Instead of looking at why things were designed a certain way, and looking at the original inspirations closely to elevate it, this just feels derivative and like they want to homogenize the series and expose any new players to "their” version of halo. They don't want legacy players anymore. I'm out.

The other core problem for indies is marketability and discover-ability. With people being tight on cash as is, lowering your barrier to entry to get as many people buying it as possible is the usual goal of extreme undercutting.

Not easy to compete with hundreds of game releases on steam each day

Agreed. For the most part I think the struggles are more vastly related to the macroeconomics at work here. The core audience for most games (16-30) have less buying power than every other generation before, so 60 dollars is still really steep. I experience near immediate buyer's remorse always.

There's a great site for checking anti cheat compatibility on Linux - areweanticheatyet.com

Unfortunately most AAA games that want to require secure boot and kernel features for client side anti cheat don't usually support Linux.

It's pretty silly considering how easy it I'd to bypass on windows👴

Depending on what you need, a WordPress site of some kind is usually pretty easy to edit if you want a blog-like thingy as well as gallary stuff for your folio