Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far

Apart from the new games that Proton brings us on a regular basis, it’s also important to look as a whole how Proton has changed the landscape over time. While the numbers are always pretty much available on the front page of ProtonDB, I take a slightly different look at it to build a graph of “Platinum” games (i.e. working out of the box without any tricks) to Linux using Proton. And you get this: (click to enlarge)

A few take-aways from this graph:

• Proton has done far more for Linux gaming than any porting company out there, by bringing about 6000 games to us in less than 2 years.
• There’s about 100 games every month that get a Platinum rating according to ProtonDB. (because of the recent changes on ProtonDB rating, this is now more accurate than it was before).
• Proton has become better over time: the percentage of games getting a Platinum rating is steadily increasing over time as well – it used to be about 40% of all unique games reported, and now we are closer to 50%. This is cumulative, so the range will vary month by month but the trend is very clear.

This does not even take in account games that are playable with minor modifications (adding a launcher flag, changing the name of an .exe in a directory, etc…) so the real number of games you can actually enjoy with Proton is way higher than that. But “Platinum” sets the bar high and we ought to judge Proton on its promise: making Windows games work on Linux with just one click.

So far, it’s been an overwhelming success.

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