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Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy... and then it's only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can't it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It's so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic... which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Well, you still don't get to play it, and you sure as hell aren't getting a refund, so I'm not entirely sure how that changes the situation at all.
... because now your weird obsession with blaming Steam for all things going wrong with gaming has less ground to stand on?
Because not having a game available is not having a game available. You still, and I can't believe I have to type this twice, don't get to play the stupid game.
For the record, I blamed Steam for nothing here. Some guy said he feels more assured that Steam will keep Linux compatibility, I pointed out that this is not the case. It's not even Steam's fault, compatibility is being dropped either for technical reasons or due to anticheat, and there is no indication that it will be any different with Epic going forward.
What they said, exactly:
Emphasis mine.
They didn't say it won't happen. They said they have far more confidence that it'll be much less likely to happen. And that they have a reasonable expectation of refund if the developer pulls that.
There are no guarantees here, but Valve has put a lot of time and effort into making Linux games work, and Epic has not. No, they can't stop developers from pulling those stunts, but they're no more happy about it than we are and, from everything I've been seeing, are actively working on getting developers to stop doing that.
Also, the anticheat excuse is mostly a lie, the ones Destiny 2, Rust, and Apex Legends use are compatible with Linux, and just require, as I understand it, checking a box and including a file in a specific spot, so those are just outright anti Linux for the sake of hating Linux and Linux gamers.
Yeah, but that's not a reasonable expectation, is it? Because it's happened multiple times and nobody got anything refunded.
So there is no meaningful incentive and no reasonable expectation, demonstrably.
And, for the record, the Apex Legends guys at least didn't say they couldn't support Linux or the Deck. They used to, in fact. They actively pulled support because they said they saw disproportionately more cheating under those platforms. I have no idea if that's true, but it's certainly what they said. It sure doesn't sound like that'll change anytime soon, unless Windows enacts the same restrictions on Kernel-level access or Linux develops some equivalent.
I'd say that's probably a distant priority over, I don't know, getting decent Nvidia support, but knowing the way Linux progresses that may absolutely not be true.
Well, of the three I mentioned, 2 are free to play, and the other they did issue refunds for Linux players... Which ones were you thinking of?
Free to play games do take your money, though. Especially Destiny 2, which is a free to play game that happens to cost about sixty bucks a year. And Rust did offer a refund to users, but not because Valve made them do it (my understanding is they had to actually negotiate with Valve how that would even work). They issued a refund because they announced a native Linux client and then backed out of that promise.
So yeah, no, I don't see what reasonable expectation for refunds there is, I don't see Valve having ever mentioned that Steam Deck compatibility being rolled back or removed would be grounds for a refund (at least outside their time limited no-cause refund policy) or that the reaction to compatibility changes with Proton or Linux would be any different across Epic, GOG or Valve at this point. Things may change if the Deck platform gets a lot bigger in the future and Valve decide to push for it as a closed environment, but that's not where we are.
To your question, the other big game that comes to mind having done the same thing as Apex would be GTA V, which to my knowledge is still listed as "Unsupported" due to adding anticheat, despite initially working on Deck. And I guess you could count the FIFA franchise if you see it as a single game, because I think there was at least one of them supported on Deck before they rolled out Anticheat and all the newer ones have not been supported.
So it's definitely not a one-off thing, and there has been no action from Valve.
No, you see it's different because Steam is love and Gabe is perfection, you know?
The level of quasi-religious fervor is... kind of scary. Especially given that it's over this one billionare techbro. I mean, good for them, they have a great product and a better understanding of how to make money with only light enshittification, but still...
If and when they do something shitty, I'll be right there with you calling them out for it, but I don't see anything here that fits that description
Well, they refused to offer refunds for a long time after people like EA and GOG had already implemented it, and only relented when forced by regulators. And they screwed up their Green Light process for a long time despite every developer telling them it sucked. There's the ongoing use of loot boxes and monetized UGC, of course. Your tolerance for that one may vary.
I think Valve makes very good software and good hardware, and they have a way better handle on where they can squeeze users versus side with them than pretty much anybody else in the industry.
But, you know, they're a corpo ran by a reclusive techbro, they're still frequently sketchy.
Which is also very much true of GOG and CD Projekt, for the record.