Honestly it never ever made sense to price a digital download at the same point as a physical object. Providing a digital download is entirely infrastructure costs, the cost of delivering “a copy” to the customer is fractions of a penny. Meanwhile, for a cartridge, for every copy, Nintendo (for example) has to buy a bunch of plastic and EMMC, image that flash storage with Mario Odyssey, print labels and stickers and encase that chip in more plastic, wrap that plastic in more plastic, ship those crates of plastic across the ocean, all to sell them to walmart and gamestop that take a cut of the sale themselves. When a customer downloads Mario Odyssey, all sixty dollars go straight to Nintendo.

Not just the installers, but plenty of games (all of GOG’s catalog, but also a bunch on Steam) don’t have DRM at all. They’ll work just fine if you run the executable file without the “store” running (even if you got the exe file from Steam/etc and can’t re-download without a login thus functional servers and account in good standing and internet connection).

Nintendo can already brick your cartridge over the internet and make it require game updates (via system firmware updates). They have already done this with Super Mario Wonder on Switch 2 - the game will not run without an update download. You can’t revert firmware versions on a DRM box like the Switch, and new cartridges (even ones with “the full game” on them) will require and include firmware updates. Playing the console online or purchasing any digital-only content (or downloading free patches) also requires the latest firmware, and there are whitelist mechanisms in place for Nintendo to outright say “you cannot run v1.0 of game X on system version 16.7.2U”. The v1. 0 being on a cartridge has no bearing on this functionality.

The only way to “play video games without relying on the internet or a company’s server” legally while being 100% sure that the company can’t do what they did to Mario Wonder is to buy and maintain multiple outdated firmware consoles that are isolated completely from the Internet. That’s obviously infeasible, so the only way to “play video games without relying on the internet or a company’s server” is the complete defeat or removal of DRM. On Nintendo platforms, that means piracy, full stop. On PC, there are a ton of games that are DRM-free digitally distributed products - those are the endgame here, not chips or discs. After all, with no DRM, you can put your copy of Slay the Spire on as many flash drives or DVDs as you want!

One thing I’d like to see from an app like this is “force the video into an arbitrary file size limit” with a list of priorities to do so defined by the user. Say I’ve got a video I want to send over Discord (10mb limit) but I’m not intending for the vid to be fullscreened by the recipient so scaling it down to like 480x480 would be fine.

Spire 1 had the beta art unlockable as a per-card toggle for beating the Act 4 boss. Spire 2 doesn’t have Act 4 yet.

If you like these narrative driven games especially Disco, you owe it to yourself to check out Esoteric Ebb and Many Nights a Whisper

If you browse on itch.io by popularity and go down the list until you find one you’ve never heard of (or never played, if you want easier standards) that’s where the “newgrounds culture” is nowadays. Plenty of stuff that works in browser for free.

Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to “mostly positive” or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you “only censored the racists don’t worry. We’re getting brigaded”

Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always… Read the reviews. If the good ones are all “lol cute dog” and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are “waaaah there’s a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah”, you can be certain the game’s actual reception among non-idiots is higher than “mostly positive”.

Reviewers that aren’t the developer’s friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing “chuds are mad about this” next to the “buy now” button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game’s sales right there.

This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.

At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.

Yep, the only resilient form of preservation is digital files stored in multiple locations with no DRM. No account system redownloads, no piece of plastic and metal. Only drm-free releases or pirate copies

3ds games do not pass the “hammer test” of digital product resiliency. They aren’t even properly tied to an account. If I smashed your digital-purchase-laden 3DS with a hammer, or threw it off a bridge, you’d never legally get those games back again. Even buying a secondhand 3ds with the right games installed (as legal purchases) violates the license terms.

currently, while the servers are up, the Switch passes the hammer test. Buy a new Switch, sign in to your account, re-download your games.

Note that neither of these are true preservation because the threats to game preservation are more varied than “smashed your console with a hammer”. And also that physical copies are borderline meaningless in an era where the majority of games have DLC. If I hammer-test your 3DS but you have Smash as a cartridge, you’re still never gonna legally play as Cloud Strife again.

The Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch all got hacked thoroughly before the console’s end of life and thus the legal preservation situation is mostly irrelevant, but the currently ironclad Switch 2 is a ticking time bomb.

yt-dlp, but most of the time you’ll use some form of front end. All the “youtube downloaders”, even the shady websites, are using yt-dlp. For selfhosted purposes, I like MeTube for individual downloads and Tubesync for keeping up with channels.

Valve could prevent this by doing it like the Steam Deck and requiring an x year old Steam account with at least y game purchases on it to be allowed to order one. Businesses aren’t going to grab secondhand consumer hardware to save a buck, and even if they are the majority of Machine buyers wouldn’t be looking to sell (and the margin necessary to get someone to effectively put the price of a Machine on layaway then ship it to some business and pay taxes twice will probably erase any gains the company would possibly see from using Steam Machines instead of Optiplexes)

Cloud saving people is a pretty core mechanic of FF7

Consoles, especially Nintendo ones, make it practically impossible to publish as “just some guy” yeah. It’s almost always a calculation for the dev: is is the vastly increased audience exposure (and sales that come with that) worth dealing with this blatantly predatory “partner” company? And the main useful thing the publisher does is deal with the even bigger, even more predatory companies Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft.

Taylor Swift has a private jet and flies around in it a lot. It caught on as a meme to point out that this one musician’s travel is responsible for approximately the same amount of pollution as a small town of car drivers. This mutated into “Taylor Swift is literally always on an airplane at all times”.

Why do I see this comment when I have lemmy’s “hide bots” flag set?

“The cloud” is somebody else’s computer. Somebody else leases you the space and compute, somebody else can turn the physical machine off or terminate your access to their service. Self-hosting is about removing as many somebody-elses as possible (you’re still on the hook for stuff like power and an ISP, though a lot of self-hosted stuff is also designed to function purely offline so it’s just power for that stuff).

You always love to see when game devs come back to add more Polish to their game.

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