[Proleps]

Most open source/free software(free as in liberty) is free as in beer. It gets payed for by donations and/or big sponsors. It has no hidden costs. Not everything is available as open source/free software, but it is enough have a usable computer and even some games.

[giovannibajo1]

The difference is that such software goes through multi-year evolution and usage (be it bash or OpenOffice or kernel) so it makes sense for a company to invest on feature X that's missing for them, and get everything else for free.

On the other hand, in the game market, most games are a one-off experience with a very short lifetime (excluding MMO games). So there is no way they could be constructed through subsequent donations and evolutions.

Add to this the fact that open source communities are only made of programmers (because they are the ones benefiting most from the network effect and from incremental integration of software components), while games require other kind of professionals. Eg: volunteer designers in OSS world are mostly non existent; most of them are on the payroll of some sponsor.