wine-preloader connecting to a bunch of different Valve IPs?

[play xenogears]

Since installing opensnitch I've noticed when playing stuff on steam that wine-preloader connects to a bunch (10+) of different valve IPs. Anybody know what this is for?

[Aoi Blue]

Well, basically "Wine-Preloader" is the task for many of the proton functions.

Notably anything that runs through the builtin drivers in Wine will register as either wineserver or wine-preloader. This notably includes the Winsock service which handles many IP connections.

I don't know why you think it wouldn't connect to steam?

[play xenogears]

I mean, I run plenty of games through wine outside of steam and they don't have to connect to a huge amount of IPs. This isn't even an online game I'm running. It's a Unity game so I kind of expected it'd be phoning home to Unity since I hear they collect hardware info, but the IPs all appear to be to Valve.

If I deny them, nothing on my end stops working, so I was wondering what exactly they're supposed to be for.

[Cpt_Kopfschmerz]

The good thing about open source is you can always check the code for bugs or (un)intended behavior, and open a bug report.
https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/loader/preloader.c