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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.
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.