To install a game you have bought on steam you need the steam client, the steam servers, internet and your steam account. If any of those stops being available you can no longer install the games you have bought. So while you can play the games once installed without most of the above, you can lose access to your not currently installed games.

Also, on steam you purchase licenses to the games which they can revoke. I.e. if steam turned evil they could take away games from your library and you couldn’t do anything about it really.

Comparatively on GOG, you get a binary installer you can download and can keep forever without DRM so you don’t need anything else to install the game in the future, even if it disappeared from your GOG account for some reason, you could still install and play the game.

Except there is (of course) a mega thread on Reddit to get invites where people blindly invite anyone.

I wonder if this will also have a reverse tail end effect.

Company uses AI (with devs) to produce a large amount of code -> code is in prod for a few years with incremental changes -> dev roles rotate or get further reduced over time -> company now needs to modernize and change very large legacy codebase that nobody really understands well enough to even feed it Into the AI -> now hiring more devs than before to figure out how to manage a legacy codebase 5-10x the size of what the team could realistically handle.

Writing greenfield code is relatively easy, maintaining it over years and keeping it up to date and well understood while twisting it for all new requirements - now that’s hard.

X4? Its on steam but for the rest, maybe? (Or previous iterations)

Some are very easy depending on how the game works (at least on android). E.g. when pokemon go came out you could just go to developer settings (in android settings) and change your location to wherever you wanted.

Another super easy one is changing the time to get around timegated games.

So sweet baby Inc (who I never knew of until now) felt attacked by a list on steam which collected titles they worked on (it didn’t say avoid apparently, just a list of titles they worked on with proof from their own media).

Kind of telling of the company that they saw this as an offense to them rather than as a tribute. If they thought their work was good they’d advertise this list themselves.

Also, way to dig a grave.