I’m not going to purchase the document to find out, and the abstract doesn’t really cover it, but I’m curious what the methodology was here. I seriously doubt that piracy is that prevalent. It’s possible that people are upset with certain companies and aim to pirate their games, and the fact that those companies are the same ones that use Denuvo is happenstance. It’s also possible that they’re using total downloads of pirated copies vs. total sales as their statistic, which is misleading, because I’d wager the majority of folks who pirate the game would not have purchased it if it wasn’t available to download for free.

I’d also be curious if the price of the game was a factor; I imagine more people are looking to pirate a game priced at $70 than one priced at $40, for example.

Really, there’s too many factors to consider here and I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to say how many folks who pirated a given game actually would have purchased it.

Well, I certainly support this novel idea, heh

is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that no, you can’t. When you buy the game, you’ve obtained a perpetual license to install and play that game, similar to what you’d have if you bought the game on a disk. You can lose your ability to download the game, that isn’t guaranteed to be unlimited or perpetual, but installing it via the installer you downloaded, and playing it once you do, are forever. (This is in contrast to something like Steam, where you rely on their servers granting you permission to install the game, and that permission can be revoked.)

I mean maybe if you hadn’t been milking Skyrim for 13 fucking years, expectations wouldn’t be so unreasonably high, would they?

This is a weird patent; it seems to be describing something more akin to Pokemon Home than an actual in-game mechanic, but then the references talk about the pokemon storage system, so who knows?

It’ll certainly expand their reputation, but not in a good way.

The only things I’ve found that just straight up don’t work on the deck are things with draconian anti-cheat (which don’t work on Linux in general, not just the deck), and very old titles that have weirdly restrictive resolutions or control schemes or whathaveyou. Some games require some tweaking (mostly around controls, occasionally changing the Proton version, which is very easy to do within Steam), but generally that’s been minor. The things that don’t work well are typically things you wouldn’t expect to work anyway.

It’s worth noting that it makes it very easy to remap controls, even for games that don’t natively support controllers or don’t let you remap the controls at all normally. You can also invoke an onscreen keyboard as needed (for e.g. typing names). The controller mapping is very strong; it’s not limited only to single buttons; you can create custom contextual radial menus, for instance, so even games that need many more unique controls than the Deck has buttons work fine with some tweaking. You can also view / download / rate other users’ control mappings for any game that has them, so you don’t even need to do the work yourself.

It’s a fantastic piece of hardware for gaming. Looks great, feels great. It’s a bit large (won’t fit in a pocket, obviously), but that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who would reasonably want a handheld gaming PC. It’s not a phone or a Gameboy.

I was without a desktop PC for a week or so due to a hardware failure, and was able to do everything I needed to do on the Steam Deck (with a USB mouse/keyboard, plugged into a monitor via a dock). So it’s a great piece of hardware even for that.

It’s been awesome watching the complete paradigm shift in political discourse since Biden stepped down… Tons of actually positive news, rather than it just being awful things about both candidates.

I love this line, talking about the Green New Deal:

It called for converting the electric grid to 100 percent clean energy this decade, declared clean air, clean water and healthy food to be basic human rights. But it also endorsed free health care and affordable housing for all Americans.

The use of “but” suggests that either the first part of that statement, or the last part, is a big negative, e.g. “She wants to fund animal shelters, but she also wants to kill dolphins”, or “She wants to kill puppies, but she also wants to clean up the oceans.”

So… which half is supposed to be the bad one? They both seem great to me. I’m so confused by these discussions.

There might be a DLC in the works already.

This whole thing seems so weird. Why is Meta using the courts to enforce their ToS, anyway? Theoretically, the penalty for a user violating Meta’s terms would be Meta closing that user’s account. Unless the lawsuits are just frivolous scare tactics intended to drain the defendant’s resources…

I really hope this leads to a drastic, many-fold increase in the amount of Rule 34 content of Nintendo characters. I hope people start tagging them on Twitter with it all. Nothing would make me happier.

It’s 10% of users using Steam Input, not all steam users.

Valve mentioned that daily controller use has jumped to 15% from around 5% since 2018, and that around 42% of these sessions use Steam Input.

“Hey, can you recommend a good free photoshop alternative?”

“DIE!”

Just like the good old Jraphics Interchange Format!

Plus as an added bonus we can have the ‘gif’ pronunciation disagreement!

This sounds awesome. I enjoyed TW:WH quite a bit; their model works very well for non-historically-accurate settings, and I’d love to see them do more of these.

Hopefully enough of our legacy survives that some future civilization’s archaeologists can sift through the vestiges of our history and learn an important lesson about the dangers of unfettered capitalism from the story of our downfall.

Feels too obvious, but… Diamond Heart, by Alan Walker?

Not once they walk by this display, they don’t. Immediate trip to HR, followed by immediate termination. Employees avoid the lingerie aisle at all costs.