Mathematically for every game you buy from Steam about 0.07% of what you pay for it ends up flowing to help the Linux gaming ecosystem.

So each time a customer buys from Steam that does very, very little to help the Linux ecosystem - if you’re a dev earning €100,000 a year literally 1 minute of your time on a related open source project is worth more in helping the Linux ecosystem than buying €1000 in games from Steam.

So unlike what you seem to think, gamers get very little “help the Linux gaming ecosystem” value from buying from Steam vs buying from others. Thus other possible forms of value for gamers easilly exceed that, such as the freedom that comes from DRM-free offline installer. I’ll happilly forgo the 0.07% of my money that goes to help the Linux gaming ecosystem when buying from Steam for getting games in a format were I have full ownership rights.

That’s the point I was trying to make (but was too confusing about it).

Which reminds me of something, you probably started using Linux recently, some of your comments mention GoG Galaxy on Windows, and that only came out in 2014, so I must assume you migrated after that. Depending on when, you probably haven’t been around long enough to feel the impact Valve is having. So while in relative terms to their profit they might not be doing that much, in absolute terms they’re definitely doing more than every other player combined at least 10 times over. And I’m not naive in thinking that they’re doing it out of the kindness of their heart, but the improvements are real, and even if they do a 180 and completely shit on Linux their improvements are here to stay and I can vote with my wallet then.

Mate, I’ve been a gamer since the late 80s, before PCs and well before the Internet and Steam. I’ve also been using Linux since the early 90s and in fact decades of my software development career involved making (later designing) server-side software that ran on Linux (and later even designing and developing entire distributed computing software systems using thousands of Linux machines).

Linux was not in my main gaming PC until recently because until maybe 5 years ago it was a PITA for it and frankly I didn’t have the patience to, after hours working making and bugfixing software, come home and have to fix problems in games in Linux before I could have some R&R playing a game.

I’m coming from the very opposite end of experience you think I’m coming from: we were fighting in the 90s the very shit that Steam pushed with their store - remote authorization and tracking over the internet of how and when you can play your games.

Back in the early 90s there was no such things as phone-home DRM. You put your floppy or CD in your PC and installed the game. Then you played the game whenever you felt like. At most some DRM forced you to have the game install floppy or CD on a PC when playing and that was it. You used to be able to lend your PC games to your friends and even sell them second hand with nobody getting in the way, same as continued to happen to console games with physical distribution for years.

As the Internet became more common we started seeing phone-home DRM in games that came in CDs and DVDs.

Steam normalized that shit - phone-home DRM is a standard feature of the Steam API. It normalized reduced ownership rights. There were only two ways in which Steam did good:

• They made it possible to return digitally bought games after trying them. Mind you, they only did it after being forced to in Europe were most consumer laws gave people that right with games in physical media.
• With things like Early Access eventually they helped grow again an era of Indie game makers (the previous one having been the era of Shareware in the 90s which was actually when Valve came to be). This is IMHO the greatest thing they did for Gaming.

Steam’s tiny, tiny, trully miniscule amount of their revenue they spend helping the Linux ecosystem now, pales in comparison to everything they took from us gamers, and then your generation grew up in an era where you have pretty much no fucking rights and think Steam is so great because they do a tiny tiny amount for Linux to further their own strategical objectives.

Mate, Steam fucked you up as a gamer maybe even before you were born and you’re blind to it because you were never a gamer in the era when gamers had full ownership rights and way more freedom. Now you see them doing the very minimum they can to help something you like and you think they’re great, not having any idea of all Steam helped take away from you well before you became a gamer.

I dislike Steam exactly because I was already an avid gamer through the whole period when Steam did most of the work of de facto taking those rights away from us and getting people used to having very few ownership rights and even be thankful when Steam allowed them back a few of those rights (like the ability of sharing games with the rest of the family) which were standard when games came in physical media and you didn’t need to ask anybody or give them your personal information to enjoy.

Steam is to games as Amazon is to books and all it takes is to compare what people can do in practice with physical books (like lending them to friends or even pick them up from a library for free, read them and return them) vs Amazon’s heavy DRM locked e-books to get an idea of what we could do with games before Steam vs what we can do now with games from Steam.

PS: And, by the way, I’ve been boycotting Amazon for 2 decades, so it’s hardly as if I’m inconsistent in this.