>Did none of those 7000 games work on Wine already?

Not on Steam, and not without user time investment.

Steam Play (which uses Proton) allows the Steam client to only show games that are known to run well on Linux, automatically installs and configures a Wine prefix for them and then launches them _as if they were native Linux games_. No mess, no fuss. If I were to put Linux with Steam Play enabled in from of a Windows layman, they would likely not even realise they were playing games that weren't built for the platform. It 'just works'.

I would agree if the article was saying "7000 games enabled in Steam", but it's not:

> we are very close to 7000 Windows games confirmed to be working out of the box with Proton on Linux.

A better point of comparison for the actual claim would be Wine-launcher or CrossOver or some other Wine wrapper. As it is, the base for comparison used is "nothing worked before"

Given that this news provider reports quite frequently on Proton, I can understand that they assumed their readership would know what they meant. I will concede that the wording is pretty loose objectively.

>Did none of those 7000 games work on Wine already?

In theory yes, but.. some games require specific wine versions, others need special settings on either side, and at times one needs to patch the game.

This is enough to make many games unplayable under wine (for most people), but useable via Proton or a similar wrapper.