IIRC, Apple licensed Codeweaver’s source and is extending it privately. My take is that this code, along with Game Mode is basically “Rosetta” for Windows, optimized for games. That would mean that you would launch a windows game on an M-chip Mac and it would launch without having to kick off an emulation mode. Folks playing FFXIV on Mac would have the feel.
I do think that PC devs will need to do something, I don’t think executables will work. Rather Apple is subsidizing the investment that the consumer and the developer needs to invoke to have a more prolific gaming experience.
Apple is using the source code. Not sure if they just bought it or licensed it. But what this means is that Apple is using the Codeweaver’s source code to build out their own, headless, emulation layer (like Rosetta). This also means that Apple doesn’t have to wait for a third party (which is why it took Square Enix so long to get their FFXIV launcher for M chip Macs) and they can sweeten the code to work with their architecture.
This is pretty impressive, because now we have Apple-flavored “Wine” Third Party bundled Wine (FFXIV) and Crossover as options.