Creating and managing a Steam styled storefront for libre games would
probably require:
1.) Someone to build and manage the software. This can be done by the company
or organization running it or hiring an outside contractor or salaried
employee. If people are downloading gigabits of data, then there are
additional server costs. What if you get a major release and the game is 20+
GB and your monthly bandwidth could be tens of thousands of dollars? Who pays
for that?
2.) Working with the developers. Developers want to get paid for their work
and while some will follow your viewpoint in making the assets totally libre
(without restriction and watermarks), there are others that want to protect
your work. What if hundreds or thousands of developers support your platform?
There has to be someone to handle the payments and human resource questions.
Once again, where does that $$$ come from? Especially if there is division
between the developers in following your idealistic scenario regarding art?
I think the biggest hurdle is protecting the non-libre assets. You could
offer the developer/publisher the option to watermark their data or leave it
in the wild as you suggest. You can't just hope for free and sharing culture
to survive if the developer is relying on sales of their product to keep it
going.
While people may steal music, those musicians still make money on concerts,
merchandise, and royalty checks for their music to be on the radio. An indie
developer doesn't have various outlets since software is software and while
they could panhandle on a crowd sourcing site or sell shirts on their
personal site, the real substance relies on their game.
