Valve is probably perfectly happy with just making sure proton compatibility is good.
Valve is happy that games break all the time? Yeah, sure buddy. If anybody at Valve was happy with that, maybe that Microsoft agent should lose their job.
They don’t expect developers to change their whole workflow to cater to the Deck
The point of cross-platform middleware is specifically not to “change their whole workflow”. 🙄
that’s why they’ve done so much work with proton.
Valve is also doing much work with SDL and so on to target native development, that’s why it’s embarrassing that they don’t target their own platform. All successful platform holders treat their platform as 1st class citizens: Sony targets PlayStation from day 1 of game development, so does Nintendo with Switch. Apple is not prioritizing Windows either.
Failing platforms are those where the platform vendor doesn’t even believe enough in it to properly support it. Since over a decade Microsoft makes ARM-based Surface devices and to this day Microsoft has ported not a single game, not even casual stuff like Minesweeper, over to Windows ARM. “Microsoft is perfectly happy with just making sure Prism compatibility is good” and yet emulated applications crash, perform worse, and result in battery drain. Similar with Steam Deck: The only way to ensure games perform to their best and don’t unexpectedly break on an update is proper SteamOS native versions.