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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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    1. Games get updates far more often than they did back in the 90s and 00s. If your game is installed, it’s pushed to you automatically. If it’s not installed, the next time you install it, you’ll be on the latest version.
    2. Installing a game is passive compared to inserting the next disc, fishing out the serial key, etc. You just click download and walk away for 5 minutes. Likewise, as games are very large these days, you can easily uninstall and reinstall games on limited drive space very easily from the same UI.
    3. Cloud saves. They’re always nice to have. You can rig up something like it if you’ve got the networking and scripting know-how, but once again, it’s just passive through a launcher like Steam.
    4. There’s a lot to be said about the longevity of network multiplayer games that allow you to self host and port forward, but Steam and its ilk mean that the average person never has to learn how to do that ever, and it’s more secure for the end users for Steam to take on the burden of facilitating the connection.
    5. With things like Steam’s Big Picture Mode, you can navigate an entire library and jump from game to game with nothing but a controller.
    6. Launching a game via Proton, whether in Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, or Steam, is just easier and more automatic than not using a launcher.

    All that said, there’s a lot of value to GOG for never requiring the launcher (but they make an annoying exception for network multiplayer games).


  • You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.














  • So then if I’m evaluating a worst case for what I plan to use this NAS for, it would be that an attacker gains access to movies that I have on my shelf, CDs that I have on my shelf, books that I’d have the right to redownload as long as the place I bought them from is still in business, and my own save files for DRM-free video games that Heroic Games Launcher currently tells me not to rely on them for syncing back to GOG.com. At which point, if some attacker found a vulnerability and locked my NAS from me, they’d have caused me an annoyance in that I’d have to reformat those drives and re-rip that media. With no sensitive information intended to be on this thing, it seems pretty low risk, right?