Yep, the only resilient form of preservation is digital files stored in multiple locations with no DRM. No account system redownloads, no piece of plastic and metal. Only drm-free releases or pirate copies

3ds games do not pass the “hammer test” of digital product resiliency. They aren’t even properly tied to an account. If I smashed your digital-purchase-laden 3DS with a hammer, or threw it off a bridge, you’d never legally get those games back again. Even buying a secondhand 3ds with the right games installed (as legal purchases) violates the license terms.

currently, while the servers are up, the Switch passes the hammer test. Buy a new Switch, sign in to your account, re-download your games.

Note that neither of these are true preservation because the threats to game preservation are more varied than “smashed your console with a hammer”. And also that physical copies are borderline meaningless in an era where the majority of games have DLC. If I hammer-test your 3DS but you have Smash as a cartridge, you’re still never gonna legally play as Cloud Strife again.

The Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch all got hacked thoroughly before the console’s end of life and thus the legal preservation situation is mostly irrelevant, but the currently ironclad Switch 2 is a ticking time bomb.

yt-dlp, but most of the time you’ll use some form of front end. All the “youtube downloaders”, even the shady websites, are using yt-dlp. For selfhosted purposes, I like MeTube for individual downloads and Tubesync for keeping up with channels.

You always love to see when game devs come back to add more Polish to their game.

FUTO can go fuck itself.

You trusted your ability to play games to a subscription service that’s now a scam at $20/mo. The thing is, it was also a scam at $10, or $5, or “first three months free with Discord Nitro”. This is because on the day you finally unsub, your $60/$120/240 a year bought you nothing, while buying games would have left you with a library. Your options post-Gamepass are to buy your games or pirate them. Being on a Mac exclusively, with no access to Windows/Linux based hardware complicates things further. This is the consequence that subscription services and proprietary vendor-locked software have on the hobby. It sucks that you’ve been personally enshittified on, but there’s no “answer to your question” other than “mac kinda sucks for native gaming, and cloud gaming is a scam”.

See if you can buy an LCD Steam Deck, I guess? Lotta games run on that. PCs and “cheap” aren’t compatible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, play what native Mac games exist. Look into Mac compatibility layers or VMs or emulators for Windows software. The PS5’s bootROM keys just leaked, it’s likely that’ll lead to a fully cracked console eventually.

You also didn’t really ask a question. You asked “how do i make games work with my budget” without any information on what your budget is and which games matter to you. Do you need big fancy graphics games? Kernel anti-cheat games? Do you care if you’re playing on low settings and/or 30fps? 1080p? 4k? Your “future of gaming” might be all possible on a used $300 Steam Deck LCD, or might require a minimum buy-in of $3500 with $1000 of it being RAM and $2000 being a GPU. Impossible to know. Your only question was “how do you deal with this” - my answer is “I don’t buy apple products or use subscription services”.

Never paid a subscription in the first place.

Ps5 pro, ps5 slim, ps5 digital edition? Nintendo Switch (Erista), Nintendo Switch (Mariko), Nintendo Switch OLED, Nintendo Switch Lite?

Piracy never ever actually hurts big companies. Game consoles make their entire business on selling “just plug it in and click the prompts and play the game, ezpz” as a lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how fully hacked a console is or how easy it is to hack them, the percentage of users that’ll mod and pirate is always miniscule.

Look at sales numbers for Pokemon X and Y, which released when the 3DS was ironclad. Compare them to Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which released when 3DS piracy required a $100 flashcart and an ancient system firmware with no downgrade route. Compare those to Pokémon Sun and Moon, which released when five minutes with an SD card and a magnet would let you pirate the game directly from Nintendo’s own fucking server, complete with fully functional online play. Notice a pattern? No you don’t, they all sold like hotcakes.

Every first party Nintendo game released after 2016 other than Super Mario Odyssey was available to pirates before legitimate buyers, until the Switch 2 came out. That entire near decade of Nintendo was exclusively releasing games for compromised platforms. Nintendo did pretty well financially during that period, I’d say. Wii piracy was trivial as soon as the Twilight Hack dropped, yet late life Wii games sold gangbusters. And on the Wii, pirates legitimately got a better product because they got to bypass the Wii’s dogshit DVD lens and disc load times. R4s and clones and upgrades existed for nearly the entire Nintendo DS lifespan. GBA games were playable on the PC before the console came out in the United States.

Sony isn’t even cooked, man. Piracy is a non issue to the bottom line. The Switch had this plus fully functional pirate installers in like, month 2 and Nintendo still sold a morbillion copies of TOTK despite all the hackable consoles on the market (and the maturity of emulators)

Firefox is a black box because you can’t opt out of stuff before you click the ‘update browser!’ button. They’ve added default-on data harvesting, telemetry, ads, and now chatbots to Firefox that you have to track down and disable every time it happens. All self-updating software is a “black box” like this, but Mozilla has lost my trust that their updates will have more good than bullshit. So now I use Waterfox and don’t need to worry that there’s some new scheme to monetize me every time I get a browser update.

Paying a bunch of salaries when your revenue streams are Shovel Knight (good but old game that kept getting free DLC and made a lot of its money before release) and… Shovel Knight Dig. They had to go back to Kickstarter for Mina, after all.

If it was one guy or a tiny team, SK’s success would be enough for them to be “set for life”, but a business is more expensive to run than a team is. They probably don’t expect Mina to be a phenomenal income stream either, since (like SK) it’s already mostly done making them money.

Well, his name is Crono, but you’ve got the spirit

Hat stores and “buy more space to hoard the loot we design the game to make you need” mtx shouldn’t be given the free pass they get, especially by players that go nuclear over paid character DLC.

F2P with MTX, got it.

I totally agree with ditching a game over MTX, but doesn’t PoE also want to stick its hand in your wallet? Making a game more restrictive to sell “quality of life” is just as bad as selling a character.

Ah, in that case you’d definitely want to get the game via Steam or torrents. Both of those options have resumable downloads so if you’re on slow Internet it’ll just be… Slow. It won’t “fail and need to restart”. It’ll just take a day or whatever to download.

You can always try it out and refund it on Steam if it doesn’t run well (or pirate it, test it, then buy it if it does). The prologue is actually one of the most hardware-taxing parts of the game, so you’ll know in about 20 minutes if your system can play it well.

I see this take a lot, usually revolving around “doing your part” to keep that tiny sliver of Firefox usage up in siteside metrics. Decide what’s right for your case, but know that Waterfox and Firefox broadcast the same browser user agent so using WF doesn’t take away “market share” from FF. The only thing using FF instead of WF does to “support firefox” is giving Mozilla Corp your data to “not sell, california just calls it selling” and your clicks on its built-in ads - if you’re turning all that stuff off by hand it’s the same as running WF.

From what I can see, this doesn’t need privilege escalation. Just for the user to grant it screen reader privileges, which many users aren’t conditioned to see as the giant flashing red alarm bell it is.

Malware is like fishing. Bait a million hooks and throw them out there, something’s gonna bite and get hooked even if 999,999 lines never even get tugged.