Old launcher no longer working

[HereInPlainSight]

Its a can that doesn't need to be opened, thus the take companies like Epic and Bungie are taking against supporting linux.

Implying that Epic hasn't been doing everything in its power to claw at Steam's user base. Absolutely no one should be surprised that Epic are doing what they can to not support something that would benefit the Steam Deck, since it would benefit Steam.

No one at Square Enix announced support of their game on the Steam Deck. That it 'just worked' is a tribute to those Wine developers who put in time to make it so, but it's not Square Enix's problem. The fact that a simple change in the launcher, which works for everybody except those who are running unsupported on Linux and Steam Deck is a problem for Wine and Steam developers to correct.

If you desire support, you need to convince both Steam and Square Enix that it is in their best financial interests to provide that support.

Chicken and egg problem, you get no support, so prove you're worth supporting, when you can't get support to be able to prove you're worth supporting. Nice.

But you know what? Let's just play the game for a minute anyway, just for fun. Let's just use some easily available numbers. Steam estimates roughly one percent of players are on Linux currently. Cool, we'll ignore the hardware that's on back order for a few financial quarters, still, that comes with Linux. It's probably not relevant anyway. A quick google estimates XIV as having 35.8 million players as of late December 2021. (The site it sourced its data from says the current subscriber count is currently higher, but I'm trying to math this out in your favor, so I'm sticking with the lower number.) So, one percent of that would still be roughly 358 thousand players. Just to give you the benefit of the doubt, that there's as minimal a financial interest as possible here, let's assume every Linux player is using the cheapest subscriptions, $12.99, though for simplicity's sake, I'm just going to do the math with ~13 / month. The number comes out to $4,654,000 per month from theoretical Linux players. Ahh, chump change, I guess. Not worth looking at.

But hey, let's go a step further. Let's just say that it's not even one percent of subscribers playing on Linux. Let's say it's half that. Half a percent of players, playing Linux. We can just cut that four million down to $2,327,000, still, per month.

We're talking over two million dollars a month over a launcher problem. I think they could afford to take a month of our theoretical existence's money, even half of our theoretical existence's money, and fix what is strictly a launcher-only problem.

[DPZ2]

We're talking over two million dollars a month over a launcher problem. I think they could afford to take a month of our theoretical existence's money, even half of our theoretical existence's money, and fix what is strictly a launcher-only problem.

Operating income (mostly subscriptions and microtransactions) from 1 April 2021 through 30 December 2022 for the entire Digital Entertainment division (MMO, HD Games, Mobile/Browser games) was 49.4 billion Yen (about $425 million dollars). Divide by 9 and you get an average of $47 million per month. With 35.8 million players at $15/month the operating income for the MMO group alone would be $537 million per month, not $47 million per month. Your estimate is off by at least a factor of 10. So no, there aren't 35.8 million subscribers per month. (For reference, WoW at its peak had something like 12 million subscribers.)

There are 37 million 'subscribers' listed in the last set of population charts I've seen. I've also seen 25 million 'registered users', which is probably more accurate, since 'registered users' do not have to maintain active subscriptions. SE reports the number of players based on accounts, not current subscriptions.

Live population statistics appear to hover around 2 million since the WoW explosion. One percent of 2 million active players would be 20,000 players.I find 2 million actively subscribed players to be a better number.

So 20,000 players contributing $15/month would be $300,000 per month, based on an income of $30 million per month for the entire actively subscribed user base. Not chump change, but faaaaaaar from you $2 million per month guesstimate.

There is no way for Square Enix to determine whether that population of players is 20,000 or 40,000 or 2,000. You can create an argument using the fuzzy math that both you and I have used here, but you need solid proof of the numbers, rather than mere conjecture.

It is far easier for the Linux community to do what it has always done for games that are not officially supported by a company -- put their own wrappers around the code and fix any problems that come up themselves. I know it's not what you want to hear, but that's the way things work.

It is entirely possible that SE developers have already heard about this, and they may make small changes to accommodate players in this position, but there is no way you can demand those changes until SE adds official support for Steam Deck and/or Linux. Until now, you've been working with a duct-taped workaround rather than playing on a supported platform.