
I’d just take a look at the Steam Deck Verified pages as that’ll give you a good idea about a game (at least though Proton).

Apple already has the Game Porting Toolkit which is made by CodeWeavers - D3DMetal can run a lot of Windows games like Proton’s DXVK/VKD3D. MoltenVK is a little behind to fully empower VKD3D on macOS; it’s not as smooth sailing as Proton.
The biggest issue is that Apple are still hoping developers spend the time to work on converting shaders to Metal, implement Game Center, UI and Accessibility features etc so the game feels like a native app.
Which is dumb. As was Metal (they should have just made Metal as a Vulkan abstraction layer).
Valve took the smart route and while they love developers using the Steam SDK, at least with the Steam Overlay they can still offer a native-like feeling experience.
Here’s hoping Steam Machine etc is incredibly disruptive as if it’s a decent workstation too, there’s a dwindling number of reasons to not use Linux (Adobe / Affinity / Office / AutoCAD / MinecraftBE / Fortnite).

Really well articulated.
Valve have enabled a critical mass of “target platforms” that enables both the community and developers to get things working on Linux, which all other distros are about to benefit from.
I’m likely going to buy all the new Valve hardware out of principle. The Deck is incredible, but I still have my beefy gaming rig. But my living room wouldn’t mind a Steam Machine (and my girlfriend is definitely after both a Steam Frame and Controller 2.
I’m taking time off work in a couple of weeks and I’m moving over to Linux completely - I too have felt the inertia of dual booting and find myself in Windows far too often.

The failure of the Steam Machine is why Valve hosted Khronos group at their office to kick off Vulkan and funded LunarG etc in the early days to get things moving quickly.
Valve took their time but this new hardware range is based on years of learning and solving the problems from their original foray into hardware and Linux for gaming.
And I’m so thankful for it!
The very definition of enshittification:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Your question mark key seems to be sticking.
The only part that makes it somewhat clear what the mode is is the part they explain the differences between local co-op and online mode.
This is a list of gameplay changes compared to a standard local co-op run:
They could have been a little more explicit and called it “online co-op mode” or something, and had a paragraph explaining what it is not just how it’s different to something else.
I have a feeling you’re right about this. I do wish Microsoft would take the Apple approach as Apple steamed ahead with deprecating kernel-mode access.
Love them or hate them, Apple take security a lot more seriously than Microsoft these days and it’s a real shame MS see security architecture as a nuisance rather than a core responsibility of their business.
Nope. They’re developing an alternative set of APIs for userspace in conjunction with security vendors for their products to use but it’s all still a long way off and will be optional to start with.
Given the volume of mission-critical devices security products are installed on (which the CrowdStrike fuckup highlighted), getting them out of kernel space would be a huge risk reduction for the world. And security vendors would love to get away from that risk as pulling a CrowdStrike costs a lot of money setting things right with customers.
But an anticheat used by consumers on their personal devices for a game, not such a big deal.
While I’m sure MS will eventually deprecate and then kill off third party kernel drivers, it could take a decade since MS has so much business (both internal and within their customer base) that relies on legacy crap.

Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite were by Irrational Games (2K Boston). Bioshock 2 was by 2K Marin.
Ken Levine shut down the studio after Infinite as they disliked the stress and scale of development - missing the days of small development teams.
That was back in 2014. Levine’s new studio, set up immediately after the closure of Irrational, has yet to release a game but supposedly their first project, Judas, is not too far from completion (it was meant to be out this year in March but, so far, there’s no news).
Steamdb lets you filter out games with less than x reviews which I’ve made liberal use of over the years.