• 2 Posts
  • 88 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Is saving the game from an early leak worth getting rid of physical games? I hope not.

    As a PC gamer who has been basically digital only since the late 00s/early 10s? Probably?

    But the thing to remember is that, like with DRM, the studios have this data. There are orgs dedicated to analyzing (and selling…) sales data that can detect the impact that Mass Effect PC being “unplayable” for pirates because of securom for the first week or so had on sales (anecdotal but… probably real positive). Because this kind of stuff costs money (well, less so for removing a disc drive…) and they aren’t going to do that if they think it will hurt revenue.





  • Not sure on ApeLegs but they have increasingly been disabling linux “support” for the Battlefields because of their anti-cheat.

    I don’t know how popular ApeLegs actually is. But for a lot of live games? Those are making MASSIVE bank and anything that can hurt the economy can kill the game. So a lot of studios actively just disable/block linux support because the added effort of making sure everything works in Proton is too big of a risk. Because nothing would increase Linux marketshare quite like free vdollars in Fortnite.

    It really fucking sucks. But I find that many studios (like Digital Extremes) are really good about making it clear that even though they don’t officially support Linux, they are very much fans of Proton (and Warframe has had a lot of bugfixes specifically FOR Proton support). Whereas EA has spent the past few months systematically disabling Linux “support” for every game they develop.



  • What pisses me off the most with the entertainment industry, is how they expect you to buy the same things whether it’s a different format or on a platform multiple times.

    No, they don’t. Yes, there are the people who will buy every single release of every single disney movie. But the general idea is that just because someone bought The Fifth Element on DVD twenty years ago doesn’t mean they are buying every single new 4k UHD re-release. Obviously that would be preferable but…

    Furthermore, they willingly take away shows, movies .etc on a reguar cyclic basis on streaming platforms.

    That annoys the piss out of me. But… that was how TV worked for decades. Seinfeld will always be on at 7 PM on TBS every single day until the end of time. But the three people who actually liked Coach? Once that got replaced by… Becker? It was “gone forever” and no longer something you watch when you are skipping school at lunch. And if you were REALLY a Wings superfan? You bought it on tape.

    Most of this boils down to… we actually have it REALLY good these days. I remember when I had to make it a point to stop off at Best Buy on my way home from work for a month because I had read that a really cool CRPG called “Evil Islands” was coming out and knew that Best Buy would buy like three copies. And some random soccer mom was likely to buy something for her kid while she was buying batteries. And, of course, Best Buy wouldn’t tell anyone when they got new games and when they would put them on the shelves.

    Now? I can hear about my dream game and still wait until a week or two after launch for a sale because Steam will “never” run out of copies.

    It’s like, leave us the fuck alone. If something is not available anymore with absolutely no assured plans to bring it back for re-release and to be available on even streaming platform which leaves us to pirate - let it fucking be. What, are you going to make a shitstorm for people who buy movies and shows while thrifting? Surprised these fuckers haven’t gotten to that process yet because of how god damn greedy they are.

    I personally have no problem pirating shit if I can’t get it otherwise (mostly because I would rather a proper blu-ray rip or to have it on Steam/GoG/whatever). But I will always call bullshit on that mentality of “We are just pirating because we can’t get it otherwise!”

    Decade or two back and abandonware was very much a thing. Plenty of us were signed up to private trackers so we could share CyClones or Star Crusader because those were dead games. And plenty of those trackers had specific rules about not having anything that is currently for sale… or Nintendo… because they totally were about preservation and it was nothing about getting sued. Then CD Projekt start up this Good Old Games site and it is exactly what we were all asking for. And… that led to discussions on what happens when suddenly those old dos games ARE available.

    End result? GoG rips are the preferred medium because they are DRM-free(-ish) and so forth. And it was obvious it was never about preservation and was just about wanting to pirate shit. Which… is fine. Just obnoxious when people pretend they are noble because they want to play Darklands without paying.

    Which is kind of the other recurring theme. People want to be pirates. Cool, steal that shit. Just don’t pretend you are morally superior and a freedom fighter and blah blah blah. You want free shit. Cool.






  • I guess I am not getting it.

    If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

    Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

    But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.