Right, you’re trying to make a “who are the good guys” judgement using money as the metric …

Then let’s do some cold hard business analysis on all this shit:

For starters, Valve does very little of the work in projects like Wine compared to the work done by voluntaries working on those Open Source projects. I vaguely remember that they had one person full time on it.

Further, judging by their yearly profits (more than $1 billion as leaked in 2021) they clearly “invest” very very little of the fee “onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc.” otherwise the profits would be much less.

Imagine how far something like Wine would go with just half a year of Valve’s profits, enough to pay for a year of work of around 5,000 devs here in Europe (depends on the country - I’m using $100,000 per year per worker which is actually well above average dev pay in all of EE)

More Maths: say you would have to PAY directly for the software that lets you run games in Linux. Let’s put a fair value per copy for that at €200 - well above a consumer price and actually a business price for software, though not a corporate price. Let’s further say that the average price you pay per game is €40. Last but not least, lets simplify our math by saying that Valve paid for the entire development of all that open source software, which is nowhere near the case, and lets ignore taxes as they vary a lot from country to country.

Valve takes 30% commission per game sold, so even in this wildly pro-Valve imaginary scenario were Valve does all the work in those open source projects, if your game collection in Valve is more than 17 games, then you’re already losing. Any further game you buy is just you delivering value to Valve for no extra value in return as you’ve already paid for the value you get from those open source projects.

The reality is that Valve aren’t the good guys - if they were their profits would be way less because they would be truly “investing the fee onto improvements to wine, dxvk, FEX, as well as the features they offer like Steam client, cloud saves, etc.” as you imagine they are. In fact the most reasonable explanation for them putting a small bit of their billionaire revenues into those projects is that it’s a small strategical investment to reduce their dependency on Microsoft and the risks associated with Microsoft doing like Apple does with iOS and Google is on its way to do with Android - forcing all sales of software that runs in Windows to go through a Microsoft store. Valve is not a charity: they send a little bit of money that way that just keeps the projects rolling with volunteer work without actually putting so much money into it that they basically take over because it’s the optimal business strategy that minimizes the cost for them whilst helping secure their market share against such a move by Microsoft.

Valve are there to make money for their owner and all they do is to make money for their owner, not help out the likes of you and me.

Mind you, neither are GOG or any of the other for-profit game stores the “good guys”: they’re all in it for themselves, not for us and anything they do which is good for us they do it because it’s good for them and would otherwise not do it.

Ultimately if you really want to make this about “value”, then you have to figure out how much “value” you derive from each feature that each store offers you - so how much are cloud saves worth it to you, how much is having a game store launcher in Linux and its features worth it for you, how much are offline game installers and no-DRM worth it for you and so on.

Personally I see little value in store launchers and cloud saves and more value in offline game installers and no-DRM, so my value consideration makes me lean towards buying more from GOG than from Steam. Yet I will still buy from Steam if a game is in Steam but not GOG and the value of the game for me is enough to exceed this imbalance, which is why I have a small collection of games in Steam - I actually tend make purchasing decisions based on value considerations since I have a background in Finance and as a business owner so naturally look at products and services as something that delivers value to the user.

However, it’s perfectly valid that other people see different value for themselves in these things and that adds up to a preference for Steam over GOG - the value an individual derives from features of products and services is a personal thing.

Let’s however not deceive ourselves by looking at small strategic investments of massive for-profit companies and think they’re doing it for us.

PS: By the way, curiously of the 3 games you listed 2 of them I bought directly from the game makers.