I vaguely remember having on the order of 5mbps “broadband” when Steam worn me down enough for me to give it a shot over the alternatives 🙄. It was pretty bad at first, but it worked. But maybe broadband adoption was more of a thing in Canada back then.

Before Steam (esp. right before Steam) it was common for a disc to have nothing but a 100mb installer that attempted to download the game, or an actual game build so buggy that you were forced to download patches that required you to be online.

Prior to this, games came with serial numbers and needed to be activated online. This made reselling PC games no longer a thing as you needed to trust who you were buying the game from.

In both cases, the physical disc was yours, but it was pretty useless. It wasn’t the game, but also was required to play the game.

Before that, we had truly resellable DRM: “Enter the 3rd word on the 20th page of the manual 🤣”.

I think the answer was to introduce a law which would force digital market places to clearly describe what users are paying for, for folks who weren’t around during the controversial time when Steam and Xbox Live Arcade came out and can’t grasp the concept; folks who didn’t observe the reality before and after this shift.

Even though it was abundantly clear already, this is what the California law is all about.

If, with this clear explanation, you still want to merely get a license to use games via a service, you should be able to do it.

Valve isn’t doing anything wrong: far from it. Steam is awesome and I understand that one day, it could all go away and with it, all the games I have access to.

I also understand that, at any time, Valve may decide that they don’t want me to use Steam anymore, or that someone may hack into my account and I won’t have access anymore.

Finally, I get that even now, things that I could do with physical games; I can’t do with my Steam library (eg. Easily play a game on my Steam Deck while someone also plays another game on my desktop, or sell a game disc that sits on my desk).

I understood this when I reluctantly signed up to Steam to play Half Life 2 back in the day when it was a complete dumpster fire of a buggy mess of a service. But it has improved so much since then.

Hey, do you, but I don’t see what the big deal is. We’ve already protested that Steam was a bad idea, and Valve was literally the devil, but it’s actually turned out to be objectively more convenient than any alternative to play games, and it’s no longer Valve forcing us to install Steam to play their games. Practically the entire industry has shifted, plus there are now alternatives (besides piracy) like GoG. Hopefully this law causes more competition in that DRM free space.

Dev’s gonna have to pull a Flappy Bird 💰💰💰

Don’t get it twisted. We definitely agree.

This will effectively add any computer it’s installed on to a botnet and create another attack vector (via Vanguard).

The tradeoff I described, tho, is one on the Riot side. And as much as this form of anticheat is ridiculous, it makes sense given Riot’s business model. A bunch of cheaters can easily waste their money and engineering effort. They made the deliberate choice to narrow their market of potential players to those who are willing to install Vanguard and feel that Vanguard pushes most cheaters out of that narrow market. It makes sense.

Re: That tradeoff, tho, users aren’t involved. The tradeoff users have is between installing the game or not.

And again we both agree, installing this to an important computer or on your home network carries a tonne of risk.

Not that I’m defending Vanguard, but Riot’s choosing to invest in developer resources for Vanguard (and in finding cheat developers) so they don’t have to invest in server capacity or developer resources to support cheater only lobbies.

As long as their anticheat is effective, every cheater they can repel is some amount of server capacity that legitimate players can use.

Also, cheaters in the types of games Riot makes will cause some amount of opponents to simply leave the game in frustration. So part of this is just trying to keep players who are willing to install the game happy.

They’ve chosen to make free to play games, so this tradeoff actually makes sense for Riot. But again, kernel level hacks aren’t something everyone will or even should install.

It’s all about tradeoffs.

The more established term is a live service game: A game where development continues far beyond release with a trickle of content to keep players playing (and paying).

Yah. Fandom is an Adblock-required site. And even then it’s pretty hard to browse.

It’s weird how I didn’t really care about the pinhole camera or my Pixel 5 weird dimensions until Ambient Mode started highlighting it. When ambient mode shipped (silently), I seriously thought I forgot that the aspect ratio wasn’t 16:9 and the pinhole was so visible all these years. Turns out the bars hid these distractions.

The feature looks great on Desktop, but on mobile, I kinda prefer the bars actually hiding the edges of the screen, esp in fullscreen mode in a darker room.

It’s cool that you can just turn it off, and hopefully, in the future, they let you toggle the feature in fullscreen and portrait mode separately.

Sync for Lemmy is a different app from Sync for Reddit. So the in-app purchases won’t transfer. There’s nothing to transfer.

tl;dr - Second option usually.

I think a huge part of shell programming (besides recognizing when anything more maintainable will do 😂😂😂) is trying to allow others who aren’t as familiar to maintain what you’ve written. Shell is full of pitfalls, not the least of which is quoting and guaranteeing how many arguments you pass to commands and functions.

To me, the whole point of quoting here is to be crystal clear about where command arguments begin and end in spite of variable substitution. For this reason I usually go for the second option. It very clearly describes how I’m trying to avoid a pitfall by wrapping each argument to find in a pair of quotes: in this case, double quotes to allow variable substitution.

Sometimes it’s clearer to use the first approach. For example, if the constant parts of one of those arguments contains a lot of special characters, it may make it clearer to use the first approach with the constant parts wrapped in single quotes.

But even then there are more clear ways to create a string out of other strings. For example, the slightly slower, and more verbose use of printf and a variable, and then using that variable as an argument…wrapped in double quotes since it could contain special characters.