I’m a 26 year old furry. my fursona is a fox. I’m agender; any pronouns are fine with me.
Terraria. Hands down. No other game I’ve ever played has had the same sheer amount of value for $10 fucking dollars.
A honorable mention would be Stellaris and good ol’ Skyrim. But their larger price tag definitely means that Terraria is greater value.
I think there’s many contributing factors. I actually was thinking about the same thing before I found your post, and the answer that came to mind outside of some of the ones people posted here was:
It feels like a breath of fresh air because we’re outside the Walled Garden. We’re not trapped on a platform who’s soul has been crushed and wrung for every penny’s worth like Reddit or Twitter. And we can see that there is a world on the Internet besides the Walled Garden and that fact is very liberating. It makes you feel like you don’t have to go back.
I swapped away from Windows about a year and a half ago. The last straw was them sticking ads in the OS. And from everything I’ve heard, they continue to boil the frog; they continue to add more and more telemetry and unasked for “features” and bloat the system more and more and more with every update. Even my own parents are growing tired of Windows; it’s a clunky, poorly optimized operating system that’s positively frustrating to use.
I will concede that not everything that runs on Windows will run on Linux. It’s true. But I severely disagree that Windows is “easier to use.” Of course, when you grow up on Windows, Linux has a learning curve. It’s different OS. But once I got past that? Nah, Linux is far easier and more intuitive in most cases.
Installing programs? Open your software manager and click a button.
Playing video games? Open Steam or Lutris and click a button. Occasionally you might need to tweak things, but you have to do the same on Windows sometimes, especially for older games!
I could go on but those are the biggest two examples that come to mind immediately.
As to another point you made, I personally gave up almost nothing. Destiny 2 and League of Legends don’t work, but I quit league before fgsh added Vanguard and neither of these games want me. That isn’t my fault, and it isn’t a short coming in Linux’s fault, it’s the devs being assholes.
In spite of this, I do acknowledge some people would have to give up more than me, and for some people that’s too much, and that’s valid! I hope one day they truly get a choice.