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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • She’s not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.

    Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last “free” browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?

    Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?

    There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don’t neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.

    This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.









  • GoG, and physical games are only licenses as well. If you have any physical games from the era of instruction manuals you can find it laid out clearly inside, generally towards the end.

    But GoG’s offline installers and physical games can’t be taken from you by the publisher etc (servers for online games and updates aside).

    Neither can installed copies of games if you write protect the files, back them up where the launcher can’t get to them, etc. Licensing, DRM, and legality really aren’t the defining factors here. There are shades of better or worse, but at the end of the day it’s about simply being able to back up the media in a form that can’t be touched by the corporations.






  • Bounds execption: Allows larger objects to fit in smaller containers, ritual spell effective for 1 day, can be upcast to increase amount of “overfill”, some check when retrieving the item for a chance of “corruption” (small chance to retrieve a different item, or have the “overfill” become something different like have the outer edge of a bar of gold be meat)

    Paralellization: High level time magic, Allows the target multiple turns to be taken simultaneously, but an equivalent cooldown afterwards (waiting for all threads or jobs to return before being able to continue), so 3 turns at once means 2 turns the target can’t do anything after.

    Split brain configuration: Allows focusing on multiple concentration checks/spells at once. This could also be called paralellization, or multithreaded.

    Pass By Reference enchantment: requires two identical items. Once enchanted, changes to one happen to both. Room for all sorts of shenanigans.

    Private field: cast on an area to prevent entry/visibility into it by unauthorized entities. Sounds inside are not audible to unauthorized entities outside of it.


  • Yep, Valve also normalized microtransactions significantly through TF2.

    Once again, Valve started it as something reasonable: Cosmetic options, then expanded to allow shortcutting unlocking alt weapons through $1-3 charges instead of through game progression (achievements unlocked alt weapons at first). Other companies followed suite in ever increasingly predatory ways, and Valve got worse with it too over time.


  • I’ll tell you something you missed:

    Steam’s DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don’t force DRM on their platform, it’s entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.

    Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.


  • Let’s also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.

    I really have a hard time accepting that they “pushed” the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.

    Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn’t something new for them. What’s new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.


    Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than “proprietary” and “too big”.

    On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren’t doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.

    Anyway, again I’ll say: I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond “proprietary” and “too big”.