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.
Microsoft have spent the whole Nadella era in "oooo cloud" inspired wonder and actively screwed up everything else.
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.
