http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48006
--- Comment #67 from Andrew Church achurch+wine@achurch.org --- (In reply to Sophira from comment #63)
I do have a question, though. At the time, I mentioned that my launcher's version number was 2025.03.10.0000.0001(11500960). Does anybody know if this was different from what other people had at the time? Could we have identified the trial that way?
It looks like the Webview2 launcher was actually released with 7.20 and just not activated unless you hit the random trial - I tried hacking Wine to rewrite the CreateProcessW() program path to a separate copy of the 7.20 ffxivlauncher64.exe (so ffxivboot64.exe would not try and update it - I successfully used this method to stay with the original libcef-based launcher past its official deprecation), verified that that .exe was in fact started, but it also used the webview launcher. Sneaky.
(Also, my 7.20's ffxivboot.ver is the same 2025.03.10.0000.0001 and the launcher binary includes a "rev11500960" string, so it doesn't look like you got a special version of the launcher.)
Forgot to mention, for some testing reason now doubt, I had windwos version set to Windows 2.0 on that run.
That might actually be a clever workaround to prevent the Webview2 install if it doesn't affect the game's own behavior. I couldn't get the "unwritable setup.exe" method to work for me, but ultimately found a different workaround as I mentioned above.