zlacker

It's possible they've shot themselves in the foot, but in order for things to play out like that, I feel like there would have had to have been some demand in the first place. Wine/Proton makes possible something that the vast majority of game developers were never even considering: playing their games on Linux. As you note, Factorio is one of very few mainstream games (by which I mean, AAA and indie, not open-source) to target native Linux support, and did so long before the Steam Deck.

Even on macOS, which sits between Windows and Linux in terms of stability and user base, the selection of available games is about 10-20% of my library. Apple dropping support for 32-bit x86 (only to kind of resurrect it with Rosetta 2 on M1/M2/+) and only barely supporting OpenGL anymore while refusing to support Vulkan at all doesn't help. Credit again to Factorio for porting to macOS/ARM64, but they're once again in the small minority.

There's an interplay here between user-driven demand and platform-provided stability. As much of a faff as Wine/Proton can be, writing a game to properly support, say, Wayland is worse. That's a problem Valve _could_ help fix, but won't do anything for the vast majority of existing games.