They sort of have done some work except it's not aimed at enabling Valve to run a competing app store for games on macs for obvious reasons. It's called game porting toolkit. Allows game developers to easily port windows games to run on macs. Of course this is not about enabling Steam but about bypassing steam. But I'm guessing it's doing a lot of the same kinds of things as proton technically. Possibly even building on some of the same OSS components. I don't know enough about this to say definitively.
The good news with 32 bit is that a lot of the 32 bit games are pretty old at this point and should run well enough in an emulator given good enough GPU emulation. So you might get something going with linux and proton running in an emulator.
But of course, Valve has an opportunity here as well. And they should step up. There's a lot of good stuff happening in Asahi linux that they could borrow probably.
Apple could do it without Valve. They could actually make a big effort to bring tons of game devs into their store with a system that doesn't require them to modify their games to run on Mac or iOS.
But they haven't, and I'm not sure they care enough to actually follow through on such a project, both technologically and in making and maintaining all of those publisher relationships.
I have thousands of dollars in my Steam library. Don’t want to purchase it again in order to get rid of my windows system. Steam has a ton of other benefits. I can literally stop playing computer games for years, and when I come back to Steam, I just click install and everything works again exactly as it did before. Compare that to almost every iOS game I’ve ever bought for $1 or $2 years ago. Now all of those have become loaded with ads or paywalls to unlock content. Angry Birds I’m looking at you. Garbage.
Right, which is why I'd rather Apple accept that their heart isn't really in the PC games business and work to enable Valve or others to handle that experience.
My point was Apple could do it themselves, but they haven't, they almost certainly won't, and even if they did I don't think their heart is really in it to do it properly.
The good news with 32 bit is that a lot of the 32 bit games are pretty old at this point and should run well enough in an emulator given good enough GPU emulation. So you might get something going with linux and proton running in an emulator.
But of course, Valve has an opportunity here as well. And they should step up. There's a lot of good stuff happening in Asahi linux that they could borrow probably.