Linux EA Play on Steam

...but seriously now, if I was asked which had higher probability: eretardic farts supporting their paying customers or an asteroid hitting earth within next 5 minutes, I'd brace for impact.

So here's a small nugget of wisdom from my (successful) efforts at running Mass Effect Andromeda with EAPlay purchased from Steam on Debian.

- Install oRIGIN (I'll refer to it as PoS for short from now on) with Lutris - https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/Origin.md

- Thoroughly read the contents from previous link to save some frustration when PoS decides to fail to install, which is normal for PoS-class software. You just need to restart it, like people did back in Windows 95  times.

- Once you are able to login to PoS, and things seem stable you'll need to add 3 libraries wih Winetricks. This step will be easier on you with Lutris launched from some kind of shell/terminal/console rather than from your OS' launcher to have easier access to debug log. Just starting a shell and typing 'lutris' should be enough.

- Find PoS in Lutris, click on it, from the menu on the right select 'Winetricks'

- select install app; click cancel; select install windows dll or component from the new menu (note: this part was probably designed by someone working with EA; great design with the cancel trick -- so obvious.)

- from rather extensive list of components choose urlmon (windows steam dependency), winhttp and wininet (PoS dependencies)

- when I was doing all those things, installing urlmon and winhttp 'just worked (TM)', however wininet seems to be distributed by MS only with service pack.

Unless this has been corrected by Lutris' devs (Lutris tries to download these from invalid URL), you'll need to manually download windows6.1-KB976932-X64.exe and windows6.1-KB976932-X86.exe files and place them in ~/.cache/winetricks/win7sp1

- Note: you downloaded 1.5GB of files for this one reason: to prevent PoS from complaining that your computer is not connected to the Internet, so games can't be activated.

- Anyway, rest is rather obvious and just works; you need to install windows steam client into the same prefix -- download steamsetup, and then start it from Lutris with 'Run EXE inside wine prefix'

- After launching steam and logging in, install your EA Play game from within Windows Steam, and launch it from Steam while having PoS running. It should just start normally, unless there are compatibility problems with the game itself (remember that we are talking about EA games here...)

...and to think all of this could've been avoided if this small unknown startup company (EA) would learn from the Gaming Industry's Big Players (Valve) that people are moving daily from Windows to Linux, and not other way around... and then there are cries about piracy etc. ME:A downloaded from some torrent site would require pretty much zero of those steps. Think EA, think. You are here for us, not the other way around.

Note: you could also make it work with Linux steam client, however you'd need separate PoS install in each sandbox for every PoS-requiring game you'd want to play.

@Ofcaah 

It does not. Origin currently supports Windows, and OSX.

We have nothing to announce regarding Linux support at this time.

Ok.

The major thing here, and I cannot over-emphasise how important it is:

Origin *does not need* to support Linux. It needs to get the hell out of the way. Origin adds zero value. It is not necessary. Its only function is to make games harder to play.

The only effort required on the part of EA developers to potentially make your entire game library available to Linux users is *removing Origin*. Just don't install it. I can 100% guarantee you that Windows users will sing equal praises if they just don't have to deal with Origin anymore. It's entirely possible Origin costs you sales purely because no-one wants to have to use it.

yeah, or I can just cancel my EA Play subscription until they decide to deliver games in a less annoying and stupid way

Agree on that. Gonna kill my Subscription cause of that Origin Nonsense. What the Heck is that for?

This gaming company just doesn't care about his fans, they stand with whatever gives them money. 

Linux has increased its popularity over the past decade, they decided not to have Linux players money then the best way is that we stop buying their games/paid for their software and ask our friend to join Linux and ask our friends to do the same until there is improvement to this situation. It is their lost to ignore Linux fans, they just not seeing the investment gain doing so.

I do my part and paid them nothing for the last few years to protest their ignorance to Linux community. Linux is everywhere, it run better, safer, much more private, much more protective to users running their program and system on Windows, they want their users to be vulnerable and expose their users to security risk is fine by me.

It's now two years later. Has EA decided to make playing their games on Linux easier?

Personally, I don't see what the issue is or could be. Steam Play works quite well with so many other titles. Linux users are still paying EA to play the games, or would be if it worked. in my case, Mass Effect Ledgendary Edition and Mass effect Andromeda. I want to play the games. I do NOT want to have to deal with Microsoft Bu** S**t and advertising in order to play the games.

And furthermore, it should be quite easy for EA to program and release a Linux compatible launcher or Link2EA program. I mean, it's linux, it's open source, so you don't need to deal with any proprietary BS to make the program work, you don't have to pay any money to Microsoft or Apple to be able to use their libraries, and you can make your program closed source if you want. If anything, making your games available to play for Linux users should be the easiest thing in the world. And you should already have programmers who know how to do it, All your servers are running Linux to begin with.

Lets go, Slackers.