Valve has confirmed the rumours that were discussed here on SoylentNews earlier.
Today, Monday, August 21, Valve has released a new beta steam client for linux. It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. This goes hand-in-hand with an ongoing testing effort of the entire Steam catalog, in order to identify games that currently work great in this compatibility environment, and find and address issues for the ones that don't. (includes a list of 27 initial games supported for beta)
We will be enabling more titles in the near future as testing results and development efforts progress; in the meantime, enthusiast users are also able to try playing non-whitelisted games using an override switch in the Steam client. Going forward, users can vote for their favorite games to be considered for Steam Play using platform wishlisting.
To make this happen, 2 years ago, Valve started funding/supporting development efforts of Proton and DXVK (the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan.) Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they're compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now.
Also reported on GamingOnLinux.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by boltronics on Thursday August 23 2018, @03:25AM
The difference here is that lots of people (myself included) were already playing games under Wine. Now the developers get a chance to actually see the stats of how many people are doing this.
If the devs really care about their audience, and their audience has a significant percentage of people playing the Windows build under Wine, they should probably consider providing a port, or otherwise keep those stats in mind for future games they develop.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!