EA needed a scapegoat it seems
FYI - the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it’s stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]
As someone on Mastodon wisely pointed out: There aren’t enough Linux gamers to invest resources in supporting them properly, but there are enough using it to cheat to actively block them?
I’m so torn about stories like this and GTA online. Because on one hand, people play these games, and people won’t switch to Linux if they can’t play them.
But on the other hand, I just cannot give a single fuck about live service trash like this. I struggle to understand how people play games products like these, and I absolutely don’t understand why anyone would waste their time cheating in them. And yet they’re absurdly popular.
Despite gaming being such a big hobby for me, I feel so disconnected from what the average gamer values.
I occasionally think back to Rocket League, which I loved in its earlier days. I put close to 100 hours into it, which is a lot for one game for me. Then they added lootboxes, leaned harder into the competitive space, and just completely sucked the soul out of it. And yet it’s still hugely popular.
I just don’t get it.
Funny you mention that, I just installed it on my Steam Deck a few days ago to give it another try. Casual is not casual anymore, everyone’s a competitive try hard now. I remember when it was fun :(
Rocket League has always been marketed as a competitive game. Obviously, if you haven’t played in a long time, the now low level players in casual look like tryhards, but that happens in every competitive activity as time goes on. The requirement to be a “bad player” goes up as the “good players” get better.
Used to play Apex Legends a lot, so could give some reasons why.
A core part of Apex’s monetization is “keep the core gameplay F2P accessible and make super expensive skins for those who can pay”. The game would put items worth around 300$ multiple times in a single season. After that as long as the gameplay’s solid; F2P players wouldn’t find a reason to not play; and whales could flex their 300$ death box to all these players interacting with them. Hell, give F2P players tasks that take too long to unlock new skins; and maybe they’ll toss a few bucks in too. You’ve got yourself a neat money loop, and players are happy.
As for cheating; most people i see cheating does it as a way of doing the unexpected in a video game. Cheating is not enjoyable to most if you do it all the time; but the cheat providers offer cheats with shorter time spans to hook the people that want to do just that. I recall an interview done with a cheat developer for a different yet similarly popular game, and they’ve said most of their sales come through these.
While I appreciate that cheating is a problem in most games, I still think these Linux ban waves are just the companies trying to appear to the complaining playerbase that they’re putting effort into a solution even though it won’t make a big difference.
Apex was one or the earliest games to support competitive multiplayer on Linux. While I hate EA for a lot of reasons, I couldn’t have fully switched to Linux years ago if Apex wasn’t playable because all the other games I played were and still aren’t.
Seems like my “fuck EA I’m not giving them money ever again” policy is beginning to pay off :)
