[hayleox]

First, they probably wouldn't win. Oracle lost Google v Oracle. Wine is pretty serious about clean-room principles -- they won't accept a patch from anyone who's ever so much as looked at Microsoft-owned source code.[1] Valve has the means and motive to fight a lawsuit to the bitter end.

Second, it would be a PR disaster. "Microsoft sues to kill the Steam Deck" is an awful look for the company. Their strategy in recent years has been to say "actually we like Linux now" and play friendly to try to win developers; this would run completely counter to that. There may not be much of an immediate consequence to this, but in the long run I think we'd see developers try to reduce their reliance on Microsoft/Windows.

Third, I don't think it would actually stop the tide. Wine and Proton are a big piece of the movement away from Windows, but they're not the only piece. The legal process would take many years to play out; during that time, we'd likely see tons of movement on making it easier for developers to create native Linux builds, and perhaps even new projects that try to find other ways to do Wine-like things without actually reimplementing Win32. Losing Wine would be a huge blow, but I don't think it'd be the end of the story.

[1]: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Submitting-Patch...

[cogman10]

Another point that makes everything different is that MS has contributed to the wine project. They've both sent in code changes to wine itself and they donated mono to the wine project.

[fragmede]

> Second, it would be a PR disaster. "Microsoft sues to kill the Steam Deck" is an awful look for the company.

If the alternative is losing the entire Xbox market? Money makes people and companies do funny things.

[dark-star]

How is the Xbox market related to SteamDeck? SteamDeck plays PC games (which XBox doesn't), and XBox plays its own console games (which PCs and thus the SteamDeck don't)

[Telaneo]

The Venn diagram of Xbox games and PC games is very close to the Xbox circle just being completely inside the larger PC circle. The number of Series S/X exclusives is literally zero at this point, at least I'm fairly sure, and if there are any, my bets are on them being shovelware. The Xbox One only has one exclusive game of note, which is Halo 5.

I don't think the performance of the Steam Deck is up to play all Xbox games at Series X quality, but that's a nitpick assuming future Steam Decks arrive.

[RichardLake]

Isn't the xbox market dead after after having to code for the weaker series s lead to the last generation of consoles being outsold massively by the PS5?

[dontlaugh]

They’re killing Xbox themselves already, I doubt they care anymore.