I think you’re discounting just how much they’ve invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE. But they don’t do lion’s share of the development in-house, they mostly just pay devs to work on it, and yes, manage the FE in Steam. They’re still a massive positive force for change in Windows game compatibility on Linux, and we’d be nowhere near where we are today without their investment.
I think you’re discounting just how much they’ve invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE
I’m not really sure I am… Do we have some actual numbers into how much money they’ve sunk in linux?
Gaming on linux is a huge community effort, whether it’s wine, dxvk, vkd3d, mesa, linux itself… and plenty of smaller projects like lutris, bottles, UMU… And all this spans literal decades, far before valve ever got involved.
AFAIK no, and we probably never will. But we do have glimpses into it, such as this article saying Valve directly paid >100 devs to work on Linux compat:
Griffais says the company is also directly paying more than 100 open-source developers to work on the Proton compatibility layer, the Mesa graphics driver, and Vulkan, among other tasks like Steam for Linux and Chromebooks.
I would imagine they still pay outside, open source devs to work on those initiatives, though maybe not as many since they’ve gotten past the initial push.
