Microsoft doesn't have any control over wine. It's a way of *breaking* microsoft's control, not extending it.
The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update, and steam controls the updates. It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.
>The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update
(un?)fortunately, games have long update tails now. Just ask Android/IOS how those older games work. The popular stuff makes money and will continue support, but abandonware is inevtiable.
> It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Sure, but I'm worried about future games, not current. I'm sure you can play the current 20 years of back catalog for the rest of your life if need be, but many people will be moving on to the new shiny thing.
>Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.
ehh, give it maybe 20-30 years. "Forever" in software is never that. You still need people who care about Wine, older games, and backwards compatibility. And have the skills and time/energy to keep that maintained.
This isn't even a critique on Windows/Linux. Just accepting that at some point, for technological advance, we will need hard breaks, and people may not always care about getting over those breaks. We haven't had a hard break in Windows for decades, but we are on the cusp of various technologies and different product models, interesting and greedy alike.
I don't expect my copy of Skyrim to work on whatever is the new hardware in 30 years. I'll probably just buy Skyrim Quantum Cloud 2040 or whatever.
answer to points 1-3: Valve controls the update process, linux has a stable ABI, and wine has had no problem adapting to library changes in general. They ship their own windows DLLs.
As for hardware changes? There really isn't going to be anything you can do there on windows or linux.
The games that need a windows ABI will never need a newer windows ABI without rolling out an update, and steam controls the updates. It doesn't matter what microsoft does with windows in the future, those games will continue to work.
Now all the games that work with wine are portable to any OS you want until the end of time.