Steam Top 50 Games: 72% Work on Linux in Sept. 2021

This is an update on the Steam Top 50 current situation, since we checked back in March how things were at the top of the charts – it used to be 70% of games working out of the box. Well, we took a look again very recently at the Steam top 50 games on Steam with the highest number of concurrent players over the past 2 weeks – you won’t see a major difference yet, but while the Steam top 50 games have changed a little bit, the overall Linux compatibility has not got worse, and may have slightly improved.

And here are the results below. The last column indicates whether you can play it on Linux even if it has no native Linux version.

So what did we get among the Top 50 games on Steam?

• 36 games overall working well on Linux out of 50: 72%.
• Among these 34, 19 have native clients (52.8%), and 17 (47.2%) run well thanks to Proton.
• An extra 4 games kind of work on Proton but not perfectly.
• 10 games are borked (20%) in one way or another.

(Note: ARMA3 is considered as ‘working’ even though BattleEye prevents you from joining official servers. It it still, however, possible to host your own multiplayer sessions with friends for Co-op).

Among the 10 games that are considered borked:

• Most of them do not work because of EAC (8)
• 2 of them because of another DRM/anti-cheat system

Now all these numbers were all nice and cool 6 months ago, but nowadays they take another meaning as Valve is preparing to unleash the Steam Deck over the world by December 2021. And they have committed to bringing all Steam titles to the Steam Deck running SteamOS, while this goal may not be reached on time.

So how does it look like for the most popular games?

Well, if they finally crack the issue that EAC (and other anti-cheat solutions), they will be getting really close to 100% compatibility among that Steam Top 50 list. The developer or Rust has already confirmed that on his devkit EAC was working as expected on the Steam Deck with SteamOS – while it will apparently require some modifications from the devs themselves to make it work (not as seamless as Proton itself).

Mac is, in the meantime, still stuck at ONLY 21 games out of the Steam Top 50 games working… 42%! Despite the introduction of MoltenVK quite a while ago now, there’s no sign that this is bringing more games running on Mac at the end of the day (as they don’t have anything remotely like Proton yet).

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Let’s watch how EAC support evolves in the coming months as this would bring a major jump in Linux support.