There is no competition when games only come to Linux by "emulating" Windows.
The only thing it has going for it is being a free beer UNIX clone for headless environments, and even then, isn't that relevant on cloud environments where containers and managed languages abstract everything they run on.
Nah, everyone is relying on Proton, there are hardly any native GNU/Linux games being ported, not even Android/NDK ones, where SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan, C, C++ are present, and would be extremely easy to port.
>Nah, everyone is relying on Proton, there are hardly any native GNU/Linux games being ported
This doesn't make the "play" button any different. People only care if the Proton version is buggy or noticeably less performant, and native ports have no trouble being both of those (see: Rust (game) before the devs dropped Linux support)
Are they ported though? I would say thanks to the Steam Deck, Proton is at a point where native Linux ports are unnecessary. It's also a much more stable target to develop against than N+1 Linux distros.
Many are specifically ported to work with Linux without a wrapper, especially among indie games and games from smaller studios.
Unity, Unreal and Godot all support compiling for Linux either by default or with inexpensive or possibly free add-ons. I'm sure many other game engines do as well, and when you're taking a few hours of work at most to add everyone who owns a steam deck or a steam deck clone as a potential customer to your customer base then that is not a tall order.
They do, yet you will hardly find a big name Studio that will waste additional money doing builds, QA and customer support for GNU/Linux, just let Valve do the needful with Proton.
The only thing it has going for it is being a free beer UNIX clone for headless environments, and even then, isn't that relevant on cloud environments where containers and managed languages abstract everything they run on.