AAA games rely on a single purchase fee for revenue. Once sales taper off because the game isn't hot and new anymore, there's nothing to be gained from further investment. (Ever notice how games steadily decrease in price the first few years after release?)
Uber gets recurring revenue from their app, so expecting them to provide updates is like expecting a rental property owner to maintain the property--entirely reasonable. Expecting a game developer to release patches years later is like a homeowner calling up the original real estate developer and demanding improvements. Not gonna happen.
(With the obvious caveat that homeowners are allowed to do the work themselves without the original developer's permission, but this about economics, not the absurdities of software licensing.)
This advice is only strictly true for AAA games. From what I've read from the more indie side of the games industry, there seems to be a common thread where the more time spent working on features for a game, the fatter the long tail became, and the spikier the stegosaurus tail tended to become. There seems to be advice that simply adding support for random steam features lead to sales (think things like trading cards, achievements, badges...). Language support can be a really unexpected big one as well. What's also counter intuitive is that porting games to other systems tends to increase existing sales channels.
Now, it's not entirely clear from what I've read, if working on all these extended features for a game have the highest expected value, since it really is a hit driven industry, but they seem to be lower effort work, and are definitely worth it from a lowered risk payout point of view, particularly for a small dev shop that can't risk too many failures.
If their one shot release isn't good enough, they deserve all the flak they are getting. I do have empathy with them getting frustrated, but the root cause is their approach.
The original post in the thread basically said that Linux support is easy if you just make a new release every time the libraries you depend on make a breaking change. (Or a GCC update breaks binary compatibility for everything.)
Even if an initial release of a Linux game is flawless, it tends to stop working with the next major distro release. (Unless it's statically linked to everything, or uses something like Flatpack to distribute all its own dependencies. Both options have their own disadvantages.)
You also have to understand that, from a business perspective, game companies have much more in common with a Hollywood studio than a normal software company.
Movies don't get patches. Occasionally they get re-releases for new formats, but at that point consumers are expected to go pay for it again.
None of that applies to today's slot machine^H^H mobile game companies that rely on in-app purchases, or MMOs that rely on monthly subscriptions. The former would never survive in the Linux world anyway, and the latter are often quite successful on Linux, even if it's only in the form of official support for Wine/Cedega.
I understand the business aspect that the Hollywood model is possibly incompatible with games in free software systems (i.e. "Linux"). There are other business models to make games, though.
The problems are real and I think it is natural that they are there, because the movie model is suboptimal. I see similar pains with Android device manufacturers and updates to released devices. That pain is because they are doing it wrong (i.e. not mainlining and doing things binary). That pain is a feature, not a bug. It is a constant reminder that the approach is wrong.
I'm not sure about this one. Compare Ferals and Ubers approach as two data points.