More Steam Deck hype

One of the few obvious weaknesses of Valve's Steam Deck was support for Easy Anti-Cheat titles. Epic, who make EAC, had already announced that Fortnite will not support SteamOS, apparently just to hurt Valve; Bungie, who make Destiny 2, have also refused to support the Steam Deck, although whether they're taking that stance to ingratiate themselves with Sony (who are in the process of acquiring them), or just to be dicks, is not known.

Thankfully, though, not every developer of an EAC-laden title is so short-sighted. As reported by Jason Evangelho at Forbes:

Bungie isn’t playing nice with Valve’s Steam Deck, but EA and Respawn Entertainment certainly are. Today’s absolutely thrilling news is that popular hero shooter Apex Legends has earned a “Steam Deck Verified” checkmark, meaning that the game legally and officially supports an implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) on Linux. So whether you’re playing on Valve’s handheld or on desktop Linux, Apex Legends is ready for you.

[...]

That’s two massive games getting official Linux support in the last week, the other being Elden Ring, which currently runs more smoothly on Linux than on Windows thanks to Valve’s custom patches.

This is great news for Valve's newly-released handheld PC, because EAC really is the Achilles' heel of the thing. A quick look at ProtonDB's EAC page shows both the problem, and the progress that Valve is making here, but the more momentum that Valve can achieve by convincing developers of EAC titles to support Steam Deck, the better.  

In other news, overall progress "Deck Verifying" games is also brisk:

Two weeks after its official launch, Steam Deck has achieved another milestone with more than 1,200 games certified by Valve as “Playable,” with 10s of 1000s more waiting to be tested.

[...]

It’s remarkable how much progress Linux gaming has made in the past few years. Hopefully holdouts like Fortnight and Destiny 2 will see the light in the near future.

Man, Q2 2022 can't come soon enough...

HTC's death spiral, continued

Way back in 2017, I was confidently predicting that VR would not be a widespread thing in 5 years time, as some were predicting, and that companies which were betting their futures on VR would come to regret those bets. In particular, I'd called out HTC, the former darling of the Android smartphone business, as being especially poorly positioned to make such a bet.

Fast forward five years, and most of those predictions are still holding up. VR is still not a widespread thing, in spite of Facebook Meta dumping $10 billion USD into their VR business and counting, and "Meta" is just the latest attempt to rebrand VR as something else. Do you remember XR? I do, but I'm probably the only one.

And HTC, having already pivoted from VR to Meta, and then to blockchain, is still desperately searching for the buzzword which can save them.

As reported by The Verge:

HTC’s slow-motion fall from smartphone grace is reportedly set to continue in 2022, with the company said to be working on a new “metaverse”-focused phone in April as the remnants of the once-flagship smartphone company continues to desperately cling to whatever zeitgeist term it can to stay afloat, according to DigiTimes.

[...]

The news sounds a lot like HTC’s last major pivot towards relevancy: its Exodus line of blockchain phones that its offered for the past few years. Promising decentralized apps (“Dapps”) and a built-in cryptocurrency wallet, the phones could run blockchain nodes and even mine paltry amounts of cryptocurrency, but — like many instances of blockchain technology — it was a solution largely in search of a problem that never really took off. 

[...]

HTC’s main announcement at MWC 2022 was the debut of a nebulous “Viverse” — the company’s metaverse concept that promises to fuse VR, XR, 5G, blockchain technology, NFTs, and more together into a new, futuristic platform.  

[...]

Given that HTC’s Viverse doesn’t really exist — nor does widespread adoption of any modern metaverse concept — it’s easy for the company to just say it’s making a metaverse app or phone. After all, who’s to say that you aren’t?

I will give HTC this much credit -- they've lasted longer than I thought they would. But considering that consumers are not showing any appetite for Metaverse, or for blockchain products in general, outside of a small group of well-heeled early adopters, I don't see why anyone would want HTC's blockchain-based Metaverse knockoff.

I mean, seriously.... Viverse? So much for dignity, I guess.