux port to get going, and even more development to actually make it run well. Like for instance, Civilization series usually release with Linux and Mac ports, but those are done by a third-party company which I imagine does add additional costs, and those suck regardless.
Not like it’s a bad thing necessarily, the vast majority of native Linux ports I’ve tried were either severely out of date, had significant performance issues, crashed a lot or had some quirks that would make it not worth playing anyway. It’s probably just easier if developers focused on proton compatibility instead.
This absolutely happens. Team Fortress 2 Classic dropped Linux support outright a few years ago in favor of Proton support since it’s easier on the devs to do, and even as an avid Linux user I don’t blame them.
yea dependencies seem like a real issue here, I don’t think Linux supports side-by-side versions like Windows does, Windows will just install every version of DirectX and libraries like that
A few devs who did have commented that Linux users are like <1% of players but most of the crash reports or things like that. That was before the Steam Deck blew up though, so now you might have more Linux players, but those mostly use Proton, so why do you need a native Linux version.
I think it’s still nice to have just so that way if for some reason Proton suddenly disappears alongside Wine (alongside all their forks and other related things) in some catastrophically low odds event you can still play the game or use the program.
This was true, but a big part of that reason (as followed up on by some other devs) is that Linux users are usually tech-savvy, and frequently work on software. They contribute more bug reports because they know how to report a bug. You’ll have more bug reports, but not necessarily because there’s more bugs (though that too), and as a bonus the users reporting them will probably be able to help you fix those bugs a lot better than the average Windows user.
Linux is such a tiny slice of the market compared to Windows, it doesn’t make financial sense for dev studios to spend any of their budget in it, because they just won’t sell enough copies to make it worth their while.
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