Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now with the tech that gave rise to the Steam Deck.
That’s true for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s valve didn’t do an absolute fuckload of work to get proton to be actually functional.
Getting direct3d and vulkan working with actually useful performance was the turning point for Wine being useful for games in addition to just standard applications.
They definitely spent an ass-load of money on that and the fact that Wine was around for 25 years before that just goes to show that no one else was willing to do that.
[citation needed]
I’m not aware of Valve or Doitsujin ever revealing how much they paid him to make DXVK. I assume they paid him reasonably well, but I doubt it was an ass-load.
Or maybe that Wine was a lot more work than the direct3d-to-vulkan shim that was done mainly by one person (now two people).
Valve definitely helped by funding a few key projects, and packaging them in Steam made them convenient to use, but I think exaggerating their role unfairly diminishes the much larger body of work (done by other people) that makes it possible at all.
Proton stands on the shoulders of giants.
I mostly agree with your comment, but…
Remember that Wine is built by community of volunteers (afaik, tell me if I’m wrong), and they don’t have as much resources as company worth billions USD.
A lot of the development for Proton has also been community-based. Aside from whatever Steam has done to directly improve Proton, just creating the Steam Deck, and SteamOS has brought so much more attention and focus to improving it to an extent that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It gave people a reason to volunteer their time to improve it.