As a Linux user, I don't like to buy commercial games for Linux. I did participate in the recent Humble Bundle, but I'd known about and decided against buying a

As a Linux user, I don't like to buy commercial games for Linux. I did participate in the recent Humble Bundle, but I'd known about and decided against buying at least three of the bundled games previously. If I buy a book or a CD or a DVD that I like, I can be pretty sure that in five or ten years if I want to experience it again, or share it with a friend. If I acquire a Free Software game that I like, the same applies - I can enjoy it for years to come. Even if they're not Free, games that are written to a VM can last if there's a Free runtime for them, such as ScummVM or the various text-adventure interpreters. Some games are written for hardware that's simple and standard enough to be a de-facto VM, such as older game consoles (NES, SNES) and PCs (Apple II, Commodore 64). Some games are popular enough that people have written sufficiently-similar re-implementations (FreeCiv, Neverball, Lockjaw). Most commercial games probably won't be around, though. Linux has never been particularly good about binary ocmpatibility, and even when it's possible, the odds that then-modern systems will be set up to handle old software is slim. Of the two Humble Bundle games I've played with so far, neither has working sound and one actually hangs on exit in the sound code - and those games are comparatively recent! Compared to other forms of entertainment available to me, commercial games seem to have a much, much shorter shelf-life, and hence seem to be a worse use of my entertainment dollar.