seaturtle

😈

Well they can revoke your ability to use the Steam client to install and access it.

But of course, fuck that. Steam doesn't need to monitor what we do with our games 24/7.

Update: It looks like it's handling the offline installers in game-by-game batches. I told it to download the offline installer for a game that if I used browser I'd have to download two files; it shows as just one item and one download in the client, and I verified that it actually does give me both files.

In addition to installing and launching the games, there are cloud saves, achievements, time tracking, leaderboards for achievements (which integrates Steam achievements for anyone who's linked their Steam profile), overlay, some multiplayer stuff, and more. In this respect it has social features and game management features similar to what Steam has.

GOG Galaxy is also meant to be a universal launcher so you can use "integrations" to have Galaxy launch other games through their respective clients and even have it close the client afterwards. You can also add your own independently-installed games, as long as they show up in a database of games that they use (I dunno where it's from but these days it has pretty much everything I've looked for, aside from romhacks, but for that matter, I'm pretty sure you could make it launch any executable with any label and Galaxy wouldn't question you). That said, I'm used to just launching things from game executables directly so I don't use it for this anyway lol.

Also Galaxy offers more flexibility with managing game installs than the Steam client does. For one, you can set the install directory to anywhere, rather than being locked in Steam\steamapps\common\gamename. And pretty importantly IMO, there's an easily accessible (though non-default, which is fine IMO) option to tell the game to not update, and the Galaxy client won't try to force you to update (unlike the Steam client). (EDIT: there's also a universal default for whether to auto-update games, in addition to per-game settings.) On top of this Galaxy also has more UI options than Steam does, e.g. having a List View option (which Steam unceremoniously junked several years ago in favor of their current mess).

I'm actually about to check out its ability to download standalone installers. I started a couple very big game downloads last night on my browser and they failed so I'm gonna see if the client can do better with stuff like resuming downloads.

Hmm, seems like this is really might be getting to a point where non-viable instances are the exception rather than the rule. At least, I hope that's the case these days.

I'm too busy to switch to Linux at the moment but if I have to it's definitely an option I'm making back-burner plans for.

Back when Mastodon was more in the news I told various friend groups to jump on it. I wrote up guides for them too. They largely didn't, and some of them even got annoyed at me.

Nowadays I see they're still somewhat mostly using Twitter though some of them have started to slowly warm up to Bluesky. Sigh.

But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.

The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be "official" instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies...but that's using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from "lol copyright", legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.

Sidenote: I wish I could do more to encourage friends on the internet to use Mastodon and Lemmy...

I've seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.

Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there's QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.

I really wish GOG made Galaxy for Linux already.

They can revoke stuff from your library.

They just usually don't have a reason to do so.

(Also, you might not be able to get older versions of the game anymore. Meaning that you may be stuck with unwanted content changes in some games.)

So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here's the information someone else found when they looked into it.

https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)

In summary, this "policy" is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.

As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), there's nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there's nothing saying they can't just update the SSA to remove such a term.

Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam's size I'd say it's less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can't be held to this promise anyway.

So, while it'd definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.

And there's also kids who don't have credit cards yet too.