Place your bets on how many games will be roguelikes. I'd go %80.

However many are not open-world-surival-craft. /s

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That's pretty terrible messaging. "Shut down without releasing the game" isn't necessarily better, but they're saying "this game won't be good enough" (because if they were confident it would sell like hot cakes they wouldn't need to close)

Don't forget that a lot of games are "mortgaged" (through publishers, kickstarter, investors, personal loans, ... or any combination of these). Meaning that most of the initial income will not go to the devs (because it was given to them in advance during the development phase).

Maybe they have an unfavourable deal for Reignbreaker or maybe they came to the conclusion that the sales required to be self reliant are unrealistic. Whatever the case, I'd argue it's wise to quit whilst they can still afford to help their employees move on, rather than barrel onward hoping for the best only to go bankrupt in 6 months.

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I get that plastic was probably the only reasonable option for an accurate look... but I really don't fancy drinking my booze out of a plastic cup. Rock and stone for the effort though!

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A fun/intresting story: https://uwaterloo.ca/computer-science/news/cheriton-school-computer-science-researchers-update-linux [External Link]

TL;DR: graduate student wrote a paper about linux network stack optimisation (up to 45% better throughput), his professor + fastly engineer wrote a 30 line kernel patch based on the research, patch was included in kernel 6.13 release.

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Jail feels counter productive. That person has apparently found a way to live and work in society as a game developer. Placing them in jail feels like a risk to see them return to their old ways more than anything.

What was done shouldn't be forgiven unconditionally; but I believe there are more productive ways to handle the punishment.

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Quoting: PikoloThe problem is that the "penalty of perjury" part of DMCA is never enforced on false reports. If it was, we'd have way less false positive reports

DMCA is very different from abuse reports. DMCA is an american legal system intended to protect copyright holders (more often than not, big companies with lots of money).

Abuse reports aren't a legal system, they're just a way for people or companies to report bad actions (phishing, miners, viruses, etc) to another company (usually a registrar or host). There are some common practices (such as the [email protected] mailbox) but there is no law or set process to react to reports. Therefore there is no "penalty of perjury" either.

Quoting: eldakingIf they want to accept some false positives, I'd say it is fine... if they take liability for it. Revenue lost, deadlines missed, possibly moral damages. Do they? Is it viable for a small business or individual to get it? Otherwise, they should have to prove they did due diligence before taking it down.

In the case of the company I worked at, liability was waived as part of the contract customers accepted. For the basic, cheap, competitive offer that is.

There were also offers which included manual review of any action or even remediation, as well as access to a qualified employee 24/7 and liability for SLA. However, these were not cheap, typically £250 to £10k per month.

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As someone who worked on the "other side" (in fact, I personally automated some abuse handling), I'd like to offer a bit of a different point of view.

Firstly internet in general is fundamentally flawed in that most of the protocols and technologies in use today were developed by some nerds in a uni/garage. They were never intended to be used at such scale nor were they designed to be abuse-proof.

As a result, internet is full of trash. I worked for some small registrar/host and we would get hundreds of abuse reports daily, week-end included. And the sad truth is that 99.9% of them were legitimate: hacked websites, domain registered with fake/stolen info for phishing, servers used to send spam, the list is endless.

Additionally, the bad actors are not dumb, abuses are often obfuscated (like displaying only if the referrer is google or at certain times of the day) to make detection harder. Checking whether a website is really compromised may require some technical skills (and thus be expensive).

It sucks for itch and imo, their registrar is still at fault if itch did indeed reply (should have trigger a human check). But in general "shoot first, check second" is sadly the most efficient way to protect people from scams, phishing and other bad stuff.

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Interesting! Sounds like a huge project but Shiro games is no greenhorn studio, I'll be following along to see where this goes.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyDunno. I've had mixed feelings about a couple of Arcen's previous games. I seem to have liked them better in theory than in practice.

Fairly accurate description of my feelings after playing the demo (older version mind you).

Game premise was really interesting, but execution was lacklustre. For example the way to get some resources is to attack and take over the corresponding production building then defend it. It works, but I was expecting something more... intelligent ? Like being able to covertly control the financial system of a big company to buy the land then erase it from their record.

I was hoping for a novel blend of stealth, economy, strategy and story. But got served a pretty average RTS.

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Reading the headline I was expecting gog to have taken over publishing rights for these games or something similar. But given their entirely noncommittal FAQ entry, I will chuck that one in the "marketing intern had a cool idea so we ran with it" bin.

Can a game be removed from the Program?

We never want a game to be removed from the GOG Preservation Program, and at the time of this writing, we don’t see a reason it should happen.

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