Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
> Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
MS now has a truly huge library, and Valve extracting a portion of every sale on Steam isn't something that's likely to make them happy. They now have so many games that they can use DRM to force users into their own ecosystem (i.e. Windows 11/XBox) to play them.
You could say, correctly, that MS's previous storefronts have not been a great success, but with such a huge catalogue they can just pull the users wherever they want them. There's no incentive for them to allow a competitor to run their games.
Proton is only a solution for as long as MS allows it, and I don't see any incentive for them to do so at this point.
Maybe things move slowly and the Steam Deck itself can still deliver these titles before this happens, but the Valve "ecosystem" as such seems to have really poor prospects.
Can is a bit abstract. I've found it works really poorly in the browser ( just getting to the correct page that actually shows you the list of games available is a pain and requires multiple hops).
For what it's worth, I used xcloud for the first time on iOS this morning, where it runs entirely in the browser. It actually wasn't bad! I had to close out the browser entirely and reopen it to fix issues with the streaming, but once I did that it was much smoother than I anticipated, and jumping into a game was quick.
It was absolutely unplayable without a controller, mind you, but it worked.
