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Steam Deck compatibility developers are now tackling non-Steam games
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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The way Proton works is really fascinating, and also requires a ton of effort from Valve. Recently found out most games are "unsupported" because they require proprietary Windows Media Foundation libraries that can't be redistributed on the Deck - so Valve actually modifies the source game assets to no longer depend on the proprietary libraries.
These games often run flawlessly with Proton GE, a community version which includes the proprietary libraries (but must be installed via Desktop mode, thankfully there is an app on the Discover store that does this automatically)
I'm glad to hear that the main author of Proton-GE is joining forces with the various non-Steam Linux game launchers to make game compatibility even more seamless for the wider Linux user base in general!
I was also kind of surprised when looking under the hood of proton that a lot of the fixes for games are pretty simple and often the same fix over and over again. Also, it's just basically running winetricks on the prefix to install things like vcrun2022 (Visual C++ runtime) and dotnet48 (.NET runtime). It's pretty simple stuff, really, but priceless when considering that no manual tinkering is required by the average user who would give up as soon as a game doesn't launch once.
Oh, also I should point out that if you want proton to run non-steam games but for it to run protontricks to fix any compatibility issues, just make sure that there's a text file called steam_appid.txt in the same directory as the game executable. The file should contain only the game's app id which you can find on https://steamdb.info/
How come Valve can’t distribute these libraries but Proton-GE can?
Valve is making money on Proton (if indirectly), so they would very quickly get sued for it. It's not that the copyright owners would want to stop them from distributing the library - just that they'd want a cut of Valve's massive revenues. A community project, on the other hand, isn't likely to be able to provide any revenue. So since it's just redistributing runtimes that are already available for free and the only likely result is the project getting taken down, it's not really worth doing.
There are licenses that allow distribution for free for personal use, but don't allow distribution without a contract if it's connected to you selling content in any way.
Ah ok, this makes sense.
Everyone else responding here is essentially making the point that Proton-GE is piracy which I didn't think would be the case.
One of them has a lot of money to be sued for patent infringement. There's no money to extract from a random guy releasing free stuff on GitHub.
It's not worth going after individuals, and I'm sure codec companies secretly loves it when their format is super popular by end users even if unlicensed (MP3, MPEG 4, HEVC), because more companies want to implement it and those have to pony up the big bucks. If they started going after end users, open formats would very quickly rise and dominate, they don't want that.
Might be a licensing thing? So you're practically pirating those libraries?
That's my best guess.
I'm not an expert so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that Valve is a big company with a lot of eyes on them. If they distribute proprietary software, they could get in hot water. Proton GE however is basically just a guy, so the risk of Microsoft actually caring, let alone taking action, is much smaller.
I had no idea. The people working on Proton are wicked smart.