Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games to Run on Linux

We are reaching another milestone with ProtonDB: we are very close to 7000 Windows games confirmed to be working out of the box with Proton on Linux. 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 (according to user reports) on a monthly basis, which is a very healthy and steady growth. Another point is the percentage of Windows 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 game out there, there’s a coin flip chance that it will work just as well on Linux. That’s pretty good, while there are still some recurring known issues in the other half of 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 VKD3D improves continuously)

Additionally, less than 20% of newly released games are rated as “borked”, which is not running at all.

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. And we know that the folks at Codeweavers (working on WINE/Proton) and other contributors are hard at work to bridge the gap day after day.

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 to user reports. Yet, it is great to observe 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 progressing, 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 a video we released for January 2021:

Stay tuned on Boiling Steam for more reports, more stats and more progress updates in the coming months.

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