https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48462
--- Comment #3 from Rémi Bernon rbernon@codeweavers.com --- AFAICS this is an issue with how focus is handled in Wine.
Sometimes, for instance right after startup, the game tries to bring itself to foreground by calling SetForegroundWindow. This succeeds on the Win32 side of Wine, and the rest of the processing works as if the game window has foreground: it can acquire dinput devices, raw input events are dispatched to it, etc...
However this is not always reflected on the X11 side, where another window may have the input focus.
Before the rawinput patches, the input events were received on each individual windows, and not really having focus would mean that no input event would be received regardless of what the Win32 side would expect. Listening to XI2 raw events on the root window, now makes Wine always receive the input events and this focus inconsistency becomes much more problematic.
I think using virtual desktop would be a possible workaround once the other issue with this mode is fixed, but it's not a real solution.