No. I remember trying to play Batman Arkham Asylum back in the day and it was a pain in the ass. First Steam. Then it wanted me to log in to some silly Windows Game system. Why? It's a single player game and I bought it via Steam, where I'm already logged in. Anyway, I couldn't register and got tons of errors until I finally managed it. Then it wanted me to download a ton of updates (almost as much as the original download) over a slow internet connection. It's a single player game, for crying out loud -- let me choose whether I want the updates! I had downloaded the game the day before, I had a couple of spare hours and wanted to play the goddamn game (spoiler: I wasn't able to that day).

Had I downloaded the warezed version, I wouldn't have needed: a- Steam, b- the Windows whatever login, c- the updates. Best experience goes to: pirated version. (Had I wanted the patches: pirates eventually release updated versions, too).

For the record, these days I do like Steam, though I far prefer GOG and DRM-free games (when I have the time to play games at all, that is. Which is almost never).

There's even repackers who can get the file size down to less than a third of the original size.

I buy all my games these days but there are people who do lots of thankless work and I'm not sure why.

Many enjoy exploring the limits of what is possible.

I can't play games that I've purchased because of DRM. In some cases because I've switched to linux and the security breaching rootkits that they want me to install don't work correctly there. In other cases it's very old games for which the authentication servers no longer exist. It's a real problem.

>Linux I feel sorry for Linux users but you must know game companies don't really care about you guys.

Steam and Proton beg to disagree. The biggest blocker "left" for games right now is the "Easy Anti Cheat" employed by titles such as Rainbow 6: Siege

Unfortunately Epic is notoriously Anti-Linux, from their CEO down. So the status of EAC under Linux is a giant question mark

That's most anti-cheats, not just Epic's. BattleEye has taken it a step further and even blocked virtual machines. Even Valve's own VAC has issues with Proton: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3225

I use BattleEye on my gaming VM to play Mount and Blade Warband without any issues...

Watch out then. BattleEye has started banning VMs: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/hts1o1/be_is_banning_...

Seems to be speculation and anecdata but thanks for the link all the same, wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be true. Disappointing. Haven't played multiplayer in a few weeks so I could be in for an unpleasant surprise next time...

That is just Valve securing their future, and even then it never goes higher than 2%.

It is quite telling that studios rather target ChromeOS or Android than any proper Linux distribution, the days of Loki are long gone.

The anti cheat R6 using is Battleye instead of EAC.

And the reason anticheat did not works with wine is mostly because they use kernel modules, which you obviously can't run a windows kernel module on linux kernel.

If you run it in a VM, most of them will just fine with it.

(But the Battleye will give you a big "fxxk you")

Of all the games companies I have ever worked for, Linux support has honestly never really come up, except, perhaps in some side "I wonder if we can" R&D project.

Granted I've only worked in smaller studios - but anecdotally, OP is correct - game companies don't care about Linux users, high expense for such a small market share.

Which is kind of funny its very difficult to pirate games on linux but easy to pay for a pretty good selection of games.

Windows has a larger selection but its also incredibly trivial to pirate.

I've never bought more games than when I had no windows install at all.

You can trivially play Windows games on Linux thanks to Steam Play and proton. I've done so since 2018. Most games that don't work are broken because of DRM. Some more are broken because of some minor thing like missing video codec but very few games actually use proprietary codecs like WMV. The rest just work.

I didn't have a good experience with it in 2020 after much fiddling I couldn't get proton to work for anything despite having reasonable success with wine and crossover.

Maybe it works better on Ubuntu.

> Most people don't even notice DRM

Just because they don't know what to blame, doesn't mean they don't notice it.

A prominent example is performance degradation with Denuvo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_DD-txK9_Q

Those who don't notice it are those who aren't aware of what DRM even means. As long as it's not multiplayer, legit repacks and cracked releases are almost always an improvement to a DRM'd release unless the game's official release (on which the cracked release is based on) itself is buggy.

>This is stuff you only read on certain forums. Most people don't even notice DRM

I can give this a "me too" to an extant. I use to be like, "Rah rah! Down with DRM!" years ago, but at some point I kinda forgot that DRM even exists—it just no longer comes up in my lifestyle at all.

This thread is an example of this. I saw the thread title and was like, "Oh right...DRM and cracking games...right right right..." that is a thing that