Someone actually emailed Valve about this back in 2013. Here’s their response: https://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg
Thank you for contacting Steam Support. In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.
It seems like Valve wants us to think they have an EoL plan. With the goodwill they’ve built over the years, I want to believe them.
I’d say in your case piracy was 1000% justified. You bought it, you should be able to play it.
I think piracy is acceptable if one of these two conditions are met:
identifying legitimate problems with the best available option
Being closed source and using DRM aren’t necessarily problems. In Valve’s case, they aren’t at all. Valve’s DRM doesn’t hurt performance, and doesn’t stop you from playing their games offline.
So?
Closed source isn’t necessarily evil, neither is DRM. It’s all in how you implement it.
Valve’s launcher/drm are so much less intrusive than their competitors. They’ve demonstrated more openness to user customization and modding over the years than just about anyone else. If we didn’t have Valve, we would have more EA and Epic Games, do you really want that?
I used ProtonDB. You can log in with your Steam account and it will show the rating for each of your games, along with how many hours they are. It won’t give the percentages for you, I had to calculate those myself, but the site got me 80% of the way there.
The only games that have anti-cheat on them actually support Linux anyway, just CS:GO. Not to mention, 77% of my hours in Steam games were spent in games that support Linux natively. 91% in games with ProtonDB scores Gold or better.
Obligatory I am not a lawyer, this is just my opinion.
A let’s play is a derivative work. You can claim fair use, but that’s hard to do. Fair use often boils down to a question of ‘does the derivative work compete with the original enough to cause a loss in sales?’ Think of when people film themselves watching a movie for YouTube, without cutting anything out and barely commentating over anything, meaning that someone could watch their video instead of the movie and get almost the same content.
In this case, he filmed himself playing the entirety of a visual novel. I think it’s fair to say that for a lot of people, his let’s play could absolutely substitute for playing the game, thus losing sales for the developer.
I don’t have the necessary enzymes to digest this.
Speaking of, how are regulators / governments going to deal with Lemmy? Virtually all existing legislation is intended to deal with centralized stuff run by companies, not federalized. By some regards, there may be actual legal issues with the current setup.
Lemmy by its nature is unlikely to ever face the scrutiny that corporate-owned platforms do, but that doesn’t mean we should be unprepared.
This is a joke, right? This feels like a very dumb solution. I don’t know much about UTF-8 encoding, but it sounds like Roman characters can be encoded shorter than most or all others because of a shorthand that assumes Roman characters. In that case, why not take that functionality and let a UTF-8 block specify which language makes up most of the text so that you can have that savings almost every time? I don’t see why one would want it to be random.