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Source: GamingOnLinux

Unity, one of the largest game engine platforms in the industry, has just announced during a GDC 2026 presentation that it will be enhancing the engine's support of the Linux platform, including specific support for Steam Deck and, in the future, Steam Machine as well.

Thanks to GamingOnLinux for scouring the above livestream to get the relevant information (from 40:11), as shown below:

One thing I can talk about now is that we're bringing official Steam support into Unity. Now, I know you'll say "But I already ship games to Steam" and that's true. Thousands of developers have had success on Steam with Unity. The thing is, prior to Platform Toolkit, we've never actually officially supported Steam in the past. It's always been up to developers to integrate Steamworks themselves, and publish and support their titles on that platform historically.

And on Steam Deck, many of you have been finding success with Proton. But I think we can do better with a native solution. So, as I mentioned before our strength is highly performant native runtimes. So moving forward we'll provide not just build targets for Steam but also Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. We'll also look to make targeted enhancements to our Linux runtime to provide native performance increases and remove the need for developers to rely on Windows through Proton.

And look, as great as Proton is, it's simply something we don't have any degree of control over or ability to support. And we've actually made some native improvements to the Linux player that targets the Steam Deck hardware. Offering a potential improvement in performance over a build running on Proton and that's actually available today.

- James Stone, Unity Platforms Team

Unity Steamworks Improvements

This is great news for Linux gaming, as it opens the way for more Unity games to have native Linux builds, instead of releasing on the Windows platform and relying on Proton to hopefully work with your game. Plus, it appears as though specific enhancements for the Steam Deck are already in the wild, so games released with a newer version of Unity (or updated to use it) may see a performance improvement on the Steam Deck.

As you can see, this goes a little beyond just Linux support, too, with Steamworks support being more integrated into the engine, allowing developers to take advantage of the Steamworks backend with ease. Making a developer's job a bit easier is what these engines are all about!

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Oliver Stogden
Oliver began playing video games at an early age, starting with the SNES console and Commodore Amiga computer. Nowadays, his interest is in the future of portable technology, such as handheld gaming systems, portable power stations/banks, and portable monitors. And seeing just how far we can push these devices.
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