Valve isn't abandoning the idea of native Linux games. It is up to the game manufacturer. There are probably about one hundred and 50 games in my Steam library with native support.

I think the issues you are referring to about compatibility have to do with dynamic compilation and something like glibc, which mostly is a compilation risk that you end up taking but the only times I've encountered it the other packages were already available in my distro and so it was just a matter of updating packages. That is why you should find a distro that is quick to update.