I think it's pretty amazing that Valve managed to create something of this type (a store/launcher/software platform), targeted at an easily annoyed[citation needed] group of people (gamers), running for this long, that is mostly used by choice and not universally hated.
That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.
The fact that they’re a private company helps a lot. There’s less incentive to extract money from customers in new ways that are lucrative in the short term but damaging in the long run.
I think their company structure also helps, where employees generally don’t work on things unless they actually want to. This means that you don’t end up with designers redesigning UIs that don’t actually need it, etc.
I think about this a lot. I don't have _that_ much invested in Steam. (about 30 games) But if they ever go public, it's all over. I can't think of a public tech company that doesn't cannibalize its user base until it becomes unusable garbage. There's also the fact that Valve has done more for Linux gaming than anyone else. If Valve goes public, I'm probably done with PC gaming for the rest of my life.
They also mostly tend to do things when the time is right rather than when they think other people think the time is right — they can be quite conservative both in tech and game design but that also means they don't ship broken crap too often which is surprisingly rare in the industry.
I remember that, in the beginning, there were some concerns:
- "I need to download a lot of data, I want discs!"
- "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"
I think the first point got kind of obsolete, because broadband is readily available compared to 20 years ago. And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
It's still a very valid complaint, and will forever be as long as you're tied to Steam's server being up and willing to give you the content you paid for. That may not always be the case, for example if financial embargos prevent Valve from actually providing the service in your country. It's more like you're paying Steam to use their service rather than actually buying the game. Right now people are not worried about Steam exit scamming and thanking us for all the fish, because it's a very solid service that basically has a monopoly on PC digital game sales, plus the Steam Market being a money making machine on its own, plus the Steam Deck providing further leverage on game sales.
But there's a nonzero chance they can just ... close. Which was a very real possibility when they launched. Now, not so much, but the future has always new and exciting ways to fuck it all up at a moment's notice.
> And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
People got comfortable, and that comfortability is great. Until it isn't, and then it's a travesty. Then it all repeats again and people never learn not to put all their eggs in one basket.
That's just the result of the flow of time. I remember a little over a decade ago when Blizzard was considered one of the best companies out there and that they always delivered quality titles. Stuff changes (and also, sometimes people can be very fickle).
> "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"
Not that this isn't a valid concern, it certainly is, but I guess what we've learnt is that you don't need to be bound to Valve for games to be bound to a big corporation.
Look at Minecraft, which was never on Steam. You could've brought that a decade ago, and now you're told you need to bind yourself to Microsoft to continue playing it.
The concerns weren't completely unfounded. My college apartment's internet was so bad I had to return HL2 to the store because it wouldn't decrypt it (the network was swampped with college gnutella traffic and the apartment complex had no idea how to handle it).
Steam shipped a version of counterstrike that glitched a lot less in windows whereas the cd version I got from ATI with my graphics card didn’t even work reliably. That was the gateway game for me.
I remember having those concerns. And Steam performance did take a few months to solidify if I remember correctly, so not everything was unfounded. Before it, only MMOs had login screens separating gamers from gaming ;-)
Nowadays, the only problems I have with Steam stem from my credit card's security mechanisms.
Their biggest achievement was getting other companies to sell through their store. This allowed gamers to build up their back catalogue on Steam. Their launcher has all the problems as the other ones but they're forgiven because most of us have large collections within Steam now. Even when the same game is on sale via Epic for a slightly lower price I'll usually get it on Steam because that's where most of my other games are. It is a choice, but a warped one.
It's kind of like Netflix vs other streaming platforms except Steam has a much better moat.
Big fan of Steam here but I wouldn't say it was _always_ amazing. In the beginning, it was a friends network that was almost always down and a launcher for games I already owned and played without a launcher for years. I hated it for a long time but it is a great platform right now.
Steam was universally hated when it launched, even more than other launchers are hated today (uplay)
The perception changed when Steam started allowing 3rd party games and had cheaper prices (through blink-and-you-miss it discounts of course, so they can still milk launch-day hype) than boxed copies and the indie explosion that digital distribution allowed
Stop using the phrase 'walled garden'. Its marketing jargon that promotes anti-consumer behavior while promoting ideas of delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.
I'll admit, many years ago I was a lot more skeptical. I didn't like the idea of not physically owning my games, being able to install them whenever and however I wanted without some middle man who could deny me what I paid for. And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?
But years have passed and I've softened on it. Steam has been - overall - a great service. It does everything I need and never gets in the way.
Is it perfect? No. I would love a better game recommendation algorithm for starters.
But it's served me well and I have hundreds of games in it, so it's work out well for both me and them.
> And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow?
Honestly? If that were to happen - just pirate it. Everything (well, almost) that's on Steam is also readily and easily available on the seven seas, if you know where to look.
Sure, that wouldn't be fair to you, but from a purely practical point of view you'd be able to access your games if Steam went belly-up, and still "own" them. (Although perhaps not legally, depending on where you live.)
I buy my games on Steam because it's convenient, to support the devs, and to support Valve's investment in Linux. But otherwise I wouldn't blink twice before pirating if I were, say, screwed over by Steam or by a game publisher.
I forget where I saw it but well over half of all pirated software has some sort of malware on board. I'm no longer a poor college student. I cannot afford to risk my bank / brokerage accounts and credit cards for the sake of saving $60 on a game.
I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago and I don't know how many hard drives have given up on me over that time.
Valve and the contract you have with them is actually more durable than stuff physically lying around the house, it just doesn't feel that way because we don't have a good intuition about how brittle digital information stored on physical media is.
Back when I first got an xbox, I got the Halo remastered collection or something like that on DVD. Wanted to fire it up again ... no idea where the disc is. Wish I had just gotten digital at this point.
That's probably one of the reasons why Valve and Steam seem to never get involved in any of the usual political activism you see basically 100% of other big companies slash their userbase in half with.
>what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for?
In many cases it's possible to copy the game out of the Steam folders and have it still work. It depends on how much Steam/DRM functionality it uses and on packaging issues. At least for Linux-native games, I have found the games almost always work outside Steam (once any dynamic library issues are cleared up).
I remember first time I tried Steam. I asked a mate "what is this steam thing?" to which he answered "its the piece of crap you need to install to play counter strike". They have come a long way since then.
I remember Steam launching with counter-strike 1.6 and I was livid at the time as an avid 1.5 player. I straight up refused to play counter-strike until Source launched when I got it with the Orange Box.
Those early days of Steam were still rough but getting better over time. I think Valve still isn't perfect, but the options for a PC leader could be a lot worse (and absolutely were).
It always amazes me that features that Steam has figured out still haven't found their way to other digital game storefronts. It's not a perfect platform, but it's likely the best we got for now. Just glad that there are other places to go if Steam isn't your jam.
I'm on the same boat as you. I despised the very idea of Steam when it first launched, and was a firm believer in owning games outright without depending on a platform on which one had to log into (well, technically I still do believe in it, but I am resigned to reality). However, I have to say that Steam and its prophet St. Gabe Newell have truly stood the test of time and been a force for good in the PC games industry (all the more so as a Linux user).
In fact, Valve is a great representative of a conclusion I reached a while ago (not original by any means), which is that privately owned businesses whose owners give a shit about the value they create are of much greater social value than the paperclip-maximising entities that often result from publicly traded corporations. Another example, though defunct, was OKCupid when it was still owned privately by its founders before it was sold off to the Borg of Match.com.
When Adam Smith said that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” it was a description of reality, not a prescription to be maximised through layer upon layer of purely financial self-interest. Doing things for pure profit optimises the market and society benefits only as a side-effect. Doing things for profit, while actually caring for what you make, may not be market-optimal but can be much better for society.
I first learned to cover my internet tracks when my mom asked what "FuckSteam.com" was and why it was in the web browser history.
I quickly came to have an appreciation for Steam, as pausing/resuming downloads on my 56k dialup was very, very unreliable. Steam's client was my first exposure to reliable download pausing so they found my soft spot.
As my little ones have gotten older it is a little annoying my kid can’t play a game on the steam deck hooked up to the TV downstairs while I want to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my main PC. I own both games, what the heck?
Buy a $20 USB C dock with an HDMI port, start "Offline mode" on the steam deck, child plugs into TV and plays game just fine, you go upstairs and play game just fine.
Alternatively, turn off internet on your personal computer and play game, and let the little one use wireless streaming to your TV.
Basically, one of them has to be in offline mode. That is a stupid thing, but valve intends for "offline mode" to be a day to day use case of the Steam Deck
I don't want to defend this in any way, but in my mind it plays out like this: You have a SNES and a dozen cartridges and so it's the same, as you only have one console.
On the other hand, multiple Game Boy consoles in the same household were more common.
So yeah, it should be better now that the physical limitation is broken. You have several games and should be able to play them at the same time.
People don't pirate PS5 games not because Sony's service is so good, but because the device is so secure that piracy is virtually impossible on it, so getting games the legal way is also the only way.
The PC was and still is, way too open for that to be achievable, though they have tried with various malware DRM, including Sony. With the PC being so open, it became a battleground to competition, which led to prices being so low.
If you still pirate games in 2023 then it's because free is more important to you than anything else. But back when Steam launched it was much more of a hassle to get a game:
First you needed to go to a physical store miles away and once you got there the game you wanted may have been sold out. And then there was seldom any sales, except the box of mixed five-year-old games no one wanted by the counter (only $1.99) that you could rummage through and hopefully find a gem. "Darn, they were out of Half-Life[1] but maybe this copy of Strike Squad[2] will be fun while I wait for two weeks for the next batch of Half-Life?"
Also note that while a five-year-old game today will barely look dated, back in those days it's the difference between [1] and [3].
Then when you came home to finally install the game, the CD was scratched and the game wouldn't install. And typically the installer didn't notice this until it had reached 95% after 45 minutes of waiting. The StarCraft CDs were notoriously bad in this respect and you needed to treat them like delicate flower petals. "Eh, my StarCraft CD no longer works, can I borrow yours? NOO!"
So for those of us, who pirated StarCraft after the third authentic CD had broken down, Steam was a godsend.
There are plenty of people that know where to go to pirate games and still choose to pay for them, and not even just out of principle.
I like that if a patch comes out which fixes bugs and adds features, I'm guaranteed that it works immediately. I don't have to wait for a new version of the crack to come out that cracks the new version.
I like that multiplayer always works.
I like that I can access the Steam Workshop.
I like never having to worry if the latest crack is going to include malware.
None of that is guaranteed if I pirate the game.
As a side note, I just discovered that GameCopyWorld not only still exists, it's still using the same style as it did 20 years ago.
I'm still a bit overwhelmed that I don't really own any of my games anymore. I can't lend them to a friend or relative. It makes me so sad that when I die, so much of what I bought will just stop being useful; I can give my account to someone yes, but the odds of having someone who likes all the games I liked seems slim. The technological unwinding of first-sale doctrine is a huge blow to me, one that I feel so regularly, and which makes every purchase more than just a little bit sad.
So far the upside of Steam has been incredible. Installing, removing, & keeping games updated is incredibly easy. Saves go to what has so far been a reliable cloud. Matchmaking & lobbies don't die after a couple years, when games use the Steam SDK. The fancy controller mapping built-in is great. Steam Remote Play is a (mostly: please, better support killing unresponsive games Steam) just-works delight.
There's so much I'm thankful for. But it still is so shocking to me how much less flexibility & capability I have. I resisted buying Steam for many many years, but it has over time become my primary gaming experience & I've accrued many hundreds of games. And that has always made me a bit sad. Now it seems like a huge number of games require either Steam or something like it; we no longer seem to even have a choice about Steam or it's ilk. It's a sad fate for such an open ended freeing thing, gaming, that we've all been ensnared in.
First Valve single-handedly saves PC gaming, then advances Linux gaming further than anyone has done in 30 years. Their work on Proton, and integrating into the Steam client is incredible.
>then advances Linux gaming further than anyone has done in 30 years.
I guess if people count "throwing a Windows runtime environment into Linux" as "Linux gaming", then so be it. It's not the direction I'd hope for Linux to go but I'm not surprised that our continued reliance on proprietary technology seeps even into Linux itself.
I take the same game runtime (open source, so the argument about being proprietary is not the main argument) and compare the Linux and Windows versions:
Descent D2X-XL.
Linux version: can't install the binaries in my distro, they are not in the repository of packages. Can't compile it as the dependencies are obsolete. I would need to run a 15 years old distro just to test it. It is probable the distro doesn't support current hardware.
Windows version: It just runs on Wine. No problem at all. Runs better than on Windows. Win32 is the only truly backwards compatible API on Linux.
I would say this is a completely self-inflicted issue in Linux world. We rely on proprietary technology because the open desktop and libraries and GPU drivers disregarded backwards compatibility, while Win32 worked hard to preserve it.
Microsoft doesn't have any control over wine. It's a way of *breaking* microsoft's control, not extending it.
The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update, and steam controls the updates. It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.
I used to weigh into arguments with positions like this, or that "Game Devs should just make Linux/Mac builds of their games" before I got into the industry. Targeting a platform, even when you have an off-the-shelf engine that does the lions share of the work for you, is not easy work. Microsoft puts in zounds of dev time to make the wild west of hardware that is the PC landscape work, and in many ways, has to hold hardware manufacturer's feet to the fire in order to make that possible. Sony, Microsoft for XBOX, and Nintendo, all have much more significantly simplified architectures to support, and put in zounds of hours of work to make that work smoothly for their respective platforms.
The amount of effort to make a comparable API that game devs could target as a platform just... doesn't exist in the F/OSS world. I'm not trying to minimize the work that folks like the SDL team do in order to make this as possible as they can, as they do spend significant efforts to try and do this. It's also not like there aren't reasonably good F/OSS engines like O3DE, based on the Lumberyard source, which was in turn forked from a version of Crytek, which would keep this kind of support close at heart. For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great.
It feels pretty rock-meet-hard-place to expect an ecosystem like Linux, one that embraces diversity as hard as it does to provide the level of stability and commonality that a large scale game project needs. Altruistically, yes, I wish there was a fantastic community supported platform target that game developers could use that provide the same level of stability and commonality that DirectX does. The adages about the chicken-and-egg problem of "nobody plays games on Linux, so no one is really interested in making a solid development target for games on Linux" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.
It’s actually weaponizing Microsoft’s backwards compatibility promises. It’s a great idea, well executed. Treat Windows ABI as yet another Linux ABI. Stop thinking that it’s Windows, because it isn’t just Windows anymore.
My Steam account is turning 20 today at 4:58pm (CET) and I cannot help but feel a bit old for the very first time. I still remember all my friends hating it so much in the beginning because it would slow our PCs down and cost us valuable FPS in Counter-Strike. It's amazing what Valve has achieved with Steam since then. Happy Birthday Steam!
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That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.
I think their company structure also helps, where employees generally don’t work on things unless they actually want to. This means that you don’t end up with designers redesigning UIs that don’t actually need it, etc.
- "I need to download a lot of data, I want discs!"
- "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"
I think the first point got kind of obsolete, because broadband is readily available compared to 20 years ago. And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
It's still a very valid complaint, and will forever be as long as you're tied to Steam's server being up and willing to give you the content you paid for. That may not always be the case, for example if financial embargos prevent Valve from actually providing the service in your country. It's more like you're paying Steam to use their service rather than actually buying the game. Right now people are not worried about Steam exit scamming and thanking us for all the fish, because it's a very solid service that basically has a monopoly on PC digital game sales, plus the Steam Market being a money making machine on its own, plus the Steam Deck providing further leverage on game sales.
But there's a nonzero chance they can just ... close. Which was a very real possibility when they launched. Now, not so much, but the future has always new and exciting ways to fuck it all up at a moment's notice.
People got comfortable, and that comfortability is great. Until it isn't, and then it's a travesty. Then it all repeats again and people never learn not to put all their eggs in one basket.
That's just the result of the flow of time. I remember a little over a decade ago when Blizzard was considered one of the best companies out there and that they always delivered quality titles. Stuff changes (and also, sometimes people can be very fickle).
Not that this isn't a valid concern, it certainly is, but I guess what we've learnt is that you don't need to be bound to Valve for games to be bound to a big corporation.
Look at Minecraft, which was never on Steam. You could've brought that a decade ago, and now you're told you need to bind yourself to Microsoft to continue playing it.
Nowadays, the only problems I have with Steam stem from my credit card's security mechanisms.
It's kind of like Netflix vs other streaming platforms except Steam has a much better moat.
The perception changed when Steam started allowing 3rd party games and had cheaper prices (through blink-and-you-miss it discounts of course, so they can still milk launch-day hype) than boxed copies and the indie explosion that digital distribution allowed
It helps that everything else is so much more annoying.
Ehh, people use IOS by choice too. An "ethical" walled garden is still just that, walled.
GOG and itch are great platforms as well, so I think people can sometimes miss the trees for the forest and remember the bad experiences.
But years have passed and I've softened on it. Steam has been - overall - a great service. It does everything I need and never gets in the way.
Is it perfect? No. I would love a better game recommendation algorithm for starters.
But it's served me well and I have hundreds of games in it, so it's work out well for both me and them.
Honestly? If that were to happen - just pirate it. Everything (well, almost) that's on Steam is also readily and easily available on the seven seas, if you know where to look.
Sure, that wouldn't be fair to you, but from a purely practical point of view you'd be able to access your games if Steam went belly-up, and still "own" them. (Although perhaps not legally, depending on where you live.)
I buy my games on Steam because it's convenient, to support the devs, and to support Valve's investment in Linux. But otherwise I wouldn't blink twice before pirating if I were, say, screwed over by Steam or by a game publisher.
I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago and I don't know how many hard drives have given up on me over that time.
Valve and the contract you have with them is actually more durable than stuff physically lying around the house, it just doesn't feel that way because we don't have a good intuition about how brittle digital information stored on physical media is.
I don't have access to 100% of my physical games because I haven't had an optical drive since 2012 and certainly don't have any of my old hard drives.
Obviously, I know I could get one for under $20, but why?
Many games on steam are also on GOG.
The no-DRM thing is nice, though.
In many cases it's possible to copy the game out of the Steam folders and have it still work. It depends on how much Steam/DRM functionality it uses and on packaging issues. At least for Linux-native games, I have found the games almost always work outside Steam (once any dynamic library issues are cleared up).
Those early days of Steam were still rough but getting better over time. I think Valve still isn't perfect, but the options for a PC leader could be a lot worse (and absolutely were).
It always amazes me that features that Steam has figured out still haven't found their way to other digital game storefronts. It's not a perfect platform, but it's likely the best we got for now. Just glad that there are other places to go if Steam isn't your jam.
In fact, Valve is a great representative of a conclusion I reached a while ago (not original by any means), which is that privately owned businesses whose owners give a shit about the value they create are of much greater social value than the paperclip-maximising entities that often result from publicly traded corporations. Another example, though defunct, was OKCupid when it was still owned privately by its founders before it was sold off to the Borg of Match.com.
When Adam Smith said that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” it was a description of reality, not a prescription to be maximised through layer upon layer of purely financial self-interest. Doing things for pure profit optimises the market and society benefits only as a side-effect. Doing things for profit, while actually caring for what you make, may not be market-optimal but can be much better for society.
I quickly came to have an appreciation for Steam, as pausing/resuming downloads on my 56k dialup was very, very unreliable. Steam's client was my first exposure to reliable download pausing so they found my soft spot.
Buy a $20 USB C dock with an HDMI port, start "Offline mode" on the steam deck, child plugs into TV and plays game just fine, you go upstairs and play game just fine.
Alternatively, turn off internet on your personal computer and play game, and let the little one use wireless streaming to your TV.
Basically, one of them has to be in offline mode. That is a stupid thing, but valve intends for "offline mode" to be a day to day use case of the Steam Deck
On the other hand, multiple Game Boy consoles in the same household were more common.
So yeah, it should be better now that the physical limitation is broken. You have several games and should be able to play them at the same time.
People don't pirate PS5 games not because Sony's service is so good, but because the device is so secure that piracy is virtually impossible on it, so getting games the legal way is also the only way.
The PC was and still is, way too open for that to be achievable, though they have tried with various malware DRM, including Sony. With the PC being so open, it became a battleground to competition, which led to prices being so low.
I think Gabe's original assessment is mostly correct - making things easily obtainable is more important than making them free.
First you needed to go to a physical store miles away and once you got there the game you wanted may have been sold out. And then there was seldom any sales, except the box of mixed five-year-old games no one wanted by the counter (only $1.99) that you could rummage through and hopefully find a gem. "Darn, they were out of Half-Life[1] but maybe this copy of Strike Squad[2] will be fun while I wait for two weeks for the next batch of Half-Life?" Also note that while a five-year-old game today will barely look dated, back in those days it's the difference between [1] and [3]. Then when you came home to finally install the game, the CD was scratched and the game wouldn't install. And typically the installer didn't notice this until it had reached 95% after 45 minutes of waiting. The StarCraft CDs were notoriously bad in this respect and you needed to treat them like delicate flower petals. "Eh, my StarCraft CD no longer works, can I borrow yours? NOO!"
So for those of us, who pirated StarCraft after the third authentic CD had broken down, Steam was a godsend.
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/155/half-life/screenshots/ [2] https://www.mobygames.com/game/9899/strike-squad/screenshots... [3] https://www.mobygames.com/game/1068/doom/screenshots/
I like that if a patch comes out which fixes bugs and adds features, I'm guaranteed that it works immediately. I don't have to wait for a new version of the crack to come out that cracks the new version.
I like that multiplayer always works.
I like that I can access the Steam Workshop.
I like never having to worry if the latest crack is going to include malware.
None of that is guaranteed if I pirate the game.
As a side note, I just discovered that GameCopyWorld not only still exists, it's still using the same style as it did 20 years ago.
So far the upside of Steam has been incredible. Installing, removing, & keeping games updated is incredibly easy. Saves go to what has so far been a reliable cloud. Matchmaking & lobbies don't die after a couple years, when games use the Steam SDK. The fancy controller mapping built-in is great. Steam Remote Play is a (mostly: please, better support killing unresponsive games Steam) just-works delight.
There's so much I'm thankful for. But it still is so shocking to me how much less flexibility & capability I have. I resisted buying Steam for many many years, but it has over time become my primary gaming experience & I've accrued many hundreds of games. And that has always made me a bit sad. Now it seems like a huge number of games require either Steam or something like it; we no longer seem to even have a choice about Steam or it's ilk. It's a sad fate for such an open ended freeing thing, gaming, that we've all been ensnared in.
I guess if people count "throwing a Windows runtime environment into Linux" as "Linux gaming", then so be it. It's not the direction I'd hope for Linux to go but I'm not surprised that our continued reliance on proprietary technology seeps even into Linux itself.
Descent D2X-XL.
Linux version: can't install the binaries in my distro, they are not in the repository of packages. Can't compile it as the dependencies are obsolete. I would need to run a 15 years old distro just to test it. It is probable the distro doesn't support current hardware.
Windows version: It just runs on Wine. No problem at all. Runs better than on Windows. Win32 is the only truly backwards compatible API on Linux.
I would say this is a completely self-inflicted issue in Linux world. We rely on proprietary technology because the open desktop and libraries and GPU drivers disregarded backwards compatibility, while Win32 worked hard to preserve it.
The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update, and steam controls the updates. It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.
The amount of effort to make a comparable API that game devs could target as a platform just... doesn't exist in the F/OSS world. I'm not trying to minimize the work that folks like the SDL team do in order to make this as possible as they can, as they do spend significant efforts to try and do this. It's also not like there aren't reasonably good F/OSS engines like O3DE, based on the Lumberyard source, which was in turn forked from a version of Crytek, which would keep this kind of support close at heart. For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great.
It feels pretty rock-meet-hard-place to expect an ecosystem like Linux, one that embraces diversity as hard as it does to provide the level of stability and commonality that a large scale game project needs. Altruistically, yes, I wish there was a fantastic community supported platform target that game developers could use that provide the same level of stability and commonality that DirectX does. The adages about the chicken-and-egg problem of "nobody plays games on Linux, so no one is really interested in making a solid development target for games on Linux" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.
Maybe in X years this may change, but that's just reality.
Codeweavers and the Wine guys have been doing that for decades. Proton builds on top of their work