Bad news: Playstation is starting to block their games from running on Proton. Playstation Overlay is blocked on Linux in Ghost of Tsushima. The same thing happened with the Concord beta.

People, read the developers comments:

We know many of you are eager to play Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut on handheld gaming devices like the Steam Deck. We're happy to share that the single player experience, including the Iki Island expansion, can be enjoyed on Steam Deck and similar handheld gaming PCs as we’ve worked extensively to optimize performance and deliver the best possible experience on these devices. You may notice that Steam marks the game as 'Unsupported' for Steam Deck. This is due to the Legends co-op multiplayer mode requiring Windows to access PlayStation Network integrated features. On behalf of everyone at Nixxes and Sucker Punch, we can't wait for PC players to start their adventure and fight for the freedom of Tsushima! Source: https://steamcommunity.com/games/2215430/announcements/detail/4188987871078331986

They strictly say that unfortunately it requires Windows to access PSN integrated features, so the multiplayer will not work because it requires said features. The singleplayer should work though. Since Concord is completely multiplayer, it needs the PSN features that only work on Windows.

Since Concord is completely multiplayer, it needs the PSN features that only work on Windows.

So did they code themselves into a corner because of malice or incompetence?
- It is well known that many multiplayer games like Valorant do not work on Linux due to kernel anticheat. Unfortunately, this is a part of Linux gaming life.
What a perfect excuse to not pay for it!
So are PlayStation consoles running Windows? FFS this is short sighted tying yourself to your competitor like that.
- The point here is that the anticheat solution needs to be written for a specific operating system because it runs "outside" the game in a privileged way to try and detect cheating.
  
  So they have anticheat on Windows, and their own consoles will have a different anticheat system that is specific for the console OS.
  
  Running games on Linux via Proton is effectively an emulation or translation layer, and the Windows-specific anticheat is not going to work with that.
  
  If Sony wanted to provide multiplayer support on Linux they'd also have to provide a native Linux implementation of the whole game, rather than relying on Proton, which sadly not many publishers are doing at all. So its technically quite understandable why this isn't possible.
  
  Now, personally I think client anticheat is garbage and they should not be depending on that as a solution anyway, but that's a separate argument!
- They're running FreeBSD (Heavily modified).
this is only mildly better then the conclusion jump. I am almost strictly single player, but the ideology of paying full price(which is becoming increasingly common to be 70$) for a game that I won't actually be able to use all the features of... it's not very appealing to me. Granted it isn't fair of me to expect it since the company doesn't advertise it as being non-windows friendly, but it still doesn't mean I need to buy it. If they want my support, they will need to at bare minimum have it be proton/wine compatible, even if shitty support. If I can't mark that box it's a solid not buying. It's a statistics case, if there are enough people like me, companies would change.
- I'm not even asking that they make their games specifically linux-compatible. I'm just asking for them to not prevent compatibility.
  
  I understand making games only for Windows because that's where the market share is. But going out of your way to ensure they won't run on Linux is a dick move.

Fuck 'em then. I'll stop playing video games before I switch to windows, but I'm sure there will always be indie devs willing to take my money in exchange for a playable game.

You won’t let us install a rootkit on your system? :-(

Well no multiplayer for you, cheater! >:-(

The lesson here is don't buy anything from Sony because you don't get what you bought. Sony is a dead company. Don't even pirate their shit. Let the corpse rot where it falls.

But the dualsense has such a nice wireless touchpad
- Does it? In my experience the touchpad is by far the worst feature of the DualSense.
- Any decent controller suggestions if I don't care about Xbox or Playstation controllers?

This is especially egregious when you remember the PS4 and PS5 operating system are themselves based on FreeBSD, meaning the original game was natively targeting a Unix-like OS to begin with. So to then say it won’t run on Linux is a huge middle finger.

No, "based on" doesn't tell us anything. Just that to avoid repeating work they took FreeBSD.
- I work on an open source project in my free time. Officially we support Linux, Windows, and macOS.
  
  I had to change ~2 lines of code to port the Linux/Mac code path to FreeBSD. Windows has a completely different code path for that critical segment because it's so different compared to the three Unix/Unix-like.
  
  This is a very specific example from a server side code that leaves out a lot of details. One being that we wrote our project with the intent that it would be multi platform by design. Game software is wildly complicated compared to what we do. The point here is that it should be easier to port Unix to Unix-like compared to Unix to Windows.
- It tell us quite a lot actually; the native PlayStation game was running on a POSIX system, on x86(-64), and Vulkan/OpenGL. Ergo, it took extra work to port the game to Windows, when the original title ran on something very close to a Linux desktop.
No, because the thing that's breaking is not graphics related (which is the major difference between Windows and Unix), it's very likely an anti-cheating measure that's trying to gain root access to the computer, and when it can't it crashes the game. This is not an issue on Playstation because Sony controls the OS so they're okay with giving root access to the game or (more likely) are okay with that part of the code not running while on a PlayStation.

Sony really doesn’t get it. Their leadership has seemed poor for a while now, I’m still annoyed they closed their Japan studio

Out of curiosity, why are you annoyed at them closing their Japan studio? They have a ton of game credits, but were mostly a support studio. Like, technically they have credits on Bloodborne but I think everyone pretty much agrees that's a FromSoft game.

The only recent original games from them I see is Knack and Knack 2. Personally I thought they were pretty decent and are better than just a meme game, but at the same time they weren't exactly successful hits either. Is there some hit game or series I'm missing here?

And what was left of them was just merged into Team Asobi. Which I find kind of funny because Asobi was originally a team from Japan Studio that was split off.
- Japan Studio was one of those developers that were allowed to experiment and take risks with smaller/cheaper titles for the PlayStation platform. Sony seems to be aiming at only making recognizable franchises and safe bets, kind of like how Disney is still leaning hard on Star Wars and Marvel to keep making money. This is a terrible move as they're no longer even trying to compete with the creativity and smaller budget of indie developers.
- They created a lot of novel and inventive games. Shadow of the Colossus is definitely their magnum opus but it’s the small weird games they were notable for that I feel Sony is missing at this point. Astrobot getting a full game is encouraging but I think Sony needs to further step back from their carousel of third person action games.

At least that rootkit anti-cheat prevents all the cheaters. There totally aren't any cheaters in games protected by rootkit anti cheat systems like in valorant. Right? Riiiiiiight?

Fuck em. I'll stick with games that work on steam deck and Linux then.

Honestly anti-cheat is dead going forward because much of the new cheats being developed exist hardware powered by machine learning. Competitive multiplayer is already just a shambling corpse, but somehow people haven't caught on yet.

Good to know. I won't buy it. Yoho yoho I guess

That's the simplest answer. See how awesome that card is when no one will buy it because we are fucking tired of hardware locking us on to Microsoft and closed source. Maybe 🤔 sell it to companies? LOL.

this is going to do a better job of getting me to not play their game then they're helldivers 2 scandal. I'm avoiding Windows like the plague now and currently the only game I have to jump back to Windows for his Beast of Bermuda and I don't play that one all that often. There's no way in hell I'm going to even consider buying a new games that won't work on via Proton lol

Funny how all the games that don't work on Linux also want your data must just be a technical thing though sure they aren't being malicious.

Stop buying Playstation games, Sony have always been scummy.

Sony have always been scummy.

Never forget the literal rootkit Sony used as a "DRM" a while back lmao
- And that they completely dumped their PC gaming division(?) SOE a decade ago, and expect people to pretend this is their first go around PC gaming and give them slack for it.
Back in PS3 days Sony were the ones that let you install any hard drive you wanted, didn't make you pay for multiplayer, and let you install Linux on your PS3.

But now they are worse overall.
- and let you install Linux on your PS3.
  
  Until they didn't. I got 10$ out of that class action LMAO I'd say when they took that away, that was the beginning of the enshittification of Sony
Might as well say "stop buying AAA games", as they all are made by corporations, who are, as we know, scummy.
But we aren't gonna stop, are we? Like, I don't even play them, I play retro and indie games, but an occasional AAA still slips in.
- Pretty much this, yeah. Triple A games used to be the ones pushing the envelope, now they are exclusively just cash grabs.
- Dude, speak for yourself, the last AAA title I bought was MH:W at massive discout many years after the next iteration released. I've never even considered a AAA title that wasn't several years old already, that have had plenty of time to show exactly how scummy they are.

Japanese companies have anything other than utter contempt and animosity for your customers challenge (impossible)

As someone who's lived in Japan for nearly a decade now, what are you on about? There are certainly shitty companies, as anywhere, but this is just wrong.
- Just the big game studios in Japan are pretty anti-consumer and shitty to their customers.
- You ever hear about a small indie game company called nintendo
- I've heard how the work culture can be pretty toxic but the amount of thought and care put into every aspect of the experience amazes me. Shame, sony was one of my favorite companies for AV equipment but their newer devices are just not as good as they used to be.
  
  This poor judgement seems to be mostly from the PlayStation decision but I can help to think this is a sign overall company culture shift.
  
  It's like the drop in quality at Toyota resulting in defects never heard of before (airbag defects, melting wing mirors, faulty screens) or the first Honda I've ever owned where the engine had a defect affecting multiple cars in their lineup making it dump gas into the oil.

Sony already stopped selling their games in my country due to them not wanting to put Estonia in the PSN country selection list but I guess I'll pirate their games even harder or something.

PS4 is jailbreakable up until FW 11.00 as of recently. It's a super easy process and is definitely worth it, for anyone interested
- How old is FW 11?
If the Baltics and the Balkans form a coalition and invade Japan over this then you guys will no longer have to be a black hole for support.

Headline is misleading since it gives impression Sony is intentionally going out of their way to prevent the game from working through Proton, but this is more the case of multiplayer component not working.

So you are saying that I can run the game but it will show me this error if I try to start multiplayer?
AFAIK the multiplayer was working for Playstation titles, so much that some of them got the verified check and that's supposed to only be given if everything works. So yes, they're purposefully breaking it by adding a dependency on (probably) kernel level anti-cheat, since any other Windows API could be converted by wine (but kernel level apis are purposefully checking if it's being run on wine to throw an error)

Walled garden salesman nr 1, go fuck yourself sony. Gladly there are enough great games these days.

I used to pirate games because I couldn't buy them. Now I pirate games because the publishers are greedy cunts who do layoffs to appease shareholders, shutter studios that make good games, and pull all the shit Sony's pulling this year 🖕

One year Sony installed rootkits on everyone's computers.
- Interesting story, thanks for informing me:
  
  Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal
- This was an interesting read. Good to know that from now on I should treat official CDs just like pirated content: with caution.

Guess I won't be playing Playstation games.

enshittification machine go brr

wonder how much money microsoft gave them to do this

Thanks sony for helping me not spend money on things I don't need.

"We win too much money so fuck all those gamers"

What in the hell is the point of this?

Ar yar, ahoy and avast!

Already learned my lesson a while back. I bought Horizon Zero Dawn for the Steam Deck. Game is listed as Steam Deck Verified. Froze every time between 10-40 secs into the opening cinematic. Fortunately, Steam is awesome and gave me a refund.

Funny thing is that in searching around for a fix, I found a forum post somewhere that described exactly my problem. Started reading replies and finally realized the poster was on a PlayStation from way back when the game was first released. Good job Sony.

I had the same deck experience but it was always really damn hot during the cutscene and inevitable hard crash. I randomly tried again after undervolting and a bunch of drg hours and the problem went away. sometimes it still freezes when doing a manual save so I have to quick save first each time. It's not a solution though because not every deck can do -30/-40/-40mv

edit: actually mine was forbidden west. I didn't play zero dawn on deck. It's probably notable that similar problems still exist in the sequel.

One more reason for not buying

I recognize how much of an impact Proton has had on Linux gaming to help bridge the gaps in our library, and make the platform more attractive to potential new users.

But this is exactly why I won't ever see it as a substitute for native support, because the important thing is support. If we're not supported, anything could break at any time and we'll be out of luck.

Support is kind of a catch 22. Companies have very little reason to support Linux because their customers don't use Linux, but their customers don't use Linux because companies don't support Linux.

And that's where Proton comes in to solve the catch. Proton is just a stepping stone for wider Linux adoption. The more people we get on Linux the more companies have to support Linux the less users need to depend on Proton.

I agree that native support is the way to go, but we're nowhere near having the user base to even justify native support.
- My concern is that Proton isn't even being seen as a stepping stone, but a real replacement for native support. I've heard too comments to the effect of "We don't need native ports anymore now that Proton exists."
I'm happy to get the refund from Valve when scumfuck companies decide to rug-pull like this. If it happens, it's usually long after I've beaten the story and become bored with the game. It's a win for me 🙂

There's so many amazing games on Linux that you'll never have the time to play all of them in your lifetime. So I'm not sure how this is bad news, just means less choice paralysis?

Because the biggest goal for Linux gaming is to get people gaming on Linux. You and me might not care that Sony games won't run on Linux but there are people who want to play Sony games and they will either switch back to windows or not even try Linux. If we want Linux to grow we can't just dismiss issues simply because they're not an issue to us, dismissing issues others have is how we will have the year of the Linux for the next 10 years.

Time to finish that last 10% of Ratchet and Clank so I can refund it if they pull this crap.

Sony needs to crash and burn

I'm waiting for the entire industry to crash and let indies fill in
- I doubt this will ever completely happen. I think Microsoft would turn windows into a full blown console with forced DRM for all games and software with perfect license tracking before sony, microsoft's xbox division and nintendo bowed out.
  
  The only great thing is that indies can be successful without being under a major publisher. Steam kind of has a stranglehold though for no good reason other than the fact they were the first and thus the most popular one. I still remember losing out on sharing half life cd keys with my buddies. Only one could be used at a time online but few of us were online all the time, this was still in the tail end of the dialup era.

So they are either incompetent or willingly want to kill their company.

Is that just for the multiplayer, or for single player as well?

Use the block function in steam to block all these nasty vidjya production companies.

Sony fucked with helldiver's 2 a month after launch, I couldn't get a refund and also couldn't use the social functions of their game. Wasted $40 on that POS.

Arrowhead-blocked

Sony-blocked

I no longer see their shitty software in my store. You shouldn't have to, either.

I thought playstation was a console. Did they mean Sony?