The "potential progress" was already there. It's just been held up by proprietary companies every step of the way. In the case of games, nearly every single game company refuses to provide their games as free (libre) game software. In the case of GPU drivers, the two big players still refuse to provide free drivers. There are plenty in the free software community willing to contribute to graphics drivers and to porting games to GNU/Linux, but these companies won't let them because it conflicts with their goals of exerting strict control over their own users. I haven't seen any evidence that this situation will let up any time soon because it seems that people have fallen for their PR tricks and so don't seem to mind whether or not most drivers and game software are proprietary. And so the cycle of abuse continues.

The whole reason why we use free software like GNU/Linux to begin with is because it doesn't make us subservient to one vendor like nonfree software does. It disturbs me that I see people making statements implying that "we need this particular proprietary company to come along and save us" or "we only need to be patient, slowly but surely they will port their games to GNU/Linux" because this is exactly the kind of thinking that free software discourages. As long as these companies are in the business of publishing nonfree software, you can be guaranteed they will drag their feet every step of the way. People need to stop buying into their lame excuses about why they can't publish free software ("We can't make money that way" is probably the oldest and stupidest one), excusing their abusive behavior and then begging them to do things only makes the situation worse.