Whether it’s any more exploitative than any other game, it’s still got all of the same baggage. It’s always online and will one day be unplayable, and it’s relying on continual revenue to support it rather than just selling it for an up front price and letting it rock, which both encourage exploitative monetization anyway.
If I buy the game on Epic, I’m given no assurance that the game will continue to work for me on Linux. Others will have different issues with the service that Epic offers. I’m not going to buy from Epic just because Valve has reached some threshold of market saturation.
Well, we’ve seen gameplay of this one already, and it’s got more in common with Dishonored than it does Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. I’ll happily be pleasantly surprised, even if that means they made a really good vampire version of Dishonored, but I also know The Chinese Room’s track record, so it would be really wild if this was somehow the game that Bloodlines fans wanted.
It does prevent Linux compatibility, but even if it didn’t, it’s a computer security problem, for those who care. You’re essentially allowing different game companies to install a rootkit on your computer so you can play a video game.
I think they’re already running out of people who want to buy the latest PlayStation, and Sony clearly can’t afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars after this level of graphics anymore, because it’s not resulting in equivalent growth of console sales to make up for it.
And it’s worth noting that trusting the game developer isn’t really enough. Far too many of them have been hacked, so who’s to say it’s always your favorite game developer behind the wheel?
They can prevent you from running cheats that other anti-cheats can’t detect. For instance, they could modify the value in memory so that your calculated hash always succeeds even when it’s modified. This doesn’t stop cheating though; it just means cheaters have to use cheat hardware that exists at a layer that even kernel anti-cheat can’t detect.