In-app purchases, requires 3rd party account, and no LAN. I think their biggest rivals are Grim Dawn still getting expansions and that new Titan Quest.
I mean the kinds that aren't extraction shooters or battle royales or some other kind of "live service" that pretends it's a service so it doesn't have to admit that it's a bad product. Something more substantial than the crop of "boomer shooters", with co-op and/or friendly deathmatch; something with objective design and a story that's interesting to follow. Basically what we used to get between the late 90s up through the middle of the last decade; what Halo used to be before they decided it had to be both open world and a live service.
Their strategy was always diversifying in ways that other big publishers stopped diversifying, buying old neglected and mismanaged IPs for pennies on the dollar. If this strategy doesn't work, then I weep for what video games could have been, because this lack of diversification is why I can't get a decent racing game or first person shooter anymore.
Gearbox is also a publishing arm, which recently put out Remnant II, and they seem to have a stake or ownership in Risk of Rain, Bulletstorm, and Torchlight.
Each publisher operates independently. So far, to my knowledge, they've shut down studios that were spun up to work that $2B deal that fell through; and Volition, who haven't made a hit game in a decade.
Someone came along and said they'd like to buy them. Perhaps at an attractive offer given the deal that fell through or perhaps at an even higher price than Embracer paid for it. Anyone would consider a sale at a decent price if someone approached them with the offer.
There are just too many good games this year. Some of them won't make the cut when we've only got so much time and several of the best games of the year each take 100 hours to finish. Armored Core isn't making the cut for me this year.
But the PlayStation 5 version, released last week, introduces a third option: local, or so-called couch co-op, which allows people to play the old-fashioned way on a split screen, sitting side-by-side.
I'm pretty sure this feature also exists on the PC version.
But yes, split-screen is an endangered species at this point. Halo Infinite dropped the feature and Forza is about to launch without it. Helldivers used to have shared-screen co-op, and now it's online-only. The Quake 2 remaster supports 8 player split-screen, which makes so much sense in the age of large HD TVs that I can't believe no one bothers with it, but FPS games in general are also almost extinct, so maybe that comes with that territory. Hardly any game is going to have as demanding of a use case as Baldur's Gate 3, so I'd really like to see more games sacrifice some graphical fidelity in order to support the feature, if possible. Just about any multiplayer game these days is designed to be a live service that you log into every day rather than a game that you can play through for a handful of hours with friends and have a satisfying experience. It's money left on the table when there's only so many of the former that the market can possibly sustain.
You can side load a program called Heroic Game Launcher that will automatically download from other stores and apply the best known version of Proton to it. It's not as good as proper Steam support, but it will often get the job done.
I guess custom campaign stuff keeps NWN going? How's the game out of the box? I don't really hear about that one compared to other Bioware games. Additionally, how's the enhanced edition? And has anyone modded in decent controller support?