On the day of Steam Play hitting the big one year anniversary (August 21st), it seems another milestone has been reached in terms of compatibility.

According to ProtonDB, the handy unofficial tracking website, over six thousand games are now working. At time of writing, exactly 6,023 "games work" (quote from their home page) against the 9,134 total of games that currently have user reports to see if they run or not. That's quite an impressive number!

It's worth noting though, that with little over nine thousand games currently reported, Steam does host well over thirty thousand so there's a huge amount that hasn't yet been tested.

Since it's not explained on the ProtonDB website, I reached out to the owner of ProtonDB to explain how they get that "games work" number. They said it "includes all games with at least one gold rating or higher".

How about a question for you to answer in the comments: What does Steam Play mean to you? I'll start.

To me, it's many things. For starters, I do have quite a number of games not available on Linux, left over from purchases before I decided Linux was what I wanted to stick with as my main platform on PC. Some of them are old favourites too so having easy access to them now is a really nice bonus. On top of that, it means also having the chance to play thousands of games not released on Linux over the last few years if I wanted to.

For some additional fun reading: check out this blog post about a Wine bug from the lead Proton Quality Assurance Engineer at CodeWeavers, the company Valve teamed up with to create Proton. Great to see even more behind the scenes info like this.

Another point I want to make, is how Proton can keep older Windows games alive and kicking too and there's people doing just that. Not Linux gaming related but interesting nonetheless.