You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with and instead try to route around everybody and ship an untestable blob then that's your fault. The reason everyone tells you to just support Ubuntu LTS is because they are the only ones who have the resources to support all these random binary blobs for X amount of years, and that comes with all the pains associated with it, as you are well aware of.
Alternative view: distros don't provide a stable platform that developers can target.
Expecting every distro to have the exact same release & support cycle is nonsensical.
To contrast, if you take a Win32 game from 2003 that targets DirectX 9, it probably runs fine on the latest Windows releases. (You might have to enable some compatibility mode.)
"BUT BUT BUT if it's packaged with the distro it's no problem." Remember we're talking about proprietary applications (mostly games) here. Having these packaged with distros for years after the devs moved on to the next project is just a pipe dream.
It doesn't mean that there's no such way, but it does mean that attempting to find it is very risky. Making games is already a very high-risk, high-reward industry, do adding this amount of risk to the equation is advice that's insane for all but most successful companies.
One of the ways these companies can reduce risk is actually by using other proven open source components. If they won't even make an effort to try to expand this, then there will never be a well-understood way.
No, it's not - this is an absurd statement. Cloud services get most of their income from big and medium companies, billing tens and thousands of dollars in privately negotiated agreements. Digital Ocean and AWS don't live on single developers paying them $5. All their real money is on B2B.
Multiplayer games either get a flat subscription from all their playerbase, or rely on micropayments. Either way, they spend much less on account management where they interact with customers as individuals, and much more on analytics, where they measure and work with their customers in aggregate. These are completely different business models, that completely shape companies that operate on them.
> Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions.
Games are not solving any problems - they are entiertainment product. I've seen people who have tried to reason about games in the terms you're using, and it always yelded hillarious (but also sad) results.