Well, you have to buy the game to try launching it without Steam. Or ask someone who did, of course. It’d be nice to know before buying.

Do note that the default shortcuts Steam uses are Steam dependent - they’re “steam://” addresses that tell Steam to load the game, not shortcuts to the game’s raw executable.

Steam notifies for third party DRM, but not for the games that do/don’t use Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam that are completely DRM free and will launch from the exe file without Steam running at all, but there’s no way to tell if Game X is one of those other than word of mouth.

And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.

If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.

Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.

Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.

I dunno about that. Plex has lots of market share and plenty of “well I bought the pass when it was $60/$90” people aren’t gonna be personally affected by them locking more and more functionality behind the pass. So they’ll keep using it and recommending it and talking about it, and the centralized account management stuff (which Jellyfin won’t copy, because not having that is the point of selfhosting) will always be more convenient than setting up VPNs or other tools like external auth for Jellyfin sharing over the internet.

Discourse about this everywhere always boils down to the same comment: “I bought the plex pass and honestly I’d do it again for $300 just to not deal with handling my own authentication system, plex remote play Just Works”. Or something like “I refuse to use a $20 HDMI android TV box instead of my ad-ridden smart TV or PlayStation 5, and those don’t have apps for JF”. These guys are literally in this thread, on Lemmy, the Reddit for people so FOSS-friendly they use Lemmy instead of Reddit.

Yes, that is correct. It’s because the people that read the email only, or read the email and click one (1) link, are likely to be less familiar with Plex as a platform than the server owner. Plex the company would very much like people to pay them $7 a month forever for literally nothing.

but it’s not, because “i got it so cheap for $60 ten years ago / $90 five years ago / $120 yesterday” and “securely opening a port and enabling OAuth for jellyfin takes more than one click”.

The “lifetime” Plex Pass was a genius marketing move, because people are permanently inertia-locked into the cost they sunk. For nearly a decade now the refrain is “I just have a Plex pass. I bought it for $30 less than its current cost and it works great for me, sucks that it’s now $90/$120/$240 but IMO it’s worth it :)”. Don’t forget that making you pay $60 or $90 or $120 or $240 to use your own GPU for hardware encoding was always a scumware tactic, even if they put up a $15/mo subscription next to that one-time cost so that the one-time cost looks like “a good deal”.

It’s scummy advertising, yes. Designed to prey on a Plex server operator’s likely-less-tech-literate users.

Yes, they’re being advertised to. In theory this is because they might be clients for non-Pass servers in addition to yours. In practice, Plex could easily verify Plex client accounts that don’t run a server or have access to non-Pass servers and skip sending this marketing email to those accounts. What they’re doing is trying to convince your users they need to pay a sub fee (even though they don’t), because it’s free money in Plex’s pocket if the users do click the thing and say “welp, still cheaper than netflix”

Any users of your plex-pass verified server do not need to pay anything to keep streaming it. You had to pay a lot more for the lifetime or subscription to enable it, but by doing so any users you share with don’t need to pay a dime. You reading this press release and seeing your users get emails and assuming that your users now need to pay for something isn’t you being stupid, it’s the intended result of their deliberately confusing messaging. One user shrugging and saying “guess it’s $7/mo now” is free money for the company.

FOSS?

Mihon is great right up until you’re trying to read ultra high quality manga with screentones. Mihon doesn’t have modern scaling algorithms, so anything significantly larger than your screen resolution will moiré like crazy.

Give UFO 50 a shot! Should run great through Winlator, or there’s an unofficial Android port (and it’s on Portmaster)

Physical games aren’t the whole game anymore and haven’t been for over a decade, is the main thesis. A DRM-locked (encryption and copy protection on the cart/disc are also DRM) physical copy that needs DRM-locked downloads to be complete is equal in preservation weight to a DRM-locked fully digital game. Once both releases are DRM-locked and download-reliant, I do consider the DRM-locked download that’s still acquirable 10 years later to be better than the one that isn’t. Both are shit, but like you said - spectrum. Disregarding piracy, The Old Hunters is better preserved than Champion’s Ballad (Wii U).

Meanwhile outside of console land, DRM-free digital exists. That’s the holy grail gold standard, not 60% of pokemon sword on a flash drive. DRM-free digital survives the CDN end-of-lifing. It survives my PC exploding, because unlike even complete physical games like a SNES cart, I can copy my DRM-free digital installer to as many devices as I want. DRM-free digital installs the version of the game I downloaded, without any connection to the internet. DRM-free digital survives the music license for a David Bowie track expiring. Even if every physical console release eventually got the “final cut GOTY” disc with everything on it, it’s worse than DRM-free digital by virtue of being a physically destructible copy (though I do consider physical a relevant form of preservation for all the patchless console gens). Everything less than DRM-free (or DRM-stripped) digital is ephemeral. PC is the only platform that’s DRM-free by default, and fully abandoning physical copies a decade ago didn’t change a thing for preservation.

Consoles will never give us DRM-free digital, because the only reason consoles exist now is to be DRM. So the only relevant preservation of console games is dumping and cracking and emulating, because that makes them DRM-free digital, even though they’re not legally such.

What I’m antagonistic towards is console manufacturers selling incomplete games on their DRM boxes.

Nintendo’s the good side of the curve? Nintendo shut down the 3ds and wii u eshops when the console was half a generation out of date. If we lived in a world with no piracy and no emulation (and no buying secondhand consoles with paid DLC installed, because that’s against TOS), and I threw my PS4 and Wii U into a wood chipper, I’d be one used PS4 away from playing my digital or disc copy of Bloodborne complete with the Old Hunters DLC. I don’t even have to buy it again because Sony is sane and ties purchases to an account instead of a console. Meanwhile on the Nintendo side, I’m never gonna play as Cloud in Smash 4 again, with or without my disc.

How about the situation where Nintendo and Sony both stop operating CDNs for old consoles? In that case, they’re equal at worst - I can play stuff I have installed until the console breaks, same with discs/carts. If the console breaks post-CDN apocalypse, and I buy a new one that can’t access game updates, I’m stuck with infinite loading screens in Bloodborne and whatever the heck v1.0 of Mario Kart 8 was. Rhythm Heaven Megamix was never released physically in the US, and the 3DS is region locked, so if you want to get your hands on that, up yours I guess. Wanna experience the weirdest port of The Binding of Isaac to ever exist? Nope.

Nintendo released a limited run digital purchase (Mario 3D All-Stars), for Christ’s sake! What’s MS or Sony done that’s even close to that? Pulled a free trailer for a canceled horror game? I can still buy PS3 games on Sony’s store if I want to. On the PlayStation 3! From 2006!

Nintendo, MS, and Sony do not deserve any grace when it comes to this topic. They’re all bad. It’s just easier to overlook how bad Nintendo’s preservation of digital content (including significant portions of games that also got carts) is when it takes half an hour to hack a 3DS, Wii U, or launch model Switch.

Preserving the shit very few people care about is absolutely a more important thing than preserving the popular thing. BOTW’s latest version will never disappear, neither will Mario 64, but the most ephemeral media in the modern landscape is always interstitial versions. You might be able to find the first cut of Star Wars before it was “A New Hope”, but what about all those recuts and edits that happened between the original release and whatever the latest CGI-filled release is? you might not care about watching the “worst” version of Star Wars, but the definition of “niche” is “most people don’t care”. A speedrun glitch that existed for a week (without being pressed to the cartridge, even!) before being patched is absolutely something worth preserving, because unlike Ocarina of Time it’s actually in danger of being lost (and would be lost almost certainly if the Switch wasn’t hacked. You had to have the game for that week and then permanently leave an entire console offline to keep it)

Thankfully the Switch 1 was cracked day 1 so the preservation can got kicked down the road to the Switch 2 release. Look up what speedrunners have to do to get the optimal any% patch for Pokémon BDSP legitimately

I’m not “mad” about anything new to the Switch 2. I’m pointing out that anything “new” that indicates physical copies aren’t complete games anymore or that physical copies will not outlive server end of life in a meaningful way Isn’t new. Cartridges and discs have been glorified DRM keys ever since the first patch-enabled consoles came out - “the game” is always delivered in some part via patching, so “the game” is never preserved in any meaningful way by someone having a cart/disc. The only meaningful game preservation is DRM cracking and loadable backups of “all-digital” content.

The latest version of the game is not guaranteed to remain the latest version when it’s getting rereleased on a new console. “No mandatory downloads besides DLC and patches” means yes mandatory downloads. They’re free (or you-already-paid) mandatory downloads, but them being mandatory downloads at all are a bullet in the head of preservation - a banned console or end of service or a whole lot of things can lock someone out of the eShop.

Updates are never downloadable to cartridges on the Switch, and won’t be on the Switch 2. Nintendo can rewrite a cartridge, the user cannot.

As for what happens if you try to load a save from a patched/DLC-installed version of the game on an unpatched/no-DLC version, the game tells you that the save is incompatible and won’t let you load it. This is verifiable on the Switch 1 and Wii U versions of the game. I don’t think we have concrete information on if Switch 2 will cross-save to Switch 1 via a Nintendo Account, so it’s safe to assume it won’t and Nintendo will do the same one-way System Transfer song and dance they’ve been doing since the Wii.

Here’s a fun wrinkle to what Nintendo thinks about physical cartridges preserving downpatched game editions: the console firmware of the Switch 1 has a version whitelist. If you have the latest firmware on your Switch 1 and insert a 1.0.0 BOTW cart without being online to install the game updates, the system will not allow you to boot the game until you update it. This is because Nintendo fears exploits like Smash Stack on the Wii or OOTHax on the 3DS.

There’s a new “DLC” that gives the game Switch 2 specific upgrades. Buying the fancy $80 cartridge includes this “DLC” on the cart, but not the existing DLCs. If you already have the Switch 1 game (as an install or a glorified access key cartridge) and its DLC, you’ll be able to play that on Switch 2 and also able to buy the $20 “generation upgrade” as DLC for it.

The physical copies “have the game on them” but not the software updates and DLC, and once you’ve played on the updated version once, your save file is no longer compatible with downpatched versions. You’re loading part of the game from system memory with or without a cart, so there’s not really a functional difference between a physical and digital copy unless you plan to resell.

Hollow Knight also felt like it was in dialogue with the Souls series, because the Souls series iterated on a ton of Metroid’s mechanics in a new space. So it took Souls’ “what if Metroid mapping, lonely mysterious vibes, backtracking and key/locks, but slower paced 3d combat and the keys aren’t weapons” and went “Ok but what if we used the lessons we learned from you to improve the Super Metroid formula that inspired you?”