It says we can link to top-level domains, just not specific titles. So you're probably fine anyway. (But I am not a mod.)

Ooh, I hadn't considered checking archive.org. Seems useful, albeit very random.

one day the search bar showed back up even though I’ve told it many times to not have it.

This sort of behavior (and other nastier things, such as introducing advertising for Microsoft services) is why I don't trust Windows Updates and am increasingly distrustful of Windows being a satisfactory operating system.

Also I'd like it to be less bloated. Sure, fancy bells and whistles are nice to look at, but if I could make things look like Win98 again I totally would. I don't actually need things like transparency or 3D rotation/resizing effects.

Oh, it's not proprietary. Then that's a lot less bad. Thanks for the guide; I'll try this later.

Update: It looks like it's handling the offline installers in game-by-game batches. I told it to download the offline installer for a game that if I used browser I'd have to download two files; it shows as just one item and one download in the client, and I verified that it actually does give me both files.

Fundamentally I don't really know how it'd be viable to truly "own" a specific copy of something, when it's always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such "ownership" is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.

So instead my personal take is that I'd rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don't necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.

Thanks for looking into that.

Still something that's merely word-of-mouth promise, not in any sort of legal documentation, and easily ignored if Valve does go down or change ownership. And that's assuming the information is still current, which itself is questionable.

(Not your fault; I don't mean to sound like I'm arguing with you.)

For a while, Recettear and Chantelise were sold on GOG, but I don't think the Steam versions ever stopped using Steam DRM. But the GOG versions appeared a good long while after the Steam releases.

Also some older Ys games had DRM when they first appeared on Steam, but I don't remember whether the DRM was patched out by the time they were sold elsewhere (on GOG and formerly on GamersGate). I do know that pretty much all the games developed by Falcom are available DRM-free these days, and I know those that are published by XSEED are the same versions on GOG and Steam. Whether this is the case for the games published by other publishers (NISA, Aksys, and Mastiff) I'm not sure yet. A likely candidate worth checking in this regard is Gurumin. It's on GOG, and it's old, and it was published by someone other than XSEED (specifically, Mastiff); I vaguely remember Gurumin on Steam being unable to start without Steam.

It sounds like bluffing.

In other words, it could very well be complete and utter bullshit.

Videogame Piracy, no-install % WR strats

On the contrary, I think the incentive would be for Unity to let the pirated install keep existing because that would mean more money they can extort from developers/publishers.

I did a quick check of zlib (I think) and while I could find the core rulebook I didn't see anything else. However, I don't know the thing OP is looking for so maybe it goes by different names that I'm not aware of.