https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48230
--- Comment #4 from Zebediah Figura z.figura12@gmail.com --- (In reply to belgix_oz from comment #3)
It's kind a bit a non sense if gstreamer is know required as WAVE files are properly handled by wine-staging ALSA backend (winealsa.drv) for all versions (including the latest 4.21). I never compiled wine-staging with gstreamer (neither pulseaudio) support.
What is broken since 4.17 is the link between ALSA wine-staging backend and mpg123 which on my system are compiled 32 and 64-bit. That would means (if not fixed) ALSA backend is no longer fully supported by wine.
It's not the ability to decode WAVE files that we depend on (and, in the case of raw integer PCM, no such decoding is taking place), but rather the general file parsing and media streaming framework that GStreamer provides. (Hence also why mpg123 isn't enough by itself). Yes, we used to have a standalone DirectShow WAVE parser filter in tree. It took up over 2,000 lines of code, was very buggy, and was not well-optimized. Making use of GStreamer is the better option for these reasons.
I'm not entirely sure what this comment is about, though, since you initially stated the game needs to play mp3 files, but the same principle applies.