Near (the creator of BSNES / Higan, as well as a fan-translator who worked on Mother 3 and Bahamut Lagoon) was driven to suicide. It's a serious issue. And I suspect the sort of people who work on labors of love are often the most susceptible because they're the sort of people who want to listen and who care if people say something is wrong with their work.

They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.

While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They've been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.

But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said "give us money if you want us to keep doing this" I suspect people would have donated more.

I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.

Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they've uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.

It's not a serious suggestion, they're just using this as a "fuck off" response to the record labels.

If I recall correctly, CODEX's Denuvo cracker was Empress anyway, so it has been just her for a long while now. There have been one or two cracks by other people for games using ancient versions of Denuvo that nobody bothered to crack before, but she's the only one doing anything with Denuvo's current version.

I think that it's because now we're starting to get judges who have an actual understanding of the internet and its issues. In the past, lawyers for copyright holders could make up whatever theories of it they wanted and frame things in whatever way benefits them the most; that's no longer the case - these judges (including the original trial judge, the appeals judges, and the Canadian Supreme Court, who handed down the original decision at stake here) plainly understand in at least a basic way how the internet is used, what an IP address is, and the complexities of assigning responsibility related to one.

Whereas ten or twenty years ago you would have had judges who mostly depended on the plaintiff's lawyers for their understanding and who would therefore basically give them anything they asked for.

The only reason people will continue using Unity is because they've already made )or are in the process of making) a game using it and switching to something else would waste massive amounts of time and effort. Unity is depending on this - this is basically them squeezing everything out of existing customers without regard for long term growth.

Remember, the whole idea here is that Unity is demanding payments for already existing games. They clearly don't care about whether people keep using Unity for new games in the future; the executives who made this decision will have cashed out and will be long gone by the time all the existing Unity games in the pipeline are done and things dry up.

The most hilarious thing about this is that, assuming crackers prevent Unity games from phoning home, the best way to support game developers would be to buy their game and then only play the cracked version, never installing the version you purchased.

The easiest way to figure out where a game is writing its saves is to load it up in Sandboxie and save your game, then check sandboxie's box content to see what got updated or saved and where.

Also, Cyberpunk is on GOG (because it's made by the people who run GOG), there's no need to get it through DODI unless you have a severely restricted internet connection and therefore desperately need the smaller size of a repack - you can get the clean gog installer from gog-games. You should just be able to install the latest GOG version over the old version with no difficulty.

Why was the post on this removed from the Reddit Piracy sub? I find that slightly alarming.

Because the people who tend to care the most about stuff like what Reddit is doing or about having a long-term community moved here; whereas the people who just wanted a quick and easy way to learn how to download warez stayed behind.

I don't even mean that in a critical way (a lot of us started out like them, and there's a limit to the number of things people can care about anyway) but that's more-or-less what it is. The people who came here are the ones who care more about piracy in-and-of itself and who often have ideological or philosophical reasons to support it; and they tend to be the ones who make the most interesting posts.

If it's not currently a problem then I don't think we need to ban them. Having to remember a bunch of rules and worry about occasionally tripping one is annoying; and having an occasional stupid meme post isn't really the end of the world as long as they're not drowning out useful discussion. If it ever reaches the point where they are then of course things would be different, but that's not the case right now.

This is a classic Conservative reaction. Not exactly the Donkey/Elephant kind

I mean it kinda is also that kind. If you look at the post histories of the loudest and most aggressive people who oppose the protests, it's pretty clear they're right-leaning ultra-capitalist types. Which is not much of a surprise; since the protests are against Reddit's efforts to aggressively monetize the site, they're effectively a protest against the effects of capitalism.

It's also pretty clear that a lot of the loudest and most aggressive anti-protest types are arriving there from links being posted on right-wing forums - you can see this in the lingo and memes they use, which mostly come from that crowd.