Proton is a fork of Wine maintained by Valve with various teaks, patches, and optimizations for gaming.

It also has a lot of preconfigured stuff and integrations for Steam.

Besides using Steam, you could look into lutris or playonlinux, as they carry game specific "formulas" to get stuff running on pure wine.

I'm not too familiar with playonlinux but had much success with lutris!

https://lutris.net/ https://www.playonlinux.com/en/

PlayOnLinux worked great for me in Linux. It installs Windows games into their own separate wine-directories, with their own C: contents and their own configuration, and with an option to pick a specific WINE-version for each game, when necessary. With a plugin you can export an installed game to its own single-file archive containing all of that game's full hard disk and config so that you can install it again later or copy to your other computers.

After switching to FreeBSD I tried to run PlayOnBSD, but it did not seem maintained and I could not get it to work. However it turns out the configuration for the games installed using PlayOnLinux were in simple text-files that I could easily use to launch all the games (after copying over to my new FreeBSD home directory).

Unfortunately after upgrading to FreeBSD 13.4 I have suddenly not had any luck at all running WINE or Proton. Need to try to figure that out some day. Or just hope that an upgrade to WINE 10.x will solve it.

Proton (Steam Play 2.0) is a set of game-focused patches on top of Wine, plus several other components that improve game compatibility and/or performance. The most notable of these are DXVK, which implements Direct3D 8/9/10/11 APIs in terms of Vulkan, and vkd3d-proton, which does the same for Direct3D 12.

In many cases, it's possible to get a game running with regular Wine (or Wine-staging) if you install into the Wine prefix not only the game, but also one or more of: DXVK, vkd3d-proton, whatever Microsoft Visual C++ runtime the game wants, and Mono. If a game also needs custom Wine patches, you'll have better luck with a game launcher like Lutris, which automates installing patched Wine versions, or running a Wine build like the one that GloriousEggroll maintained until recently.

Be sure that your graphics card's Vulkan drivers are installed, and if it's a 32-bit game, all the appropriate 32-bit libraries as well.

Valve's issue tracker for games running in Proton often has comments that are helpful when trying to bring up a game in Wine.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk

https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton

https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues