I got average monthly ratings for games on Wine AppDB, and seems like something happened in 2016.
I took each rating for games on Wine Application Database, mapped them to numbers (Garbage -> 1, Bronze -> 2, Silver -> 3, Gold -> 4, Platinum -> 5) and plotted a monthly average.
GPU passthrough for virtual machines became way more accessible around 2016. From my personal experiences, I got more into figuring out Wine and Linux stuff in general once I knew I could pass a GPU to my virtual machines.