Yes and before valve got involved gaming on wine was a hit and miss (mostly a miss). Whereas now basically 100% of the games i play just work with no to minimal tinkering. They put in a lot of effort to get all the kinks out. And steam input is also a huge factor in this. Downplaying their involvement is akin to downplaying wine’s achievements because it’s built on top of linux.

A 25% increase is $625. Not $575… But either way they are insane prices and i really don’t understand how there’s a market at that price point.

I’ve not looked too much into it, but it seems AsyncRead/AsyncBufRead (through IoSafe) is implemented for stdin. So i think you should be able to use it like that.