Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

Steam gets all my gaming budget, as I really try to stick to Linux.

If it ain't on steam, I don't play it, and they don't get my money.

It’s sad to me that you and many others have this opinion, which is fine, but Valve takes a significant tax from small companies while gamers, a cheap demographic, complain about the price of games.

Games don’t need to be on Steam to be good.

The issue kinda is on Linux we’re playing windows games. There is significant work done by valve on that proton compatability layer, so a lot of people on Linux want to support that. Without that us Linux users have a lot harder time gaming.

There are some other launchers for epic games and gog (heroic game launcher I’ve used). It worked for me for a the couple games I tried (gloomhaven and disco elysium) but I’m using the proton wine I which I think was put out there by valve/steam.

This I agree with. If the game developer can produce a Linux binary I am happy to buy on other stores (I prefer GOG). They usually do _not_ and I don’t want to spend time to wrap and configure windows apps to run on Linux. You can consider the 30% steam fee outsourcing the multi-platform “porting”.

Many gamedevs actually stopped building a specific Linux binary because the Proton compatibility version was so much faster and required almost zero effort from them =)

If 1% of your users generate 30% of your bug reports it makes sense to outsource the job to valve.