Most investors are going to care about what kind of return they're making. It's the capital they provide that pays the paychecks.

Maybe that's the problem. Valve did pretty well for themselves, even before steam, without putting investors in charge of their direction.

If you want to do volunteer work on video games -- I have -- then that's not an issue.

I have indeed worked on my own and others projects without financial gain but that's orthogonal to my point.

But typically games are made by paid workers, and those workers won't work without their paychecks.

The games industry is full of chronically under-compensated workers. Again, nowhere did I advocate for people to work for free for commercial enterprises or anything of the like.

So they're going to need to attract investors.

That's a pretty good example of the False Dichotomy fallacy. There are numerous alternatives that don't involve prioritizing profit over the product or service that a business produces.