Quoting: BeamboomNow, things are different because piracy is not as widespread as it was back then.

But how do we actually know that piracy is not as widespread as back then? Due to large parts of the world getting broadband access and picking up PC gaming in the last couple of decades, I'd imagine more torrents might be downloaded these days than 15-20 years ago. The market has grown so much that even if piracy was actually increasing and assuming it does have a significant negative impact on sales, direct comparisons to the situation twenty years ago might be very difficult.

For what it's worth, I did a quick check last night and all of my recent purchases would be easily available for download, maybe due to them being almost exclusively single player and rarely brand new releases. I guess if I were a pirate, my gaming wouldn't be significantly hindered by DRM. (The hook and the eye patch might be more of a problem.)

Online gaming is different of course, and I suppose PC games are now cheaper and more readily available in general. And I'm sure the other kind of piracy, counterfeit DVDs and such are much less prevalent due to nobody buying DVDs anymore, not so much due to easily circumvented local DRM measures.

I believe you when you say these things are obvious to you, but stating things in a self-assured and condescending manner isn't how you make a convincing argument. Verifiable facts and sources are more effective. And if these things are indeed general knowledge, in my defence I wasn't following the gaming news for several years starting around 1999 due to various reasons like a stint in the army, switching over to Linux back when Linux gaming wasn't much of a thing and so on.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubiI'm not claiming to know one way or the other, but the lack of independent studies confirming your claims should at least be noted. You can always find anecdotes to support any hypothesis, but that's not the same as data.

Well . . . despite the old aphorism, anecdotes are in fact data. Not well sampled data, definitely far into the "qualitative" rather than "quantitative" end of things, but still data.

Trust a Library Guy to be pedantic. And absolutely correct of course. :)

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Quoting: BeamboomBut really, do we need numbers to believe this? Isn't it enough to use our own heads, our logic and rational reasoning?
Would the industry have invested such a massive amount of resources and efforts on intricate DRM systems, online verification etc, if piracy lead to more sales?
Like, seriously - are we really questioning this?!

Sure, relying on data instead of your gut is pretty much always a good idea. No matter how rational our reasoning, it's often based on faulty assumptions or oversimplifications, especially when it comes to the human element.

I'm not claiming to know one way or the other, but the lack of independent studies confirming your claims should at least be noted. You can always find anecdotes to support any hypothesis, but that's not the same as data.

In reality, the PC gaming industry is bigger than ever. Game piracy isn't a good thing, but at least it doesn't seem to have caused enough damage to seriously harm the market. Popular games still make millions. Some of those make millions on the PC platform, even without DRM. Even if you think no pirate is ever going to pay for a game, then maybe a significant portion of pirates are people who wouldn't be buying these games anyway, at least not through legitimate channels? It's only the ones who would have bought if pirating was not an option that are an actual problem to game studios, if you ignore the ethical implications of grabbing a copy of a copyrighted work for free. But you're not talking about the ethics.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: TheRiddickIts the same deal with pirates, whom are MORE LIKELY to buy more games then a regular joe, simply because they get exposed to more games and are likely to buy stuff they enjoy. A regular joe doesn't know what he is missing, basically, thus spends less.

This is faulty logic that's long been proven wrong. Absolutely every statistics in the world will show you that.

Are there any actual statistics showing that pirates buy more (or less) games? If there are, I don't know. Care to tell the source?

Well there's the unpublished EU study from 2015 [External Link] showing that they buy more (just search for "EU piracy study" for more sources on that one), but studies commissioned by intellectual property holders or their advocacy groups tend to show the opposite. And usually it's these groups that have the motivation to fund studies and statistics.

Here's a quote from that Forbes article:

"In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements," it concludes. Indeed, it found that games piracy actually increased legitimate sales.

I started buying more games as soon as I could afford them, and stopped pirating when I was old enough to understand the implications.

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Quoting: clatterfordslim[All the talking points]

If you're a comedian and the only thing you can do is punch down at different cultures and races, I don't think you're very creative. Come up with better jokes man. It can't be that hard. Joke about people, not stereotypes. Punch up, not down. Or make fun of your own race and culture, like many great comedians do.

Adding content warnings or information about context takes nothing away from comedy. That sort of thing is perfectly fine. And so is taking episodes/movies off of streaming services. These are private companies and they get to decide what they sell. Hard to argue against that. Still, none of that is being "erased". It's still on our DVDs and various other media.

Your silly bit about activism is barely worth an answer. As if these statues (of which almost none are of historical or artistic value) were somehow more important than actual issues. Statues are monuments to people, they're not history. There's nothing you can learn from them that you can't learn better in a history book, a documentary, or a museum. Context is important. Or did we forget about Hitler after (most of) his statues were torn down? Or about Saddam Hussein?

The "erasing history" silliness doesn't make a lick of sense. As if you could erase history these days even if you tried.

PS: If you ever need to start a sentence with something along the lines of "I'm not a racist, but", you're probably heading down the wrong path. It doesn't necessarily mean you're a racist, but it does mean you're about to defend racism in some form. There's no other reason to say those words.

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In case Earthlock is the only thing you'd want from this bundle (and it is a pretty sweet JRPG style game), it's on sale on Steam. In fact, the collector's edition bundle [External Link] is even cheaper than the base game for some reason. :)

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Quoting: DefaultX-od

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: DefaultX-od

Quoting: Purple Library Guy2) No. I don't use or like the Gnome shell, so I don't care what they do with it.

Well according to this article the vast majority using Ubuntu and that's basically means gnome + Fedora which is gnome too, so Canonical helping to improve what's de facto is a standard now.

What do you use?

In case you're interested, GNOME is the second most popular DE among GOL users after KDE Plasma. I'm partial to Xfce myself.

In case you're interested, not everyone who uses Linux are into gaming stuff

No need to get defensive. I genuinely thought you might be interested.

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Quoting: DefaultX-od

Quoting: Purple Library Guy2) No. I don't use or like the Gnome shell, so I don't care what they do with it.

Well according to this article the vast majority using Ubuntu and that's basically means gnome + Fedora which is gnome too, so Canonical helping to improve what's de facto is a standard now.

What do you use?

In case you're interested, GNOME is the second most popular DE among GOL users after KDE Plasma. I'm partial to Xfce myself.

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Quoting: elmapuleven linus torvalds himself complain that you have to make an binary for each distro and for each version of that distro, or things may just broke, he said something like that then praised the appimage initiative.

If we're talking about games (as I suppose we should on GOL), trying to support every single distro is pointless. Just support the latest stable or LTS release of whatever distribution most of your target audience games on, bundle your libraries (or target a runtime) and let users of other distros figure it out as needed. Or you can package with appimage, I guess, in case you're not on Steam/Itch/GOG.

Call the diversity of the Linux ecosystem a problem if you want, but I'd argue that the pros outweigh the cons. Choose a common distro if you don't want to spend too much time fiddling with your system. That's what I do these days.

Quoting: elmapulnow... if someone can tell me how to install open mortal on a debian based distro in 2020, i would be grateful.
the game sucks, but not being able to install an linux software on linux, having to install the windows version of it on wine shows that we are not in a position to complain about android/chromeOS being incompatible.

There's plenty of old Windows / Mac software that won't install on modern versions of these operating systems too. That's not a Linux problem. Sometimes it's necessary to break compatibility if you don't want to stifle innovation. Or in some cases, if you want to build more walls around your garden I suppose. Web software isn't completely safe from this either.

At least open source stuff can be updated, if there's interest. Apparently there's not enough interest in Open Combat.

ChromeOS/Android not being standard Linux distributions is a completely separate issue, if it is indeed an issue. I'll just avoid both Android and ChromeOS, thank you very much.

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Quoting: elmapuli dont know what they are doing but i dont like the trend here, looks like an walled garden.

What else should we expect from Google?

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Quoting: WorMzyDon't chromebooks use ARM processors?

Apparently not all of them.

Quoting: Liam DaweChromebooks are steadily getting more powerful too, as they bring in newer generation Intel processors that can handle a bit of a load and it appears AMD Ryzen Chromebooks will also enter the scene soon.

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