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Games
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
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This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
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We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
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ah the ol' IP PI trick
Happipiness
I wanna CUP.
Get your hands off my print server
Oh, those weren't my hands.
(Also, I haven't thought about CUPS in forever and this made me laugh. Thank you!)
This is my time to shine
Years ago, I worked for WEA Record (Warner Bros), and one of our labels was Rhino Records, who liked to release great reissues and compilations of our-of-print albums and artists.
They did it by the book at first, getting permission from the copyright holders, who were happy to see their stuff back in print, and get royalty checks again, especially since most of them were getting older, and didn't mind an extra income stream as they headed into retirement, even if it was small.
There were some cult classics that they wanted to release, but couldn't find the copyright holders. After a while, they decided to go ahead and release that albums anyway, but put the royalties into escrow. When/if the rights holder came forward, their royalties would be waiting for them.
It seemed like a reasonable, moral way to handle the situation, unlike the way record companies usually do business, which is to just steal as much as they can, and if they get sued, bury the plaintiff in expensive litigation. Rhino Records, and the people who worked there, always seemed like a relatively honorable outfit, by comparison.
There were some cult classics that they wanted to release, but couldn’t find the copyright holders. After a while, they decided to go ahead and release that albums anyway, but put the royalties into escrow. When/if the rights holder came forward, their royalties would be waiting for them.
Yeah...
Having gone out for drinks with enough people who deal with financial fraud and the like, here is how that plays out:
- Q1: Yeah, we are doing our due dilligence and all royalties go into this account
- Q4: So they totally don't know we have their money, right? Would any of them miss it if we just kept it?
- Q5: We've updated our royalties program and sent out letters to everyone involved to let them know if they want to opt in to our new awesome program
- Q6: Oops, we now only put a fraction of the royalties into this pool and the rest go into profits
- Q8: Hey, Fred is retiring. Let's just empty out the escrow account and blame it on him if anyone ever notices
Well if you went out for drinks with people, I'm sure the record company is evil after all.
I’m trying to buy 50% of my games on Gog because they avoir DRM and 50% on Steam because they’re great Linux supporters.
Still I can understand why Steam is ahead in terms to f sale as GOG has some progress to do.
90% of games on steam are drm free. The only "drm" for most is a single dll that loads the steam overlay and cloud API. Remove the dll and the game is drm free.
Hell most games also support just adding a txt file to the root folder with the appID which just disables the "drm".
Outside of extremely large triple A games you basically don't have a single game on steam that has mandatory drm.
While that's true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.
There are ways to archive Steam games, but it's not the "normal mode of operation". If Steam dies, you probably don't have your games. If Steam's terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.
Some other wrinkles:
-
Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it's clearly marked.
-
I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn't doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited. It's hard to overstate how radical an impact Valve's support has had.
How do you know if a Steam game is DRM free or not?
How do you install such games without Steam through Linux? Is it just an .exe and you click on it as I haven’t done it since probably the early 00’s?
There is a DRM section on the sidebar of the steam store page that tells you.
Oh I’m gonna have a look at my games out of curiosity then.
You would use a Wine Prefix Manager like Bottles or Lutris (both on Flathub). Steam itself does prettymuch the same or similar things as these.
Where download link?
I'm more like 90/10, because GOG still refuses to port their Galaxy client to Linux. At this point I don't even really want to use it since Heroic is good enough, but it really sucks feeling like a second-class citizen, compared to Steam, which goes out of its way to provide a top tier experience on Linux. I'd even be fine with them adopting Heroic as an officially-supported client (provide links and whatnot on the website next to Galaxy), I just need some indication that they care.
Most games I own on Steam are DRM-free anyway, so I'd be supporting GOG more out of principle than anything.
Paczynski says they once hired a private investigator to find someone living off the grid in the UK. He had unknowingly inherited the rights to several games, but was super supportive of "preserving his family's legacy" when GOG tracked him down.
So, it happened once. And they hired one private investigator. Not that it isn't interesting, but why exaggerate everything?
Remaining quotes from article:
"To be perfectly honest, it's harder than we thought it would be," Paczynski explained. "What we've found out is that games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than what we thought. And we are not talking only about the game not launching. We are talking about more subtle things as well, like the game not supporting modern controllers, or the game not supporting ultra-widescreen or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like not being able to minimise the game, which is an essential feature today."
Pacyznski says digital rights management (DRM) features are especially frustrating to circumvent, which means they're working as designed. Heck, some rather famous games are unplayable without third-party patches because of DRM — any old Xbox-to-PC that's saddled with a "Games for Windows Live" log-in comes to mind.
Pacyznski suggests that triple-A developers remove DRM from games after a few years to make life easier for future game preservationists. Of course, this will never happen because executives don't care about preserving games.
GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders
that's not exaggerating anything. it's merely saying it has happened at least once before.
Okay, so grammatically, in perfect tense we can use plural to mention a thing that has happened at least (or exactly) once? Wouldn't using a plural imply multiple, when the known fact is singular?
It's a fair point but it's not as egregious as most other headlines. I personally give this one a pass since clickbaits are meta in the article space. It shows that GOG has this in their toolbox.
Is implying plurality exaggerating things to begin with in this context? The headline is pretty vague, it doesn't overtly exaggerate. It makes a pretty simple statement without embellishing anything.
But if we're going to get into the weeds, we don't know how many private investigators work at whatever agency they hired, or how many were involved in tracking this person down.
Yes. Yes implying plurality for a singular thing is, by definition, exaggerating.
It did feel like exaggeration to me, but it could be my bias. May feel differently about it later.
You are right about the fact that it could be an agency. Maybe I was just being pedantic 😀
Eh, when someone says "private investigator," I subconsciously assume there could be a group involved, and not one person. If I hire a tax preparer, there are probably multiple people involved (the person preparing the tax docs, the accountants auditing those docs, people auditing their software, etc).
If someone says "private investigators," I assume they contacted multiple agencies, perhaps on multiple occasions.
I mean, we're all being pedantic, aren't we? honestly, I don't even know why we wasted the time we have on this lmao. for me it's probably because I'm working and bored to death.
"investigators" is plural tho so that is indeed wrong
Not really. It could be they hired several for this one case.
If a person is off the grid in Yorkshire, you wouldn't get someone from London to go up to do something.
Well, the quote specifically says "a private investigator".
that could refer to an agency. when somebody says they "hired a plumber", it isn't an incorrect statement if that company employs multiple plumbers, despite the quote being singular.
I should support them more
https://www.gog.com/en/patrons
Launched the other day if you want to throw a bit of money to their cause
I'm just waiting for the day they get the rights to the games No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 from back in the early 2000's.
Loved those games, especially 2... 60's setting, female spy protagonist.... Excellent games.
If only they could solve the rights problem with No One Lives Forever.