While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games
… but in the same sentence has nothing but good things to say about constant tinkering and overhauling:
companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes
Dude sounds like he’s just speaking out of two sides of his mouth.
By the way, this is also why they are against game preservation. Artificially making the $thing unavailable is a sure fire way to sell it again ‘remade’.
It’s weird that they mention games getting rereleased over and over. But that’s really the popular games. The less popular games, like the unpopular shows and movies, just get abandoned. Hell, with companies closing or splitting, they might not even know who owns a lot of them.
You don’t own the games. You can’t trade them. If they get removed from the platform you are SOL. Also it affected physical games as well. Why did I have to install Steam (that was green steam btw) to play Empire Total War?
I’ll stick to torrenting, besides a game is like 10% of my salary. Nope.
Are you sure about them being removed from the platform? I purchased GTA: San Andreas before the shitty remaster came out, and I can still download it. It is no longer available/purchasable, but I still “own” it. Do you have a better example, as I haven’t really heard of this happening before?
But yeah, all the other points you mention are valid. GOG is better in this regard, but their platform is nowhere near the level of Steam in terms of user experience.
Valve has made it very clear that any game you purchase on their platform will always be available to you, and they’ve held up on that promise for 15+ years so far.
I completely disagree. You still own the games in Steam, and you can download them forever as long as you have your account. It’s not like streaming services that can just remove stuff. I think you may not understand the difference.
I wouldn’t say you own games on Steam. You can’t install them without Steam, and usually you can’t even launch them without being connected to Steam. And you if lose your account, they are lost forever.
GOG on the other hand, you can absolutely download offline installers for you entire game collection and keep them somewhere safe in a hard drive from which you could still install them 10 years after GOG is dead. (and hopefully the games still work on newer hardware)
Piracy has always offered a simpler and more user-friendly alternative to the official methods of consuming movies and series. And today, with tools like Jellyfin or Plex, everything is more accessible and at least centralized, so you don’t need 15 platforms (you just need to know where to look to get the content). In the case of games, the presence of anti-tampering solutions like Denuvo is a significant concern. These solutions not only consume a considerable amount of system resources but also ironically make pirated versions more playable on less powerful platforms. Unless companies adopt a new mindset and approach, piracy is likely to continue thriving and evolving.
Yup, this is the same fight the Music labels fought in the late 90’s and early 00’s. Piracy offers a far superior user experience and a lower price point. With the chances of facing punishment low enough that most people expect to get away with it. The content producers could solve the problem, but none of them want to, as that would mean lower profits per person. So, we’re stuck in a cycle of companies whining about piracy while not actually addressing the incentives which drive people to it.
It’s kinda funny that, what people want is a lot like the old cable TV model, without the bullshit of contracts and bundles. Imagine a single service, when you can get all the content from all the producers for one price. Ya, that’s cable TV. The problems were that cable TV had regional monopolies (in the US), consumers got locked into expensive contracts which discouraged free choice and it was largely impossible to say, “I want channels X, Y and C. But not Z, A or B.” Your choices were “Here’s every channel known to man for the low, well not that low, price of hundreds of dollars per month; or, you can get two of the channels you want, but not that other one you really want.” It’s no wonder that people jumped ship when streaming came along. Oh and as a bonus problem, time shifting content on cable was chock full of “fuck you”.
I was a reasonably early cord cutter. Went with an OTA antenna for a few years, followed by YouTube TV and finally just axing live TV all together. I’ve done the math a few times and even with costs creeping up, and subscribing to half a dozen services, the costs for streaming still beat the stuffing out of what I was paying for cable. Back when I cut the cord, I was up around $200/month for all the channels I wanted (and a shit-ton I didn’t). With the services I have now, I’m closer to $100/month. And I had to pay an “early termination” fee back then to break my contract. Given that history, anyone asking for a return to that type of model can go get fucked. Ya, it’s a PITA when content is pulled or I have to fumble between several different services to find something to watch. But, I’d rather have the freedom to trim and adjust services at a whim, than be locked back into that bullshit.
And all this is why rising piracy doesn’t surprise me either. The current system is broke. The system which came before it was broke even worse. And it’s been pretty well established that piracy on the internet is a low risk action with an end result that puts the official way to shame. Piracy isn’t a price problem, its a service delivery problem. You can never compete with piracy on price, just on service. And the content companies aren’t doing that. Video content needs a Steam like service to create a service offering which is, at least, as good as the service piracy is offering. And while some people won’t use an official service at any price, it’s still early enough that many potential pirates could be swayed to pay a reasonable cost for a good service. But, that might mean lower costs and companies not having exclusive access to viewership data. And they won’t allow that until market forces make their refusal untenable.
I had this realization about 5 years ago and just started building out my Plex server. Today I have over 10 TB of movies and shows on there and we love it. Being able to watch any show from any platform is a breeze, and with my file server I can download torrents anywhere and they instantly move to my seedbox and start downloading, so it’s super easy to add new content. Fuck streaming services.
Yesterday I finished automating my seedbox and oh my, it’s so so good. I gave my family their Plex accounts and they’re so happy getting any movie or tv show they want in two clicks in any device they have. Plex->Overseerr->Radarr/Sonarr->Download, it was so satisfying to set up, a lot of fun too haha. I even set up a Telegram bot so they know when their requests are available.
That’s cool! My setup isn’t quite so automated, but I do like to really curate the content that’s on there. IE ensuring it has the proper codecs for audio and video, has subs, is good quality, etc. But I can download the torrent files from any device, they get sent to my seedbox via a VPN no matter where I am, then the torrent program starts downloading. Then I can just drag and drop into my plex folder, which scans every 6 hours for new stuff.
You can set up quality profiles in Radarr/Sonarr and they can get very specific through Regex. You can also set up the root folder to your Plex folder for them to get downloaded there automatically.
I have been running a pirate campaign for quite awhile and some that I would add are:
Be careful how evil you let the players get. Too much evil is difficult to run especially in civilized port cities.
I have allowed my players to learn new tool or skill proficiencies using downtime on the boat, there’s a lot of traveling and this helps give them incentive to use the boat more.
Don’t take away their boat more than once or twice during the campaign for narrative reasons, it gets old and they invest a lot of money and resources into it. If they mess up and lose or sink their boat, that’s on them.
Make sure there’s enough quests that need a boat, otherwise they might revert to old habits of traveling across land.
How do you manage this? Isn’t pirating kind of inherently evil? Do you need to set up an evil empire with the party playing Robin Hood on the high seas?
I ran a wild west game of 5e called Spellslinger for three years from 3rd to 15th. You can actually adapt most DnD monsters and races quite easily to a wild west them.
Dwarves - gold and mithril prospectors
Wood elves - dessert nomads
Aaracocra - native Americans although you need to be respectful obviously
Tielflings - always played piano in bars for some reason
Giants - desert giants work really naturally
It also turns out they’re is an absolute ton of fantasy wild west art which serves for great inspiration.
Pretty good basic intro to dnd healing, but they are sleeping on Bards as healers. They can apply expertise to perception, which more than makes up for wisdom not being their primary stat. They have access to awesome crowd control and support spells in their list. And then you’ve got the glamour bard’s mantle of inspiration that pours temporary hit points and reaction disengage/movement on several people. A party having a large movement advantage compared to the enemies is one of the best ways to reduce incoming damage.
It’s not even though. Tolkein was very deliberate about what he included in his world, whereas Forgotten Realms is just “we need to make up some shit so that everything can go here”
Kinda disappointed by the article (Waterdeep, but no Myth Drannor, or Icewind Dale, or Thay? No Underdark?!!?!), so in protest I'm gonna post the OG D&D world - Greyhawk - the origin of Vecna and the late, great Gary Gygax's personal campaign setting.
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