CMA has revealed that they believe Proton, and by extension, Wine, are ‘imperfect substitutes’ for gaming on Windows OS.
In their official decision, the CMA had this to say on page 226 of the document:
“ Data on game performance using Proton suggests that it is an imperfect substitute for gaming on Windows, and a significant proportion of games cannot be played without issues.
Valve categorises games based on how well they run using Proton on Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming device. Data on the proportion of Steam’s top 100 games in each category showed that 16% were playable with no issues, with a further 33% playable with some tweaking required. 31% were unplayable and 20% had not been tested.
A separate community-based categorisation is also available, and this also suggested that Proton was still subject to material performance issues. Data for Steam’s top 100 games using this categorisation suggested that 19% ran perfectly, 53% ran perfectly after some tweaking, 14% ran with minor issues, 2% ran but with more substantial issues, and 12% were unplayable.
Whilst Microsoft submitted that this data demonstrates the effectiveness of Proton, in our view it is consistent with the interpretation that it is an imperfect substitute to using the Windows OS.”
As we know, CMA’s case for ‘preventing’ the Microsoft Activision deal is Microsoft’s predicted domination of cloud gaming. We also know that CMA has found that Microsoft dominates cloud gaming in terms of operating systems. This is mainly because all cloud gaming providers have to use Windows, because Windows is the dominant PC gaming OS.
These findings, while true, are not because Microsoft continues to aggressively monopolize the video game space. If we were all honest about it, we all know that Microsoft really put the work into making Windows the OS for doing anything in the 1990s, and even with their faults, they simply cared more about gaming than Apple ever did.
In contrast, while the Linux community proved game to trying to compete with Microsoft, their efforts have yielded mixed results when it comes to the gaming front.
Wine, originally called Windows is Not an Emulator, is a compatibility layer that allows programs made for Windows to run on a Linux or Mac OS. For many years, Linux enthusiasts have played with Wine to play their favorite games on Linux instead of Windows.
However, Wine remains imperfect at this function, mainly because of poor documentation of the Windows API. Microsoft continues to keep some data on how Windows works private. This has forced the Wine developer team at Codeweavers to reverse engineer and guess what they don’t know.
When Valve decided to enter the hardware business, they invested in Wine to work on their own fork of the program, called Proton. Proton has some features that are deliberately not being used in Wine, but makes it even better at running Windows programs just for Linux.
In fact, as you may know, Proton’s giant ace is the Vulkan API, rivaling Microsoft’s DirectX 12 and Apple’s Metal APIs in compatibility and efficiency. Developers using Vulkan get better compatibility and performance for games running on Linux and Proton than they do on Windows, for some builds.
With all of this taken into account, as the CMA have found out for themselves, Proton is nowhere near where it needs to be to make Linux OSes like SteamOS a viable alternative to Windows. Compatibility of many Windows based video games is still up in the air on the Steam Deck, and Linux in general. Many players expect a select number of games will never be playable outside of Windows.
Ironically, Microsoft pitched Proton to the CMA themselves to indicate that they don’t have an absolute monopoly on gaming OSes. While it is true that they didn’t force it to happen, Microsoft themselves could have addressed this part of the industry by helping with Wine development themselves.
Does that sound farfetched? In 2023, Microsoft is actually a member of the Linux Foundation. While the company has limited their work with the foundation, they have demonstrated a good faith openness to work with Linux.
Microsoft themselves have stated that their OS is no longer the core of their business. Perhaps, if they really believed that, they could take actions to reduce the dependency on Windows for many industries, such as video games. It’s clear that they could have fared better with the CMA if they had the foresight to shift their business in this manner years ago.
