The game, the movie, or the keyboard?

I haven’t looked into it so I’m just speculating, but I assumed Meta is selling their headsets at a loss to get users into their ecosystem, while Valve would want to make some profit from each sale. Looking at other high end PC VR headsets from Pimax, Varjo and HTC they also tend to be on the pricier side. The Deck was IMO surprisingly cheap, but I guess Valve probably thinks that it’ll lead to more games sold on Steam, even though it isn’t locked into the platform. Of course it would have been nice if Deckard was cheaper but I think €1200 is reasonable in this day and age. Though personally I think I would’ve preferred if it didn’t have standalone capabilities, if that had made it a few hundred cheaper…

I think there’s been a lot of inflation since the Index was released. As a very crude comparison, the Index was released roughly in between Nvidia’s 20- and 30-series, and it seems like launch MSRPs have gone up 30-40% for the current 40- and 50-series. So if Valve only increases their VR headsets by 10% in the same time period, it could be seen as having become relatively cheaper :)

Still just unconfirmed “leaks”, a.k.a. rumours, but according to this article on uploadvr it sounds like people are claiming that it’s going to be a standalone headset.

Personally I’ve pretty adamant that I’d prefer a PC VR headset, since I already own a powerful gaming computer. But on the other hand, SteamVR always had so poor performance in Linux for me, so it is the one thing I still dual boot for.

An increase of 172000 monthly active Linux users (based on this)

I think Microsoft and their partners have been dreaming about turning PCs into fully locked down platforms for a long time, completely unrelated to gaming. Hardware DRM including display devices and cables, and only running “trusted” software is the end goal.

I think the problem is that game publishers also want the cheapest and laziest solutions. What EA (and others) are doing now are basically “give us full control of your computer so we can do whatever we want” with their kernel level anti-cheats. Server side anti-cheat requires more processing that they have to pay for, and requires more work to develop heuristics and other algorithms to detect cheaters.

Would be interesting to know why some people downvoted this comment, if they think there’s some reason to not play The Finals on Linux. I’ve only done the tutorial so far, and the gameplay seems somewhat similar to Apex, it’s also f2p, and uses EAC so currently no issues with anti-cheat. Might not look like an indie game but it feels like a decent alternative to Apex.

Seems like my “fuck EA I’m not giving them money ever again” policy is beginning to pay off :)

I bought a Razer Basilisk 3 because it was the only mouse where I could reach both thumb buttons with the fingertip-ish grip I use. Wasn’t fully supported by Linux software at first, but worst case I could program it on Windows which I had on a dual boot at the time. Now that I can use it with Polychromatic and OpenRazer it even works better on Linux. On Windows the Razer software won’t let me save individual LED colours to the mouse, and needs to be running all the time in order to do that…

My guess is that Microsoft will provide their own kernel level anticheat to game developers, using a secure API which will be impossible to emulate with Wine etc.

It did alright, don’t think I saw that many obvious cheaters in BF1. BF5 would occasionally have obvious cheaters, but I would hope they get banned eventually just because it’s over the top (shooting people through walls, infinite ammo, perfect aim). Difficult to say with more subtle cheats, but I suppose if they’re indistinguishable from players who are just good at the game then I think most people won’t ever notice.

On the flip side I got permabanned from multiplayer in BF5 after EA falsely accused me of cheating, though I suppose that could’ve happened with any kind of anti-cheat, and could’ve been fixed by having half-competent support.

I think FairFight is the old anti-cheat, which at least used to be server side only.

Unfortunately most Battlefield games worked fine with Wine/Proton for years since EA used server side AC, so they already have our money.

I’ve never got my Vive to work well in Linux, even though I’m using X which supposedly still is better for gaming that Wayland.

What is the solution?

My guess is that Microsoft wants provide some kind of kernel level anti-cheat, possibly directly integrated with directx, and it will use cryptography which will make it impossible to emulate with Wine/Proton.

So sad that they didn’t fix the AC until the game had been around for years, I would’ve loved to play it in the beginning when the player skill was more varied. Tried to get into it when Linux was allowed but it seemed like mostly the try-hards were still playing. Had some good games but it was a bit too sweaty for my friends at times.

I tried playing it through Wine during season 2 or 3, the game worked flawlessly but you would get kicked after 1-5 minutes due to missing AC.

The first game was named Battlefield 1942, so technically there hasn’t been a “1” in the series before this :) It came out in 2016 so it’s not really new, but I bought it last year and played it on Linux for a few hours with friends, and it still has an active player base.

Have they stated that they’re going to support Linux or at least Proton/Wine? I did a quick search on the game’s Steam forum and it sounded like it doesn’t work currently.

Hopefully, yes. But I’m sure MS and some hardware manufacturers salivate at the thought of being able to create a completely locked down computer platform. I own neither, but aren’t both iPhone and Playstation users locked into the manufacturers’ respective stores? Those seems to be perfectly legal in the EU.