EA Vows to Ruin Their Games for Steam Deck Owners
This week, we've seen major publishers intentionally ruin Steam Deck support for their games. We'll investigate. And what
EA Ruins Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2
Electronic Arts have announced their plans to deployed their in-house Anti-Cheat solution for Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 and it will fundamentally break compatibility with the Steam Deck.
According to their announcement, quote:
Over the past few months, we’ve identified an issue affecting our Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 PC players. As part of our ongoing efforts to create a safe and fair experience for all players, we will be rolling out an update in March 2024 that will transition PVZGW2 for PC over to EA Anticheat
With this update, we will be ending support for Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 for PC on Windows 7, 8, 8.1 operating systems. Additionally, Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2 will not run on the native Steam OS for Steamdeck with this update.
I'm sympathetic to the needs of creating a fair online experience for your players, but I'm sorry... it should be criminal for game companies to roll out mandatory updates that renders your game unplayable...
Like, they should be required by law to allow customers to launch the game without anti-cheat if they want.
This is yet another reason to not buy games from AAA publishers. Especially not EA. But we've all seen how well "voting with your wallet" actually works. That's right. It's completely ineffectual. By design.
But hey, at least they announced this weeks in advance rather than what Capcom's been doing recently. Am I right? Guys. Feed the engagement algorithm and let me know your thoughts on EA's circus of shittiness. I'm eager to hear your take.
I'm not sure how I missed it, but last week Valve released the most played games on Steam Deck for the month of January.
- Baldur's Gate 3
- Palworld
- Elden Ring
- Monster Hunter: World
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Stardew Valley
- Dave the Diver
- Hogwarts Legacy
- GTA V
- Vampire Survivors
A fascinating list as, at the time they compiled this list, Palworld was the new hotness. Now? Not so much. It seems like it was a bit of a fad. A bit of meme. Pokemon with guns, am I right? But they went from being the game with the highest number of concurrent players in the world to having a few hundred thousand.
It will be interesting to see if it's even on February's list, honestly... what did you think of the game? Sound off in the comments.
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There was a lot of speculation about Microsoft's big announcement that was happening today, February 15th. Phil Spencer and the official Xbox Twitter had announced their new podcast episode as "revealing the future of Xbox..." and the games media, of course, gave in to hype and speculation..
"Xbox is going to reveal that they're never releasing a hardware exclusive again."
"They're going to retire the Xbox brand"
"they are going to announce a handheld Xbox"
Truthfully, I waited to watch the episode before I recorded this video... just in case... But it was an absolute nothing burger.
Not only did they overly-indulge in the typical corporate cult-speak for most of the episode, but they actually only said like... two interesting things. First, that they're releasing four games as multi-platform (and they didn't even say which games), and also that they're working on 'new hardware'.
And here analysts at multiple outlets were expecting an Xbox Handheld announcement. As if that was reasonable.
Man. If they had announced a handheld Xbox console... can you imagine? It'd be the first potential "Steam Deck Killer". And then imagine how much it would still suck because it's an Xbox.
Humble has a new Bundle out: the Mind-Bending Masterpieces bundle. And it's a doozie! You can pay what you want for this bundle, but to get all seven games it's at least $15. As with all bundles, a portion of the sale goes towards charity.
This bundle has a few of my favorite puzzle games including Superliminal, The Talos Principle, The Witness, and more! And there are a few games that I haven't played here like Patrick's Parabox, Taiji, Manifold Garden, and The Pedestrian.
You can use the link in the description or pinned comment to pick one up for yourself. It's an affiliate link, so you'll be helping this channel out with no additional cost to you! And thanks!
Steam Deck Updates
There have been a flurry of updates over the last two weeks for the Steam Deck's beta channels. Yes, channels. This includes both the Steam Client and the operating system. This could indicate that a new stable SteamOS is just on the horizon, but only time will tell when it comes to Valve.
Starting on February 2nd, there were a bunch of updates to the client beta that fixed a ton of issues with the screen shot manager, transparency and blur effects, the graph height on the downloads page, and more.
Then on the 6th, there was a fix for dialog menus and other popups, as well as a Steam Input fix for gyro calibration.
On the 9th, there were fixes for some game news appearing out of order in the activity feed, they removed duplicate friend counters in game capsules, and they added a privacy icon to your own in-game status if you're in a private game.
Then there was a new SteamOS preview that fixed HDR titles on the OLED model and it also improved GPU crashes. On the 12th, a small SteamOS preview improved performance for Persona 3 Reloaded's raytraced reflections.
A client beta that hit on the 13th included fixes for CD Key popups failing to display, they fixed some unnecessary disk reads that could impact performance and they addressed some other stability concerns.
And on the 14th, they fixed a case where no element would be selected in the UI when closing the quick access menu as well as an issue in desktop mode where mouse click input could stop working when starting a drag operation on a Steam window.
And, wow. That was a ton of news for a week that felt kinda slow, huh? I mean... damn
-- Chapters --
00:00 - Introduction
00:16 - Mind Bending Masterpieces Bundle
01:03 - Most Played Steam Deck Games
02:39 - Microsoft's "Big Announcement"
04:56 - Electronic Arts vows to ruin Garden Warfare 2
06:53 - Beta Channel Client and OS Updates
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