Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...
I’ve seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.
Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there’s QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.
I got out of video game piracy for a while, but I’m coming back. One thing I have been absolutely SHOCKED by is how finding PC game torrents is actually kind of difficult from my normal sources. Now it’d be one thing if I just wasn’t seeing games, but for some reason Playstation and Switch have far more uploaders and...
I thought the file splits are based on size? But maybe I’m wrong. The larger games I have also tend to be Windows-only anyway so maybe I just don’t know this stuff.
In addition to installing and launching the games, there are cloud saves, achievements, time tracking, leaderboards for achievements (which integrates Steam achievements for anyone who’s linked their Steam profile), overlay, some multiplayer stuff, and more. In this respect it has social features and game management features similar to what Steam has.
GOG Galaxy is also meant to be a universal launcher so you can use “integrations” to have Galaxy launch other games through their respective clients and even have it close the client afterwards. You can also add your own independently-installed games, as long as they show up in a database of games that they use (I dunno where it’s from but these days it has pretty much everything I’ve looked for, aside from romhacks, but for that matter, I’m pretty sure you could make it launch any executable with any label and Galaxy wouldn’t question you). That said, I’m used to just launching things from game executables directly so I don’t use it for this anyway lol.
Also Galaxy offers more flexibility with managing game installs than the Steam client does. For one, you can set the install directory to anywhere, rather than being locked in Steam\steamapps\common\gamename. And pretty importantly IMO, there’s an easily accessible (though non-default, which is fine IMO) option to tell the game to not update, and the Galaxy client won’t try to force you to update (unlike the Steam client). (EDIT: there’s also a universal default for whether to auto-update games, in addition to per-game settings.) On top of this Galaxy also has more UI options than Steam does, e.g. having a List View option (which Steam unceremoniously junked several years ago in favor of their current mess).
I’m actually about to check out its ability to download standalone installers. I started a couple very big game downloads last night on my browser and they failed so I’m gonna see if the client can do better with stuff like resuming downloads.
Oh, I see. That’s quite interesting. And I noticed that the Mac version is only split into 4 parts, with one clocking in at 11.6 GB (though others are capped at 4 GB).
They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....
This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn’t do anything wrong on my end).
These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That’s an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it’s not available DRM-free, it’s ethically justifiable to pirate.
So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here’s the information someone else found when they looked into it.
In summary, this “policy” is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.
As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), there’s nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there’s nothing saying they can’t just update the SSA to remove such a term.
Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam’s size I’d say it’s less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can’t be held to this promise anyway.
So, while it’d definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.
It's funny how google pretends the music on YouTube isn't straight up piracy and everyone just goes along with it
Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...
Arrrrrrrrrr (lemmy.world)
Does anybody know where to get analytical/academic software?
I thought my university provided a copy of Mnova, but they didn’t. Are there repositories for this kind of software.
What happened to the PC games (or what happened to consoles)?
I got out of video game piracy for a while, but I’m coming back. One thing I have been absolutely SHOCKED by is how finding PC game torrents is actually kind of difficult from my normal sources. Now it’d be one thing if I just wasn’t seeing games, but for some reason Playstation and Switch have far more uploaders and...
Bringing the power of books to the fediverse (lemmy.world)
Aye mateys, I wanted to share this with you as you may be interested in a discussion on having annas-archive linked to the fedi....
I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."
They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....