This will take a few years, though. Then, they will switch the servers off (silently or loudly, depending on their strategy - e.g. Adobe prefers to kill them silently).

At that point your only hope are pirate copies. I was always wondering how that scenario would stand in court. After all, you bought something that was complete, and then, due to someone's arbitrary decision, stopped to work. It's basically a remote kill-switch. Should you be punished for removing the possibility of someone's deliberately damaging the product you bought?

I’ve gotten to a point where Windows is now my least favorite OS, but the fact of the matter is that modern Windows has the widest gaming compatibility of all operating systems.

Proton/Steam seem like the only ones who could possibly challenge that at this point.