> a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them

(raises hand)

  > Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility.

its also the exact opposite of what an os is supposed to do: provide a base and abstraction for applications/programs to run stably; if apps breaks all the time whats the point?

I agree with everything here. Apple has a perverse incentive to create support churn for games and blame developers, but overall the strategy doesn't work on Mac. It only really panned out on mobile, where gambling apps and gacha games take up Apple's mantle in exchange for access to a larger audience. Which is a rich parallel to Apple's story about the App Store "protecting consumers" and the other knee-jerk DSA/DMA apologia.

> They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton

> Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.

Well, Valve steered away from the cowpie this time. Proton is a concession that Windows won, and the equivalent for Linux (Steam Linux Runtime) is still a great idea but goes relatively unused. Valve went to where the gamers were and met them halfway, which is why the Steam Deck became an instant hit despite costing more than an iPad. Proton could be optimized to fix games that were objectively broken on DirectX (see: Elden Ring, Fallout 3/New Vegas) without developers lifting a finger to port anything. It gave customers a real alternative to suffering through Windows and the Windows runtime.

I personally love development on Linux, and I'm making a few hobby games on NixOS right now. The dev experience wasn't the problem for the original Steam Machine or for macOS either, it's the concentration of game devs, modders and players that all treat Win32 and DX11 as the lingua-franca of gaming. Valve threw in the towel on native ports, and it enabled them to focus on curb-cutting efforts that made Linux stick.