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Comment by Yuioup | Hacker News Reader

That is exactly why I have been saying for quite some time now that Proton has killed native Linux games. Developers would be crazy to publish a native Linux game right now. Sure middleware like Godot helps but even then it's still probably not worth it.

Witb Proton you can publish a game and deny all reponsibily for Linux support. “Sorry we don't support Linux but we hear it runs great on Proton!”

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It wouldn't be unreasonable to officially target Proton support. Hell, I'd like that almost as much as native support. And we can give back to a community that is bringing a massive catalog of Windows software to Linux by sending our patches to the compatibility layer instead of just our proprietary source tree.

I think that runs into issues with anti-cheat though. Neither the very popular Easy Anti Cheat or even Valve's own Valve Anti Cheat work through Proton. While Linux native versions of both work fine.

I'm unsure how I feel about classifying an entire game engine as middleware. For most engines (Godot included!) building your code for a different platform is as easy as changing your target in a dropdown menu.

I'm also deeply curious as to exactly how many indie game developers are writing code that interfaces directly with these low level systems and graphics APIs. In my experience, building cross platform games (I've shipped from Unity, Unreal, Godot, and XNA/MonoGame) is trivial and the framework handles 100% of the complexity of porting. From the sounds of this comment thread, everybody is writing their game in raw shader language and then having to port that to Vulkan or OpenGL.

I mean, you could deny Linux support without Proton too. I think that's a separate issue.

Now, supporting Linux via Proton, that's where Proton can kill native Linux builds. But I'm not sure how common that is, or will be.

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