lemmeee

Sure, it might happen. I'm not going to pay for something that has DRM anyway, so for me nothing will change. I'm pretty sure movies have had DRM longer than games.

People should fight for their rights, though. It doesn't matter if it's Valve taking them away or somebody else. Gamers have been screwed over pretty badly over the years and it's sad to see they don't care. They even praise the companies that are abusing them.

How has Valve been abusing its users?

With DRM and non free software.

Number one, it’s impossible for me to imagine that big-name publishers would be okay with putting their games on a “go to the web site and download the binary” thing. Presumably they have DRM in the package you download, so you have to “activate” it or something and can’t just send the same binary to 10 friends, at which point… you have avoided having proprietary DRM-encumbered software on your system as part of the steps involved in getting proprietary DRM-encumbered software onto your system.

I don't know why it's so hard to imagine for you. I have bought multiple games on GOG. For every game you can download an offline installer and yes you can give it to other people. It is truly DRM-free.

(So Steam works by peer-to-peer file transfer; part of how it’s able to function is sending around binaries between the users. It kind of has to have a client of some sort in order to function the way it does; there are technical reasons why for the model they chose it can’t just be a web site like GOG, even if the developers would be okay with that model, which of course, a lot of the bigger ones wouldn’t.)

Alright, make the client free software then. There would be no ethical issue then, just inconvenience.

Number two, a lot of that indie game landscape that is available on GOG and Itch.io, Valve created over the years right after they created Steam. That’s what I was saying about the hillock. It used to be either your games were shareware, or you found a publisher and probably got denied or else maybe they took control of a lot of the process and kept a lot of the money, and so as a result there really weren’t that many options as far as small games. This little profusion of small indie games just didn’t exist. Valve created a feasible financial and distributional model for it to all work, and at the time it was like a godsend both in terms of who could make games and what variety of games were available.

So you are saying that digital distribution has helped indie developers grow. I don't deny that and I'm not against digital distribution.

I kinda get what you’re saying – just because their system was better than what came before doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some flaws that should get fixed. But yeah I think some of what you’re listing as flaws aren’t really flaws and I don’t see what the bad things about Steam are. Like it seems like it mostly boils down to “it’s not libre software”… which is understandable, but games is just inherently a proprietary type of landscape anyway, so I don’t see that as a bad thing in the same way that like a proprietary-only web browser would be.

DRM and proprietary software are bad for us. It doesn't make sense to defend a company that does those things. We should criticize it, so that we can get something better. You are right that most games are proprietary, but maybe some day we will be able to change that too. Right now I see that gamers don't care about their rights, so they have no chance to change anything. It's sad.

I don't think this is true. You can still buy movies on Blu-ray and I don't think you need internet access to watch them. They have DRM, so it still sucks that you can't make copies, but people sell used movies.

Yeah out of all the shitty behavior in the games industry how are you pickin on Valve

Why not? It's an unethical company, which has been abusing its users for many years. But for some reason it has a lot of fans.

In my view, the absolute publisher-slams-the-developer-over-a-barrel shit show that was the “before digital distribution” landscape was vastly improved by the advent of Steam. The fact that we’re now on a nice new little hillock where we can see some elements of how much better than this it could potentially be, doesn’t mean it’s all the hillock’s fault that we’re not there yet.

You can have digital distribution without DRM and forcing proprietary software on people. GOG and itch.io are examples of that.

(How would a libre distribution system for presumably-still-sometimes-proprietary games even work? Wouldn’t that make it trivial to crack the games, since you have access to the purchasing code and can modify it to just give yourself all the games?)

You don't own their servers, so you can't just add all the games to your account. Itch.io has a libre client and I don't think you can give yourself all the games.

Valve didn't invent that. It's a slightly modified fork of Wine - software that people have been developing and using for 30 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

I forgot about the toggles under the PP cover, I didn’t know they acted as hardware kill switches like L5? Interesting for sure

Yeah, they have the same purpose. They are just a little less convenient to use.

x86 is a power suck but I still think it’s a interesting use case as it delivers on webpage rendering and demanding tasks. Ideally I would imagine RISCV would be the golden standard.

I think the power efficiency of x86 is getting better lately, but still not good enough.

I guess if I wanted to be puritan maybe starting with a Librem Mini with Secure boot might make a good frankenstein phone.

It would probably be pretty big and power hungry. It seems that it uses Coreboot, which contains proprietary blobs. Most x86 devices need those.

I won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good until we are in a position to be choosers, until then its pretty much a community effort to get the whole thing off the ground.

I hope some next phone will get a RYF certificate from the Free Software Foundation. That's already a pretty high standard.

BeepBerry was a really interesting concept but lacked the sophistication needed to take off.

I could see a new iteration gaining ground

https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

I haven't heard of it before, but I doubt that Raspberry PI can be the solution. Does it even run a mainline Linux kernel?

To be fair those were preorders and I'm pretty sure everyone did get their phone eventually. It just took a really long time. At least they don't make proprietary software like Louis Rossmann and unlike Pine64, they contribute a lot to the software development. They've created Phosh and still develop it, so it would be a shame if this company didn't exist.

It's crazy to see someone here defending proprietary software. But I guess you are just trolling.