Great PR move.

Never heard of this game or dev and now I've seen multiple articles about it.

Never heard of the game, but I can get behind his reasoning.

Yes, but it’s aimed at developers. Regular users can’t just load a windows game up and run it.

We have Crossover, which is paid, and isn’t cheap. The silver lining is that they donate/contribute to WINE. So it seems like an ethical purchase at least.

You can run MoltenVK to convert vulkan calls to metal, and if you can stack DXVK on top of that, now with FEX to bring x86 over and the existing wine for Mac we have everything we need to run windows games badly on a Mac.

Apple already has a proton alternative. It’s called their game porting toolkit.

That's not gonna happen. Since Mac uses a different kernel, userspace and even their own proprietary graphics API, bringing Proton to Mac would take comparable effort to developing it for Linux. That's not worth it given the small amount of Apple gamers, which is self-inflicted thanks to many bad decisions Apple has made.

There's also the whole walled garden aspect. Getting away from Windows, just to lock yourself into the next closed ecosystem, is a terrible play. If Valve spent their efforts on this instead of focusing on improving Linux gaming, it would tarnish their image in many people's eyes.

Steam has been in ARM64 — on the Mac. Nice to see Linux getting in on the fun as traditional PCs transition to the architecture.

Now go the other way and bring proton to Mac so we can all give Windows the finger.

I was initially excited thinking this was a native aarch64 build. Its not, its x86 emulation. Its still a step forward though, but Asahi Linux already has Steam working right now (also using FEX with Vulcan) running on Apple M1 and M2 ARM CPUs.

Yeah for steam in aarch64. Boo for snap.

Sounds like reskinned R.E.P.O. to me

Only award for COE33 is the soundtrack!?

Yay, I guess? I mean it’s not really an app that needs performance gains.

A lot of it, I'm sure... 2025 had plenty of huge releases. Just off the top of my head, we've got the aforementioned Silksong, Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Nightreign, ARC Raiders, and Dispatch.

How much of that remaining 14% isn't Silksong?

Eh, the problem is inherent to how this particular market works. Once a game is developed, the cost to distribute it further are negligible compared to the development costs. This also means that a single game can, theoretically, satisfy the entire market. Hence, at any given time, only small percentage of games are successful.

I wonder how many are school projects that are now abandoned

I'm sure that these are gems, but they are not hidden; going by Steamdb, these games are all in the top 3% most popular games on Steam, based on the total number of reviews:

• Toem: 9,500 reviews on Steam
• Ghost of a Tale: 5,000 reviews on Steam
• Lost in Random: 5,000 reviews on Steam
• We Were Here: 31,000 reviews on Steam

Almost forgot: I don't think that I can name a truly hidden gem, but Deathbulge is pretty good and has a mere 360 reviews on Steam. Which is still more than the vast majority of indies, of course.

Toem, Ghost of a Tale, Lost in Random, We Were Here

Yeah, I think the more accurate take is that it's way easier to get a game published now. These days they die on Steam. 20 years ago they'd die before making it that far.

Anyone have hidden gems released in the last couple years they can recommend?

I'm not sure if the takeaway about it being hard to be a game developer is accurate. Because I know for a fact that there are some really low-effort games that get released on Steam (I've seen some), and I would assume that there are a lot more of such games that I have not seen. I don't know what percentage of those 19,000 games are low-effort slop, but it could be significant, and if those slop games get low engagement it's just the system working as intended.

Kind of sad to think about. Some creative soul might decide to start working on a game, only for it to slip under the radar.

To be fair, most of my Steam library consist of games from the 80s/90s, so maybe I'm contributing to the problem, whoops. 😅

The ultra cube is a very creative mod. I hope this is good for them too

Sigh

The Substructure must grow.

All I have to say to this is, yes