It’s really interesting that Proton feels like a step forward in cross-platform gaming, but it also made it more economical to focus on Windows builds and dependencies.

Steam has a lot of power in the market and a vested interest in making things easier for developers and publishers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they picked up (more of) the slack in keeping systems backwards compatible.

Same as Microsoft, sort of. They can’t afford to have Apple’s “courage” in dropping x86 and then amd64.

The Steam launcher is one very popular Linux app which needs a 32 bits arch apparently.

Steam, as mentioned, and an old iMac that I’ve been meaning to dual-boot for a while.

This kind of thing is mostly inevitable, but has an impact on software and game preservation.