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Latest Comments by Shmerl
Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
11 Jun 2020 at 3:04 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: EikeDo you trust random people?
Do you leave your door or car open?
Random people don't come to your house to spy on you or to restrict what you can do. And if they try - they should be treated as a security threat.

DRM comes to your private digital space to do just that (it runs on your computer, on your OS and etc.), because some control freaks decided that you are a potential criminal. So DRM should be always treated as digital adversary, aka malware and security threat.

Idea of DRM proponents was summarized very well here [External Link]:

The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.
That's the mentality behind any DRM - invade your space and control you.

Cyberpunk point and click 'VirtuaVerse' is out now and looks incredible
10 Jun 2020 at 11:44 pm UTC

Just finished the game. It had some weird story twists,

Spoiler, click me
but the ending was pretty off putting

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
10 Jun 2020 at 6:59 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: mphuZIf you omit the conspiracy theory and so on, then normal DRM is not dangerous and everything is fine with it.
DRM is malicious by definition. So you can't omit "conspiracy theory", or rather to rephrase it in normal terms, you can't start treating DRM as harmless and something to ever be trusted, because it's always aimed against you.

DRM doesn't trust you and treats you as a potential criminal apriory. So even from basic security perspective, you should treat DRM as a malware apriori in return. Trust can only be mutual.

And there is no such thing as "normal" DRM, because DRM is always an overreaching preemptive policing aimed against the user. It's unethical because it's overreaching and preemptive.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
10 Jun 2020 at 1:12 am UTC Likes: 1

Yeah, I'm surprised some have a hard time with a workflow that creates some tarball or something that can be uploaded to GOG. GOG repackage things on their own anyway.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 10:42 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: fleskDoes GOG have the infrastructure to split sales between multiple publishers, depending on the platform a game is downloaded to? If not, that could explain why.
They have the infrastructure (such as they gather download statistics), but I'm not sure how exactly they are handling it in regards to payments to developers. There is some problem in that whole process, but what it is exactly no one explained.

Feral aren't the only porting company though, so it's them in particular who somehow are affected by this issue, no one else seems to have it.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 10:05 pm UTC Likes: 3

GOG provided refunds long before Steam started doing the same, so yeah, they refund. I used it only once personally, and they didn't cause any troubles with it.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 8:55 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: redshiftWhat do you mean by that? It doesn't update installed games, does it?
It updates installed games, when you run it with proper parameters. It's not automatic (i.e. something that runs without your intervention).

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 8:27 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedjeI also get annoyed at the many games on GOG that elsewhere have Linux versions, but they don't provide one themselves.
Yeah, that's a mess. The worst cases are major games which are missing ports from Feral for instance.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 8:18 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedjeI have this same issue with GOG. I mean we basically have to use third party applications if we want any semblance of usefulness, and even then I don't think any of them handle automatic updates or anything.
Not automatic, but lgogdownlader handles incremental updates.

Supraland is leaving GOG after less than a year, dev says sales were low
9 Jun 2020 at 7:10 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: mphuZBut it's true. Does anyone disagree?
Various studies disagree. But I'm not surprised that it can be easy to ignore as well. Too many people trade off their privacy. It became easy to accept unethical nature of DRM too.