We are reaching another milestone with ProtonDB: it looks like we are very close to 7000 games confirmed to be working out of the box with Proton. The charts says it all:

Proton has been receiving many updates in the past few months as well, with the introduction of the Soldier Linux runtime container and Proton Experimental on top of the regular Proton releases. We are still getting about 100 new titles working flawlessly (based on user reports) on a monthly basis, which is a very healthy and steady growth. Another point is the percentage of games working out of the box in Proton over time. The number has been close to 50% since for a long time and seems to be fairly stable.

In other words, for every Windows title out there, there’s a coin flip chance that it will work just as expected on Linux. That’s pretty good, while there are still some knows minor issues in several games coming out, typically:

• Movie files within games not playing as expected
• Multiplayer not working because of EAC or other anti-cheat technology
• Certain types of DRM that prevent games from even launching
• Performance issues
• DX12 support in certain titles (although this is getting better as VKDX12 improves continuously)

It does not look like the number of Platinum ratings on a month-by-month basis is evolving much, which means there’s still some large opportunities to tackle in terms of compatibility.

Note that when a game does not run well with vanilla Proton, there’s always a non-negligible chance that Proton GE may fare better at running it.

In reality, there’s probably much more than 7000 games that work out of the box on Steam with Proton, because the dataset is limited by the user reports. Yet it’s great to also see that there are so many contributors who try many new games every single month: it gives us a great insight at how diverse the community is, and how fast Proton is progressiving, even if it’s just a sample of the reality.

On this topic, please keep in mind we are tracking on a monthly basis what games get the most positive reports from ProtonDB: here’s the video we made about it back for January 2021: