CMA Finds That Proton Is An Imperfect Substitute For Windows Gaming

gameranx.com:

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