I don’t see how Steam would make any difference.

• Implementing any kind of DRM is the game developer’s prerogative.
• Allowing other versions is possible, again, at the developer’s convenience.
• No other launcher needed besides Steam (and Steam is very far from being only a launcher)
• Steam Workshop (because fuck Forge)

The only downside I can see is that Steam doesn’t have a way to maintain multiple instances of the same game.

Ah yes, the famous DRM.

Some launchers allow you to play fully offline, but only after you’ve authenticated and started the game at least once with a real Microsoft account. The launcher has a sophisticated validation mechanism to ensure this: a single boolean value stored in a JSON file. Set that to true and you’re good to go.

• Outer Wilds
• SOMA
• Red Dead 2
• Factorio
• Half-Life 2

Honorable mentions:

• Warframe should be the example by which live service games are designed and operated.
• Crimson Desert… is such a paradox of game design. In almost all aspects, 70% of the game is fantastic, but the remaining 30% is a shocking display of incompetence and/or indifference. The exception is player training, which is consistently horrible.

Those two are mutually exclusive. An application that uses Proton can’t be natively Linux-compatible, and an application that is natively Linux-compatible can’t run using Proton.

natively on a Windows PC or on Linux via Proton

Sounds like it’s a Windows build, but the developers also provide first party support for running it on Proton.

Linux (Proton) Native Compatibility

I had to sit down and drink a glass of anhydrous water after reading that…

There’s not really a stable way to do that in Wayland at the moment. This post lists some options, but they’re not guaranteed to work in any particular compositor: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/786856/how-to-send-keyboard-strokes-programmatically-like-sendkeys-in-windows-to-a

Did it hurt to carve out the fevered flesh? Did it hurt to sever the gangrenous foot? The swines of the industry spent the last decade butchering their own carcass and selling it in pieces, now they’re horrified that they’re bleeding to death.

(I recently replayed Forgor: Hog Machine. Mandus kinda had a point.)

I have this new AI tool. Free and open source, model and all, and extremely CPU-efficient. Basically you feed it the training data (like some New York Times articles, but it can be any text or binary), and it can produce a 1:1 output when prompted. I call it “copi”; can I get my five trillion tax dollars now?

On the other hand, Sky TV somehow managed to successfully sue Microsoft to force them to rename SkyDrive.

If you have the facts, you pound the facts. If you have the law, you pound the law. If you have neither, you pound the table. This is the ESA pounding the table, and the goal is to confuse the gerontocracy LARPing as lawmakers.