The funny thing is, this particular game got easy anti-cheat support a few months ago for linux. So it is kinda weird they blame linux users for all the cheaters in game. Most gamers are using windows anyway, so they will ban all the people on windows a few months later ? EA is full of s…
For me I won’t notice it anyway, i only play singleplayer games. But for people who do play, it’s terrible news. EA is blocking the steamdeck/Linux completely
No Man's Sky ... long, long Time ago, hahaha!
Some good news too 
Thanks for that info ..... I played Black Mesa years ago and play it on Win 7 every once in a while now .... it is really great to see it coming to Linux .... gonna check it out for posterity ..... LOL
I now play games that are single player ..... open world ...... simulation and first person ...... mostly hunting and fishing games .....
The Hunter: Call of the Wild ..... have 789 hrs to date so far and my newest game ..... play it daily .... love it
Russia Fishing 4 ..... 188.5 hrs
Fishing Planet ..... 10484.5 hrs
The Hunter: Classic ..... not so good IMHO
Pool 2D: Poolians ..... play against the computer which is a cheating mother so I mostly play against myself...... 241 hrs
Black mesa already had linux support, it just got better 
Remember in 1995 when games were $50? $50 in 1995 adjusted for inflation in 2024 is $103.45. Meanwhile it's VASTLY more expensive to develop a AAA game today than it was in 1995, simply due to the much larger team sizes.
I'm no fan of the gradual increase in price either, but game prices are actually rising more slowly than inflation, especially when you consider that those $100 games are almost all special editions that come with junk you don't require, like extra outfits. Most AAA games launch at $60-70 right now. I think Ubisoft, with their moronic claim that Skull & Bones was quadruple A launched at $80, but I can't think of any other examples above $70 that didn't have a cheaper, non-collector's option.
For those in the game industry it really sucks. I know people working on games who have to use food stamps they're paid so little. Even $70 is hard to swallow. Wage growth, not just in the industry, but in the USA generally, has not kept up well with costs.
There are many people who refuse to pay more than 60. I even know people who aren't willing to go even for that, so it makes sense that prices of games are almost always not even close to 100... because they would lose so many sales that the profit would actually be less than if they sold it at 60.
I always wait till the price drops under 10 
. Last game i paid full price whas Halo Infinite (could not wait for it, big halo fan). Now with 2 kids around me i wait till the price drops.
Games I want, I usually buy at full price. Games I'm sort of interested in, yeah, I wait for sales. I work in the game industry though, and feel like I'm undermining myself if I get too cheap too often. <_<
Your undermining yourself if you don't 
In a more immediate sense, yeah. On the other hand, with all the studio closures of late...
When it comes to games from steam, I always wait for sales
But when the game I am interested on getting is a 1st party nintendo title... I have no option but full price: they almost never go on sale, and when they do it's by such a small amount that it's not worth waiting years for. That's a double-edged sword: they get more money from franchises I know that I like, but I don't dare giving a chance to franchises that I'm not sure if I'll like in fear of spending so much on a game I won't play more than twice (looking specifically at you, Zelda BOTW with the 70€ price).
The prices got increased when those xbox and ps units came on the market. Those 2 devices also introduced the “dlc” stuff in their store which you had to pay for. Back in the late 90’s early 00’s we got mappacks for free (yes you read it well). Since that we have to pay for dlc too.
The most funny thing is, some stuff they ask money for is already in game (sometimes with a config editor you could unlock them). That is a total ripoff if you ask me. A game for sample who did this is Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2.
Not really. The prices didn't go up until the second generation of Xbox and third generation of Playstation consoles. When Did Games Change to $60? - A Comprehensive Look at the History and Future of Game Pricing - 33rd Square
That's true in some cases and not true in others. As far back as Wing Commander 2 (at least) you could buy additional content for games; it just wasn't downloadable yet because Internet speeds and access wasn't available. Wing Commander 2 had paid expansions and speech packs. This was in 1991. Going farther back, some Japanese games had paid expansions in the 1980s. The only difference between these things and DLC is that you had to buy them on disks.
Notably, even today some games ship with free DLC, akin to the map packs you mentioned companies giving away. That kind of freebie is usually smaller and cosmetic, but it still exists, and in some cases better DLC is given away free.
I probably shouldn't even address this one as no one ever changes their mind on it, but I consider this more of a faux pas than an actual problem, as long as the company is clear and truthful up front about what you get when you purchase the game and what you have to pay extra for. If you buy a game for $X, knowing that DLC is not part of the price, then whether it's on the disc or not, the company delivered what it promised. It's not much different from going to a restaurant, ordering a meal with a regular drink and regular fries. Yes, they have more fries waiting there. Yes, they could have put them on your plate. But you didn't pay for them, so you didn't get them. (The obvious difference is that food has a material cost and once the DLC is made, they can provide it infinitely, but it still isn't free to make. Designers, programmers, and artists cost money. Recall above where I pointed out that games cost $50 in 1995 and $50 in 1995 money is $103.45 today. DLC absolutely can feed corporate greed, but it's also one of the things allowing game prices to rise slower than inflation.)
Don't get me wrong; some DLC is absolutely a cash grab and is shameful, and some is an honest purchase with a bad price. Everyone likes to point at Oblivion's horse armor DLC, but it was completely optional, had no gameplay effect, and it was the literal first console DLC; the pricing was basically a guess.
Other DLC though represents a lot of time and money invested, and significantly increases the value of a game. Borderlands 2's Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage added hours of really good gameplay and frankly hilarious voice work to the game. Its Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep was amazing, and later got a standalone release. I've never felt like I got a bad deal out of an expansion to a Civilization game, and those are DLC, and Phantom Liberty was AMAZING DLC for Cyberpunk 2077—and CD Projekt Red backported their general gameplay changes developed for Phantom Liberty so even people who didn't buy the DLC got major upgrades to the game.
I'm running very long here. All I'm trying to say is that what people curse as DLC existed long before what we call DLC, and sometimes it's worth every penny. Game prices went up because ALL prices go up over time. Games just do a much better job of holding a fixed price, so when the price does go up, it feels like a huge jump.
Edit: Geez, I got up at 4 am because I forgot to pay rent and needed to do it immediately, and look what happened. I apologize if any of the above could've been better phrased; I am writing it at 4:45 in the morning, after having been asleep. >_<
My favorite example for free vs dlc is comparing two specific pokemon games:
the free post-game of pokemon heartgold (2009, on a console with no DLC capabilities) was bigger and with more content than the paid DLC of pokemon sword (2018), whose free post-game was also incredibly small and lacking
Pokemon Scarlet (2022) got rid of the concept of free post-games entirely and charge more money for the DLC than what many full games cost, making the full game cost 95€, while 40€ was the price of pokemon heartgold with everything included
Game prices may have not directly increased a lot because people wouldn't buy them, but they have increased indirectly in the form of DLCs. And I can see how that worked so well: paying 100€ for a single game feels excessive, but paying 60 is somewhat reasonable and later extra content being advertised as only 25 is much easier to swallow if you really liked the game than seeing the 85€ price, while also allowing people who do not want that extra content to just not pay it
Am I against the concept of DLCs? Yes. But seeing how even console prices are rising (160€ for a 3DS and around 300€ for a PS2 -which was reduced over time- VS 300€ for a 7-year-old switch and 500€ for a 4-year-old PS5) I'm glad that the price of games aren't rising at the same speed
Yes and no, i am against dlc’s that only offer “skins” (weapon packs, customization of a character and so on) but i am not against a dlc that has a awesome story. I am a huge Mass Effect fan, finished those games at least 15 times (when i had no wife and kids lol). I remember the big dlc release from Mass Effect 2 (Lair of the Shadowbroker). I was blown away by that dlc release, it had a great story and you can easily spend 2-3 hours on it. Those dlc’s don’t cost much either, but some dlc’s like skins are asking the same price as a full level designed dlc/add-on.
And i don’t even want to mention EA’s great lootbox systems in games….
Overall:
I think that DLC is a side issue. It becomes front and center because it is directly in customer view. It is not where the problem is, just something easily exploited to be a problem when it is exploited.
What gets people's ire is pay-to-win, nickel and diming and whale hunting.
Whale hunting is when you a game exclusively aims for Massive Spenders. These games often have misleading ads as to what the content is.
Why the distaste for skins, if I might ask? As long as they really are just skins, they're purely optional since they have no effect on gameplay, and they're a good way to keep artists at a studio busy, since they require little to no programmer effort.
One of the many difficulties of game development is keeping your studio members working usefully. Artists do tons and tons of work in alpha and beta, but as a game approaches GMC (gold master candidate), they're largely just fixing issues with textures and animations. You can keep them working by having them do extra playtesting, but if your studio is properly staffed, you have QA for this. (Obviously indie studios are not what I'm talking about here, but they do a lot less DLC in all respects.) At some point, you hit diminishing returns on playtesting unless the game is being rushed (and if it is, you're probably not fixing what gets found anyway), so having the artists do playtesting becomes much less valuable. Having them working on skins and optional cosmetics is a way to pay your artists and keep them employed while their workload would otherwise be lighter and they'd become a target for cost-cutting. And the skins neither raise the cost of the game, nor tax players who don't want them.
It's certainly possible to overcharge for skins; greed is a thing, always. Blizzard's shop for Diablo 4 is just ridiculously priced. But the answer to that is just not to buy them. I've spent $10 on Diablo 4 optional purchases, because everything else has just been more than it's worth to me.
There is one other case to be made for optional purchases when the company doesn't need them to survive. I don't expect many (or any) of you play Genshin Impact or Arknights. They're gacha games, and though their monetization has become less bad since the worst days of EA loot boxes, there are still grounds to complain. And yet...
These are full length concerts put on by the respective game publishers. Sure, they sold tickets, but one doesn't typically make the effort to produce and share a concert with the world for free, and the production quality of these concerts is well beyond the quality of the handful of concerts I've personally attended.
I buy what I want in the way of extra content. If I don't want it, I don't pay and it doesn't hurt me. But when even a little of what I pay for goes toward producing this kind of thing, it takes a fair bit of the sting out of the expense for me.
Yeah, seconded. There's DLC and there's DLC. Horse armor is stupid, but stuff like Blood and Wine (Witcher 3 DLC) or Shadow of the Erdtree (Elden Ring DLC) which are more like game expansion sets can be amazing.