
Nah, make a stop at the steam refund button on your way there
The only game I preordered in years was the new Bond game and that was before they disclosed they infested it with Denuvo. I refunded that shit before preloaded was even done.
What a bummer, I love bond games. Thankfully plenty of them on good systems like ps2.
I a fan of that one on '360. Felt like GoldenEye but with Daniel Craig and cover mechanics.
do that after you start downloading/installing
I have replaced game binaries with their pirated version for this sole reason
These publishers don’t even deserve the relevancy of high pirate rates. Just find an indie game to play.
Haven’t bought a Ubisoft game for more than a decade because all of their new stuff requires Uplay.
I just check the steam description. If it requires an account, uses a 3rd party launcher or/and has DRM, I pirate the game.
Same, except I don’t pirate it, or play it. there’s nearly limitless entertainment options and none is so special.
I particularly appreciate the fact that it’s EAs launcher in the meme, undoubtedly one of if not the worst offender for this shit.
I just bought Far Cry 3 on steam, because it was on sale, but launching it requires me to sign into the uplay launcher. I now had multiple occurrences of the game not starting, because uplay couldn’t verify that I own the game. I then decided to open Far Cry from the uplay launcher directly which still opened steam. I guess jokes on me for not pirating the game.
The last time I tolerated a 3rd party launcher was when I was playing through the mass effect trilogy, as the 3rd game needed EA’s launcher, I think.
It was so much of a pain, I just swore them off completely. Now if a game needs a 3rd party launcher, I either just don’t play it, or… Yarr, if it’s good enough to warrant it.
I love Mass Effect, but I haven’t played the 3rd because of this
I bought ME:LE and I still refuse to play it uncracked. The EA app bullshit has caused me more than enough grief, actively preventing me from playing the game I paid for unless it’s cracked.
Exactly the same for me. I played ME 1&2 years ago when they launched through steam, then when I finally got 3 it made me go through the EA launcher. I endured it just long enough to do the game once and then uninstalled it, and now I’m more vigilant about checking the reqs to see if games need 3rd party software.
ME 2 was better anyway
That’s actually good, you wasted no time from your 2 hour refund period and can pirate it then.
Wonder if there is one worse then Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
Launch game on steam
It opens EA Origin
It then opens the Mass Effect LE launcher
Now you get to pick which Mass Effect game you want to play.Even worse on Linux, their stupid EA app breaks all the time. It took me 20 minutes fucking around to finally get it to work yesterday.
I ended up giving up on my playthrough of Mass Effect Legendary Edition on linux for this reason. The EA App worked fine for a bit, so I had time to finish ME1 and get about halfway through ME2, but then the app updated and would just crash after that.
Then another 10 minutes setting up graphics settings and your out 1/2 hour of your refundable time. On top of that sometimes you have to make an account so thats another 15-20 minutes. Then there are possible proton problems so you might have to test different protons. I play on laptop and deck so I might not have internet all the time, I have to test if the game can play without internet. Might waste most of your trial period on getting the game to run.
Battlefield 3 on Steam:
- Steam launches EA App
- EA App launches Battlelog in your web browser, and a background service
- After choosing a mode/server, web browser sends data to EA App
- EA App launches bf3.exe
EA. More like hEll nAah
And the launcher looks like a flash website from 2002
I’d say the many games that died when Games for Windows Live went down. Many of them got patches to make them work again (officially), but many games just became permanently unplayable (officially).
My favorite is that I bought a game on Epic and it has to use the Ubisoft Launcher.
Ubisoft accounts dont connect to Epic directly. Neither party - Ubisoft or Epic - would help me get it working so I cant play it.
Cool.
Frankly, I despise all launchers, Steam included. The only reason it gets a pass is because it’s one of the two somewhat reasonable ones, and the only one that makes gaming on Linux simple and convenient.
It’s still slow, ugly as hell, and entirely unnecessary. Makes me want to pirate more, but then I’d have to set the games up from scratch.
The only use case for launchers is console gaming. It makes perfect sense on a Deck, Switch or a PS5. But absolutely no sense whatsoever on a desktop PC.
Again - Steam has features that make it tolerable (achievements, screenshot sharing, workshop, etc.), but I’d still prefer to just play my games without anything in the middle.
I think some games on steam you can just launch from the executable file. I rarely have, because my process is usually “open steam… stare at list of games… pick one”, so steam is already open.
But yeah, at least it adds some value (proton magic, recording and screenshots, the overlay used to be real useful when i only had one monitor…)
Yep, launchers have always been a scam. Your launcher should be your operating system
game.exe
the end.
My operating system can’t filter by specifics like “local co-op” or “anime titties” though.
I get how organization can be useful but if click game.exe on my OS homescreen it should open game.exe. Not a series of launchers and login screens before launching game.exe
I like Steam as a launcher because I can organize my games
for games I know I want to play, pretty sure I’ve often just launched them directly. I don’t remember, as I haven’t played much on Steam lately, if it would then launch steam before launching the game.
it launches steam before launching the game
and the only one that makes gaming on Linux simple and convenient.
It’s not though, there are a handful of game launchers for Linux. Faugus Launcher is a good lightweight one. I believe you can export the game as an icon as well so you don’t even need to open the launcher first if you don’t want to (haven’t personally done this, but pretty due can).
I’ll only use Steam for my non-Steam games if I need controller support since Steam Input is pretty awesome.
The correct take.
The only other laucher i dont have a problem with is warthunders launcher
Mostly because its what its needed any nothing more, games loading? Launcher automaticlly shutsoff (less then 1 megabyte) It doesnt need a login for the launcher itself
If its downloaded through steam you may never actualy know it even has a launcher
I just stopped buying games from studios that do this.
Yep, same. If I buy a game and that’s the first thing I’m hit with, it’s an immediate refund. They can all go fuck off with their bs launchers.
It takes two. Fucking incredible game. Hasn’t give me headaches during startup while playing on Linux. But God dang, why does it have to be paired with origin in windows and why do I have to login to it just run the game? Fucking eh…
I pirated the game and it doesn’t do this
I mean, cool that you’ve pirated it. Not my case tho.
I have heard tons of good reviews for this game and I bought it once it got goty. Truly a masterpiece so I wanted to support good devs (unfortunately distributed through a crap add distributor). I’d pirate it too but price was right and devs are saints in my eyes. Already have gotten myself Split fiction.
I have it on PS5 and it doesn’t have this.
Refund time
- Diablo II: had a -skiptobnet command line option.
- Diablo II Resurrected: Load Battle.Net first, click through ads for other stuff, click again to start the game, press buttons to skip the animations, and press another key to really log in, for real this time.
So I just made a button that launches a script that does all those clicks for me while I retrieve a beverage. The only reason I didn’t just pirate was so I could play online with an old friend.
I wanted to try this “GTAV” game all the kids were talking about. It was on sale, so I spent four days downloading it over my miserable rural DSL connection only to find out that it wouldn’t work without rockstar demanding my information.
So I refunded it. Im sure there was a work around but I didn’t need to play it that bad.
Fucking Rockstar.
It took me fucking AGES to get Red Dead 2 running on CachyOS because of that bastard launcher.













