I must confess that sometimes fast travel removes a lot of value from a game. While it saves you a lot of time like a cheat. Cheats also save you time.
I read this post (without knowing the game yet but having it on a wishlist to get in a few months) and can’t stop thinking how lucky we were with the quality of Dark Souls, Elden Ring, BB and Sekiro.
I generally buy 2 year old games except in some cases.
And in the consoles they are even more expensive. Game price could be higher than on PC and then you also need to pay an expensive subscription (because they charge you for a lot more things than just the multiplayer costs) to be allowed to play in multiplayer.
The player base is also bigger than before. While that needs more post sales support and more infrastructure it is nothing compared to the game.
I think in short the problem here is just the wrong forecasting when planning the game.
And steam works like a charm in Linux with windows games.
Also works fine with joysticks like dualsense. (Although for some reason they started overriding the native driver with their own steam API after launching steam games even if the game is set to disable steam input).