Lol as if there is oodles of money to be gained from hosting a store like that on Linux. We can see all these steam game publishers desperate to release games to a community that is rather famous fo being cheapskates.
Also, snap existing doesn't hinder flatpak or appimage or debs or rpms.
Since when are linux users "famously considered cheapstakes"? I was under the impression it's quite the opposite!
Of course, all generalizations are just that. But if anything, the linux gaming community has many passionate people more than willing to pay for games on their platform.
Most game developers don't port/build for linux due to the lower market share. A way simpler explanation that obeys basic market rules.
OTOH I know more than a fair share of people who exclusive pirate all the games they play on Windows. I also don't know many people who bought a license to windows itsellf.
> release games to a community that is rather famous fo being cheapskates
Wrong, if you look at game sales that are donation-based, like the humble bundle (they used to publish average price per platform but I haven't found recent data), you'll see that Linux users actually pay significantly more (voluntarily).
They aren't going for a model like Steam where they sell software to end-users. The idea is to get enterprises hooked on using snaps to distribute their software internally, and then charge them for private repository hosting.
Then fair play for Canonical to get revenue streams from enterprise?
From my perspective the primary motivation seems rather simple in minimizing the maintenance costs/testing of having to publish software for 5-6 distributions.
That to me seems more plausible than evil mustache twisting capitalist reasons.
Highly doubtful they'd make any material amount of revenue from selling software on Linux since a lot of Linux's user base prefer to only use free and open source software.
1. Get market share with free product.
2. Start charging once monopoly is achieved.
3. Profit!