Oh my god I think this is one of the two games from my childhood that I first played and have not for the life of me been able to find

The other is some weird frog sidescroller platformer I got at Staples as a kid in the late aughts or possibly early 2010s

He wildly misunderstood/misrepresented the initiative two videos in a row (and continues to ten months later), and he continually discredits the entire initiative because of contrived edge cases.

I think this paragraph from this twitter reply really sums it up:

My dislike of the initiative stems entirely from the wording to keep all games in a “Functional Playable State” after sunsetting which is not possible for all games and could limit what kinds of games people make in the future.

The idea that creativity would be hampered because games would have to remain playable when the company shuts down servers one day is ridiculous. Can you imagine if we talked like this about anything else? “We can’t force every phone to use the same USB-C charging port because it would be too technically infeasible to do so and hamper creativity.” “We can’t outlaw CFCs because they’re useful chemicals and it would be technically infeasible for some products to be made without chlorofluorocarbons (the things that fucked up the ozone layer).” “My dislike of the initiative stems entirely from the wording to ‘make cars limit their emissions’ which is not possible for all cars and could limit what kinds of cars companies make in the future.” Ridiculous.

It’s absurd that I’m not exaggerating when I say his opposition to Stop Killing Games entirely boils down to “I think companies should be allowed to take games away because it would be really hard for them to leave some games playable when they’re done supporting them 🥺”

I used to passively like Thor, but when I watched those two videos he made last year about SKG I lost all of my respect for him.

I would argue UE5 enables and encourages bad development practices that lead to the unoptimized mess that “modern graphics” games are right now. Their work is cool, but so many games rely on temporal aliasing for in-game effects now, and UE5 is the common denominator.

Steam and GOG have a strong history and userbase. 0% commission is nice, but Steam in particular offers a world of more value than Epic Games Store, including but not limited to a usable fucking user interface (I use Rare to play my EGS library because it’s so bad).

Steam games are DRM free unless you consider Steam itself a form of DRM. DRM is implemented by the developers of the game, not by the marketplace it’s sold on.

And I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?

No clue, but you can selfhost it! So even if you don’t like the official Revolt instance, you can spin up your own for you and your friends and not worry about it!

It’s not a full replacement for Discord, but it’s working towards that. If you just want a basic server for yourself and friends with emotes and voice chats, Revolt works. If you want polls, events, threads, forums, etc., it can’t replace your setup. I think the goal is to be a full Discord replacement in the future, but it’s still a work in progress (such is often the case with FOSS software maintained by hobbyists).

Can’t wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.

About two weeks ago I thought about this in regards to google podcasts.

“Well this one will probably stick around long enough that I’ll have moved on by the time google shuts it down. They don’t even host the episodes anyway. They source the metadata and audio files from elsewhere. All they really host is my listening history, queue, and subscriptions. Certainly this is less likely to get the axe anytime soon.”

*two weeks later*

It really does suck though. I genuinely like the google podcasts app/website. Best one I’ve found so far that works how I like my apps/services to work.

I only ever hear people say the opposite. The comment you’re replying to is I think the first time I’ve seen someone say google is better than ddg in the wild. I keep feeling like I’m going crazy when people say ddg is better than google. Google is the only search engine capable of actually finding the results I’m looking for. Half the time it feels like it’s reading my mind.

I genuinely don’t know what people are searching for that yields better results on ddg than google. Every time I’ve gotten someone to give me an example, the thing they supposedly couldn’t find was the first result.

You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up “installs” for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I’m doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.

Yes! It’s called uBlock Origin Lite. It doesn’t have element filtering, but it works well if you just want a super lightweight adblocker.

Chrome

Firefox

Fwiw, Denuvo is actually really hard to crack. There’s like one well-known person who is capable and she’s incredibly unlikeable. Agreeable sentiment though; Denuvo sucks and harms legitimate consumers (arguably more than it inconveniences pirates).