You don't need to ship distro-specific packages. You could ship a tarball with a statically linked executable. Take a look at the Humble Bundle, for example. Every game published in the bundles is cross-platform, and work great Linux regardless of distro choice.
Ah, never thought about that. As good old DOS games were, everything contained within program/directory itself. Interesting, makes using some of the external code a bit harder due to licenses though.
