Originally posted by mrg666
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Wine/Proton are not without their quirks.
There is still on going problem.
Note you said game developer tests with "wine or proton they are done." Problem here is the reverse as well. Wine when programs report features that need adding then they are put in the issue list to be added to wine. Wine does not attempt to implement all of Windows API/ABI.
There was a recent game were everyone was getting upset because developer blocked the beta from working on wine. Developer did not get by doing that they blocked wine using people running the program and reporting to wine that the program was using different sections of the windows API some what wine/proton has not implemented yet.
Competition gaming wine at times can be a nightmare. Because developer tested on X version of wine and it performed fairly but on newer Y version of wine with a few more functions implemented game goes down unexpected code path resulting in wine user getting unfair advantage.
Steam runtime/flathub runtime solutions do have their places for particular games over wine/proton due to being a more set in time runtime.
Wine/proton has helped to close the gap you are right. But wine/proton is a double sided sword for game developers.
Wine/proton advantages
1) Can make porting simpler because you don't have to port. Of course some games the game engine selected from the start of development already works natively on Linux so there is not a porting cost.
Wine/Proton disadvantages.
1) can also be cause of wine players getting unfair advantages over other players of the game.
2) can require higher memory and cpu due to wine/proton overhead.
3) can cause wine player to have unfair disadvantage.
4) updates of wine/proton can randomly change all these disadvantages.
5) can at time cause program to report confusing bug reports as in a bug report generated from program running under wine crashing appear to be a windows issue so causing developers to waste a lot of time.
6) wine/proton as solution to supporting mac/linux does not give you extra release announcements for marketing. New release sections of steam/gog... yes the Windows release gets a new release entry the mac release gets a new release entry the Linux release gets a new release entry. So windows only equals 1 appearance in the new release section staged windows, mac and Linux releases gets you 3 appearances in the new release section.
Yes 1 to 5 of Wine/Proton disadvantages can happen to a game developer who does not bother releasing on Linux anyhow. Number 5 of the disadvantages of wine/proton is a good one kind of kicked game developers were it hurts by deciding not to support wine/proton.
Number 6 is reduced marketing. Reduced views on those looking at new games.
mrg666 game consumer and game developer there is different math here. If it simple to port to steam runtime/linux native that gives you extra shot for a user looking though new games to buy the game. port to mac OS gives extra shot for user looking though new games to buy the game. This also explains why you see windows release then a few months latter mac release few months latter linux release. Yes later mac/linux releases cause the game to show up again in the new release list on gog and steam to the windows users so getting more window users sales. Not doing Linux/Mac releases results in less windows copies of a game sold all due to how new releases on steam and gog work This is why lot of cases it is worth at least 1 release of mac and linux each of game not for Linux users sales but for windows users sales.
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