Old launcher no longer working

[DPZ2]

So you might call people who buy a game on steam and expect play it on steam deck entitled, or try to put down linux players, but they will look at your weightless argument here and not think twice about your false opinion putting them down.

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.

[darkvalefor]

Seems to me if an unsupported platform doesn't work after any changes to the game a developer makes on supported platforms, it's up to the supporters/developers of the unsupported platform to make things right.

There are fixes being proposed and partial workarounds, which is pretty much what the Wine community has been used to for almost three decades.

What's different, apparently, is the sense of entitlement to something that was never promised by the software vendor.

And that is totally fair, thats why in my original post I ask if there are any future plans to support the Steam Deck.

I can understand not supporting Linux as the userbase is very small and would not really mean too much of a benefit even if the change would be almost effortless, but the Steam Deck will probably have more users and in the near future could bring about the same amount of users as the macOS platform so it would be interesting if they decided to support it.

One concern tho is the security risk of using an obsolete and unsupported APi but we will see what happens and hopefully we get a solution from wine devs.

[junmoxiao]

can understand not supporting Linux as the userbase is very small and would not really mean too much of a benefit even if the change would be almost effortless

The latest Steam statistics show that Mac users are about twice as many as Linux users. We are talking about a factor of 2, not a factor of 10+, and the devs think Mac users are enough to be worth supporting. Also when you are talking about subscription numbers of tens of millions of people, even 1% of that is still hundreds of thousands of users. Please don't encourage this false narrative that the Linux userbase is so small as to be negligible, especially in a context where Mac is already supported.

[darkvalefor]

The latest Steam statistics show that Mac users are about twice as many as Linux users. We are talking about a factor of 2, not a factor of 10+, and the devs think Mac users are enough to be worth supporting. Also when you are talking about subscription numbers of tens of millions of people, even 1% of that is still hundreds of thousands of users. Please don't encourage this false narrative that the Linux userbase is so small as to be negligible, especially in a context where Mac is already supported.

That is actually surprising as i was uninformed about the numbers but if the Linux playerbase is already half of the macOS one, Steam is very soon going to push that over the macOS playerbase, which means it’s already more than worth it supporting Proton and hopefully it will happen soon

[darkvalefor]

That is actually surprising as i was uninformed about the numbers but if the Linux playerbase is already half of the macOS one, Steam is very soon going to push that over the macOS playerbase, which means it’s already more than worth it supporting Proton and hopefully it will happen soon

I meant Steam Deck

[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.

[HereInPlainSight]

Words

Hey, you've got a better source. Great. In the end, as you said, the numbers themselves aren't entirely significant -- because it's always going to be fuzzy math. In the end, the primary thing to take away was that it won't be an insignificant amount of money, if you're going to cry about 'proving we're worth it.'

And again, to highlight, we're not demanding anything. We're just asking to not make things harder. Fixes, in fact, are all already available, for all instances. However, as users, we'd prefer to have cleaner solutions to offer other new players. To make the experience smoother. Not necessarily for ourselves -- but we do like to have a nice, working, easy solution for newcomers. We like a cleaner experience for users just like, I'd assume, anyone would like to. Can we work around these problems? Yes. We already have. Even better ones are still being worked on. But again, cleaner solutions make for better experiences, not Frankensteining old tech that's not even used by the people who made it any more. Frankly, the solution for playing on Linux hasn't been 'duct taped.' It is, in fact, smooth as hell for years now -- so long as you're not running a steam license, specifically, since Tuesday's maintenance.

Appearently the launcher is ignoring the Browser option in the config file after a recent update. This means the game just turned unplayable on Proton which makes me wonder if SquareEnix has any plans to support Proton or the Steam Deck.

Another thing that is quite concerning is that the browser seems to rely on Internet Explorer, which ends extended support in 3 months.

Are there any plans to fix the launcher in the future?

Not a demand.

This of course has made the game completely unplayable on Proton and I've had no choice but to unsub for the first time in years.

Not a demand either, though certainly a note that there are paying Linux customers who will not pay for a game they're unable to play, or that makes it needlessly more difficult to do so.

I'm not gonna go back through every post -- but no one is demanding fixes. We have an issue, we're trying to make it more heard, and see if there's any developer interest in reasoned arguments. Be they fiscal or technological. Maybe they'll fall on deaf ears, maybe there'll miraculously be changes.

Oh, and by the way -- if Square had programmed the launcher better, to not assume all Wine users were Mac users, they actually could have measured Linux population and growth easily and had solid numbers to know exactly how much revenue we generate. Linked it into how much we spend on the mog station and whatever else. You're right, we don't have the exact numbers. But even with reasoned guesswork -- and again, thank you for having better numbers to work with -- we can at least make the argument Linux users are not insignificantly contributing to the profit margin. Again, you're asking us to prove something that we can't because that information is not available to us -- so yes, we have to work within the numbers we do have.

[HereInPlainSight]

Fixes, in fact, are all already available, for all instances.

Wait for 3rd party developers to fix the custom launchers and until then tough luck.

Reading comprehension, not so high. Until then, tough luck.

Reminder that my actual 'argument' is

we'd prefer to have cleaner solutions to offer other new players. To make the experience smoother. Not necessarily for ourselves -- but we do like to have a nice, working, easy solution for newcomers. We like a cleaner experience for users just like, I'd assume, anyone would like to.

Except for people like you, apparently -- people who seem to prefer that other people have a less smooth process for the reason of... mah Windows?

Might escape you, BTW, but I never had this problem.

I just have empathy and understanding for people who are not in my exact situation.

[Ransu]

You can't make any argument. Linux is not a supported OS. You choose to make that risk and you have to deal with it. Square is under no obligation to ensure any changes they make will work with Linux because they simply do not support it. Making threads about it is pointless because square will 100% do nothing about it. Wait for 3rd party developers to fix the custom launchers and until then tough luck. Install windows and you wont have those problems.