Rainbow Six Siege, Forza 6 / Horizon 3, Halo 5, Gears of War 4, Apex Legends, Fifa 20, COD:MW (remake) are a few examples of games that launched with 12 support only.

Note how they’re the big, blockbuster games that are widely played by most non hardcore gamers.

It’d take Roblox 2, COD:69, and Footballz9000 to launch with DX3D13 only to slow down the wheels on SteamOS/Linux. When average gamers can’t pick up and play the games marketed down their throats, they’ll ditch their Steam Decks for whatever MS are pedalling.

Valve have been amazing at funding and supporting CodeWeavers the past decade but even with Valve’s practically bottomless pit of money, it took 7 years just to barely catch up to a set of APIs that haven’t changed practically since 2014.

Playing catchup forever isn’t sustainable. Proton is a stop-gap while Valve try and shift an industry away from a behemoth. Native is the end goal, not maintaining middleware and a creaking stack of patches.