I got my Steam Deck 3 days ago and I just started exploring it. Given that I already have a large library of games on Epic Games, one of the first thing I did was installing the Heroic launcher. It worked well for some of the games (and not for others… like Hyper Light Drifter ;_; if someone knows how to configure it please help me). What I’m not understanding is: why do I need to have different proton versions installed for each game? Eg: one game requires GE 7.32 (what’s GE by the way???), another game version 7.45, another one 7.20 etc etc etc… Why? I already had the latest version (8.0) of proton installed on my Steam Deck, shouldn’t it be enough to run all other games being the latest version? 🫤
You don’t usually need different versions of proton for most games. Games will be identified as working on a specific version of proton, but you can usually run them on the newest version without issue.
The two exceptions to this are:
If a game won’t run on the newest version of proton, you may need to go back to an older version. This doesn’t happen very often, but it is a concern.
GE proton is a special variety of proton that has extra media codecs and some game specific hot fixes built in. The media codecs can’t be included in regular proton for legal reasons. If cutscenes in a game don’t work it can be a missing media codec. This isn’t usually an issue for steam games, valve is able to use fix the video cutscenes by distributing shader cache files. But for a 3rd party launcher like heroic, many games will require GE-proton.