I was rhetorically speaking, so if you feel targeted, it’s you projecting some sort of guilt, home slice.

All it would take is for GabeN to die and a corporate takeover for Valve to change their tune. They are a corporation pursuing profit, not some fucking benevolent NGO, so stop idolizing them.

Both of those heavily rely on Wine and especially Proton, which is funded by significant donations from Valve software, so you are arguing a trivial cost versus a subsidized cost.

Technically the OS isn’t free: Valve pays a team of developers to maintain the SteamOS and also donates money to Arch and Ubuntu foundations as well as to the Proton and Wine dev teams as well as contributes code to the linux kernel. All costing them money, that they eat but could easily find a way to charge the end user

What games were taken down? Are they preserved somewhere? Anybody know?

It feels like they tried to make a PG/kids version of Red Dead Redemption with aliens, poorly written characters and a glitch-infested game engine as cheap as legally possible without being called slave labor.