With vulkan support and wine, running windows games on an M1 using linux is already possible. How fast that will be is another question.

It would reduce the amount of work needed by developers as at minimum all they’d have to do is build something that uses Vulkan and it would run on Mx hardware thans to linux. For better support, they could compile their games on any ARM64 hardware and that’d remove the need for an emulation layer (x86 -> ARM).

I’d say this might actually be what unlocks a real gaming experience on Apple hardware without relying on (DX ->) Vulkan -> Metal for graphics, x86 -> ARM, and windows -> darwin. Nothing would have to be done for graphics (vulkan), x86->ARM (if it’s only compiled for x86), and windows -> Linux (which already has tons of work and the major support of Steam, while Apple just started with their wine fork for this).

It wouldn’t surprise me if an “apple gaming” community would have a post pinned “install linux to game on Apple” in a year or two.