I really hope the (eventual) rise in popularity of the Steam Deck will somehow convince developers and publishers to dial it back a little with these goddamn useless launchers and clients.
I guess the launcher makes sense during EA for Larian to help gather metrics on how players interact with the game, problems they encounter, crash reports etc. The launcher is optional, though (i.e. you can launch the game without it).
But speaking of Steam Deck, I would love to see more games supported natively for Linux. Wine and Proton help a lot but I still hope that there will be a Linux version of Baldur's Gate 3 eventually. From what I know, the Stadia version needs to run on Linux servers so my hope is that would make it easier to launch a Linux version of the game at some point.
Well, the game is Vulkan anyway, so as long as the game works with Wine/Proton ( Patch 5 failed this particular test ), there is little Windows influence left, other than executable load format and some calling conventions. The performance impact should be slight, really.
If the Steam Deck does become popular and encourages developers to target the SteamOS runtime, that would obviously be preferable ( for me, at least ); but I would predict that there would still be significant moaning from the Linux community because many seem to care about "Free Software" more than Linux, and consider Valve and Steam to be as evil as Microsoft and Apple.
Personally, I don't use Linux because it is "Free Software"; I use it because Linux is a fast, efficient, stable and configurable platform that (unlike Microsoft and Apple) and does not constantly try to manipulate me, control my experience, or waste my computer resources running pointless crap in the background. It's not problem-free, of course, but nothing is perfect.
