So often is maintenance work more necessary than glorious. Thank you for it anyway.

"no stakes" my ass.

Oh, I see. That's quite interesting. And I noticed that the Mac version is only split into 4 parts, with one clocking in at 11.6 GB (though others are capped at 4 GB).

I'm very curious why these differences exist.

I thought the file splits are based on size? But maybe I'm wrong. The larger games I have also tend to be Windows-only anyway so maybe I just don't know this stuff.

Ironically I've seen some pirate sites that also suggest related items.

Doesn't mean Netflix is worth using of course.

😈

Well they can revoke your ability to use the Steam client to install and access it.

But of course, fuck that. Steam doesn't need to monitor what we do with our games 24/7.

In addition to installing and launching the games, there are cloud saves, achievements, time tracking, leaderboards for achievements (which integrates Steam achievements for anyone who's linked their Steam profile), overlay, some multiplayer stuff, and more. In this respect it has social features and game management features similar to what Steam has.

GOG Galaxy is also meant to be a universal launcher so you can use "integrations" to have Galaxy launch other games through their respective clients and even have it close the client afterwards. You can also add your own independently-installed games, as long as they show up in a database of games that they use (I dunno where it's from but these days it has pretty much everything I've looked for, aside from romhacks, but for that matter, I'm pretty sure you could make it launch any executable with any label and Galaxy wouldn't question you). That said, I'm used to just launching things from game executables directly so I don't use it for this anyway lol.

Also Galaxy offers more flexibility with managing game installs than the Steam client does. For one, you can set the install directory to anywhere, rather than being locked in Steam\steamapps\common\gamename. And pretty importantly IMO, there's an easily accessible (though non-default, which is fine IMO) option to tell the game to not update, and the Galaxy client won't try to force you to update (unlike the Steam client). (EDIT: there's also a universal default for whether to auto-update games, in addition to per-game settings.) On top of this Galaxy also has more UI options than Steam does, e.g. having a List View option (which Steam unceremoniously junked several years ago in favor of their current mess).

I'm actually about to check out its ability to download standalone installers. I started a couple very big game downloads last night on my browser and they failed so I'm gonna see if the client can do better with stuff like resuming downloads.

Sidenote: I wish I could do more to encourage friends on the internet to use Mastodon and Lemmy...

I've seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.

Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there's QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.

So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here's the information someone else found when they looked into it.

https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)

In summary, this "policy" is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.

As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), there's nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there's nothing saying they can't just update the SSA to remove such a term.

Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam's size I'd say it's less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can't be held to this promise anyway.

So, while it'd definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.

replied to wrong comment, oops

(The comment previously posted here is now at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/1259716 )

Isn't there not yet a consistent crack for Denuvo? Having such would be very, very nice.

Heck, there's at least one Denuvo game that got cracked, and then despite being cracked stopped working after a while, necessitating an updated crack. (It's Shining Resonance Refrain, for anyone curious.)