The WAN show had a pretty good take on this. Valve tried just waiting for developers to port games and it didn’t work, so they had to make proton. It’s going to take Apple hitting the “fuck it, we’ll just do it ourselves” point and developing a full translation layer before gaming on Mac becomes a real possibility.

An important detail – described well in the article but missing from a lot of online discussion – is that this tool is for game developers to assess the work needed for a proper port. It’s not for consumer use.

It’s still great news for people who want to play games on Mac because it’s such an improvement to the porting process to have this kind of visibility into a game’s performance and key issues at the outset.

(Aside: I tweaked the Verge’s original title after posting to make the developer focus clearer. It’s nice to be able to do that!)