WSL is the answer in what most folks are concerned.
Has Steam finally started to push for native Linux games instead of translating Windows ones?
Has Steam finally started to push for native Linux games instead of translating Windows ones?
The failure of business, only reinforces Windows as the platform most studios reach for.
Buy Windows, buy Visual Studio, pay game engines licenses, let Valve do the work.
This ignoring that current Valve's management doesn't live forever, so who knows what happens afterwards.
Windows' monopoly on game dev isn't just market share either, since game dev isn't just code. You still need Photoshop, Maya, etc. and in smaller studies there's typically a crossover where some devs are doing art as well. Visual Studio's C++ debugger is still one of the best, and the tooling elsewhere hasn't caught up yet (compared to DX + PIX).
Then you also have to solve distribution and handling the fragmented display & audio stack. It's gotten a lot better, but its still a factor.
I'm fine with most of the work going into Wine/Proton. A stable ABI for Linux is a boon, if it happens to be Win32 then so be it.
Valve isn't going to be around forever porting Windows games into Proton, which is actually hardly any different if they would start selling Nintendo games with Dolphin, if we ignore the legal implications for a moment.
Microsoft have spent the whole Nadella era in "oooo cloud" inspired wonder and actively screwed up everything else.
Note how game developers rather spend their working hours in Windows with all its issues, even if they happen to have Linux servers for running their MMOs.
My Steam library is full of old win32 games that run better on Linux than they do on Windows 11. There are some native games appearing because of the Steam Deck, but the fact is they aren't necessary.
Valve aren't simply better at running a platform business, they've thoroughly subverted Microsoft's old one and have done a better job at running that than Microsoft themselves.
Look at the absolute state of the XBox business: all native games, tens of billions spent on something, and yet it's just a trainwreck from top to bottom.
Tens of thousands of Windows games would remain playable with ubiquitous Vulkan-capable hardware and a 500mb Proton runtime?
In truth if AMD or nVidia put their mind to having decent profiling tooling on Linux, and the AI wave suggests they will have no option, then this could readily become a thing.