AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

From a performance and technical perspective this is incredible. Well done!

It will never happen, but my dream is for the Asahi devs, Valve, and Apple to all get together to build out a cross-platform Proton to emulate and play games built for Windows on both x86 and ARM hardware running Linux.

A Steam Deck with the performance and power efficiency of an M-series ARM chip and the entire library of games that run on Proton is just...dreamy.

A lot of stuff like this shows up, they also have a fork of waydroid and box64. I think a lot of them are projects and a lot of them are just devs with a lot of agency who share the dream

Steam Deck was made possible by their ongoing efforts to enable the play of most of their games catalog on any hardware platform that is computationally capable of running them, regardless of OS or architecture.

The end game for Valve isn't Steam Deck 2 or 3 (which is statistically impossible for Valve to produce), but for Steam to be on everything.

Steam Deck was made possible by the plethora of the Windows games developer market and Proton.

Most of the studios that own those games, and target POSIX like OSes on mobile phones and game consoles, are yet to bother with GNU/Linux versions for SteamOS.

Wine and DXVK are already running on Android and they play Windows games with the rendering and computational complexity of Fallout 4 at playable framerates on many of the latest smartphone SoCs. It's still WIP, but it's already gone beyond proof of concept, people are using them. Valve don't need the developers to be on-board in order to run their games on anything else, that's why Proton exists.

What Valve want is the dissolution between platform/architecture and store. By my eye, it's the driving force of their efforts, more so than them selling hardware or being the open source good guys. Not to undervalue their work in helping make Linux a first class citizen for gaming, but the core of their business model is getting people to engage with their store, full stop, and being able to sell their games on Android (and elsewhere) would massively extend their reach.

This may go both ways too, there's also been indications that Valve have been tinkering with Waydroid, meaning Steam could also become a store for Android-native games.

It looks more like how to avoid paying Windows licenses for the SteamDeck to me.

That's a small part of it, I think. They've almost certainly spent a lot more on pouring time and effort into Linux than they ever would have saved on license fees. It seems like Valve doesn't want to be beholden to Microsoft in any way. They support Windows because that's where the users and the games are, but they don't want Microsoft to be able to rug-pull them either.

Except that they are, to the extent they depend on Microsoft technologies for the games that run on Proton.

As far as I am aware, neither Valve nor the independent Wine/Proton developers are bound by any licensing agreements with Microsoft. They are clean-room implementing the same technologies, but they are not beholden to Microsoft in any legal way. Of course, drastic changes in laws or policy regimes could alter this dynamic, but those are out-of-context risks.

In order for Microsoft to rug-pull the technology (which is quite different from rug-pulling the business model), they'd have to break compatibility on Windows itself. Video games remain a major reason for home users to run Windows. Making ABI-breaking changes to Win32 or DirectX is just not very likely to happen. And if it did happen, it would be a boon to Valve and not a harm.

The biggest risk (and this would be a classic Microsoft move, to be fair) I can foresee is aggressive API changes that make it hard for Valve/Wine/Proton to keep up but also make it hard for game developers not to. I'm not exactly sure what this would look like, and a lot of the core technologies are pretty stable by now, but it's a possibility. It's not, however, going to harm anything that already exists.