Lots of discussions on this already, NoTuxNoBux and all that, but one thing I think is often overlooked is that Proton/Wine enables treating closed source games a bit like emulation roms, thus freeing the system around it to innovate.
What I mean with that is that binary backwards compatibility is a sort of poisoned sweet of the Windows world. It has resulted in the monstrous instable thing that Windows is, but admittedly is much better at running a few years old binary only software (although not perfectly though, ans in some cases WINE is better already).
In the GNU/Linux world backwards compatibility is usually much less of a concern as with open-source software a library dependency is usually fixed quite easily.
But with closed source game ports it becomes quite apparent that this model doesn’t work with unmaintained binaries, as Linux game binaries very often become unusable very quickly.
Of course in an ideal world all software was FOSS, but in our less than ideal world we need to think of ways to deal with this fact.
Of course GNU/Linux could become more like Windows in that regard (worst outcome IMHO), or some sort of containers could be wrapped around those games that include the older libraries.
Or we could just consider old windows games to be similar to ROMs for emulators and run them through Proton/WINE…
P.S.: in before WINE Is Not an Emulator ;)
It really pisses me off that the way we deal with the issue only prolongs the problem. But I guess the issue isn’t all that one dimensional. It’s sort of the same thing with Steam; it’s a proprietary walled garden, yet Valve does an incredible amount of work that benefits Linux gaming in general, so it would be silly to bite the hand that feeds. It really does seem like a lot of Linux gamers don’t realize just how unbealivibly valuable Valve’s work is for them.
Linux doesn’t need a majority to make it profitable for developers, the threshold is much lower. Wine/Proton and Steam are simply necessary evils until we have the leverage to choose another service to force change.