Quoting: monyarmWhy do these emulator devs keep bending over backwards for Nintendo? Emulation and Reverse Engineering have both been proven to be legal on multiple ocassions. Literally all Nintendo can do is huff and puff.

Because, sadly, in most justice systems, especially on the civil side, it's far less a matter of actual justice... actual right and wrong... that wins a case, but rather who has the money to go through the process of the court system.

Or, more directly, Nintendo simply has the money to outlast the developers of these emulators in court, regardless of whether Nintendo is actually right or wrong. Their bank account allows them to win by default.

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Quoting: scaineThe Fallout TV series was indeed absolutely superb. I'm practically aching for a second season. Gonna be a long wait. In the meantime, I think I'm going to play Fallout 3 again, then New Vegas. Might even push myself to play more than 1 hour of Fallout 4 - something about that one just didn't resonate for me.

Reckon I'll still stay clear of Fallout 76 though. To this day, it still gets crap reviews, and while it might only £7 in the sale at 80% off, it's apparently rammed full of MTX begging for your money.

Just to play devils advocate to Fallout 76... I bought the game at release and, content wise, it has grown quite substantially since it released... not the least of which because it was finally given legit NPCs. The MTX situation is true. While the vast majority is cosmetic related, they so sell those items that "help you" skip the more grindy parts of the game (like repairing weapons and collecting scrap)... I will admit, I lost a lot of respect for Bethesda when they put up those later items. None-the-less, the game proper can be a blast, especially if you have a buddy or two to explore with, and when I say you can play the whole game without ever touching the MTX content, I mean that. If you ignore the MTX content exists, I think you'd be hard pressed to feel like the game was that much different from Fallout 4... at least it was for me.

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Quoting: elmapulits not that i dont like physical media, if they were DRM free and i could afford, i would totally buy all my games in physical, and i dont see a big difference from having physical media or an steam key in terms of DRM (aside from all the conveniences that steam offer)

i just dont like the discourse arround it, as if physical was synonymous with preservation while digital was automagically bad, gog is a good exception to this rule!

Except you contradict these statements with...

Quoting: elmapulthe only downsides is that they can delist, ban your account, you cant resell (but you often pay less to accommodate for that) and... in cases where they sold something they dint really had the rights to sell, they may remove it... ok its quite inconvenient when you think about those issues.

You basically point out exactly why many people prefer physical distribution. The core fact that once you own the disc, none of the above can be done to your purchase... exception being...

Quoting: elmapul...with things like games that dont have the full content (or in some cases any) in the disk, they just act as an key to download the rest of the game (or even the entire game).

In this case, you're right, but then, this example wouldn't be a consumer making a physical purchase, but rather a customer buying the equivalent of a pre-paid card of sorts, with the added bonus that you, as the consumer, was actively being tricked into thinking you were buying a disc with the content upon it.

Quoting: elmapulevery "digital" game is being distributed to an physical media, and the content of every physical media is digital anyway (aside from things like superFX chips, you cant download then nor store hardware, at best you can emulate with an powerfull enough hardware)

Not exactly sure what you're explaining here. Obviously all of the content on physical media is digital (with exceptions for some [but not all] magnetic storage media). This is not the point. Additionally, being able to utilize that digital content upon it's originally intended hardware, or running it on emulation (whether software or hardware based) is also a moot point. The core point of physical media, in this context, is the inability of a company to remove your access to said content. If you own the media on which those bits are stored, you cannot have it taken from you (legally) regardless of any actions that content's originating company, or 3rd party company may do.

Quoting: elmapulthe fact that people have being able to dump content and break DRM does not mean they will be able to do so forever

Yes... yes it does. Copy protection (at present) is devised by, and executed by humans. There's always another human that can circumvent limitations imposed by another. The only limitation that has success is to make sure nobody is able to access the full content of your digital media... AKA, always online functionality in which some functionality of the game is absolutely not client side. Even then, while it takes considerable effort, people have worked around these limitations as well. All one has to do is look at the various MMOs that have been resurrected by fans via a fan-made server (City of Heros is one of the latest MMOs resurrected in this manner. Star Wars Galaxies is another).

Quoting: elmapulthe same can be said about hacking servers to download content (take nintendo giga leak for example and compare to an cloud exclusive game, sure in theory we can hack the server and download the game to preserve it, in pratice we have no guarantee that we will be able to do that before it got deleted, so why risk it ?)

In terms of hacking servers... which, to be fair, now we are definitely outside the merits of physical ownership, but, WTH... If content was nabbed from a server hack, that's it. Cats out of the bag. Sure, the server owner may patch the vulnerability, but that's ultimately temporary. Hackers with a strong enough desire (just like breaking copy protection) can, eventually, get through and access the content again. It becomes a game called Cat and Mouse. Hacker breaks in, server is patched, hacker gets around patch, rinse, wash, repeat. Regardless, though, after the first breach, if anything was, indeed, copied off the servers, that's it. Even with the server patched, the content is in the wild. Those that truely want it will be able to get it.

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Still, going back to physical distribution. Assuming you're not being tricked with an empty disc, physical media does have a greater chance of preserving games, movies, and music as a company cannot walk into your home and take it from you. The content that only lives on a server can be stripped from you at any time.

Also... on a side note... If a game can be downloaded onto your computer, it's now a physical copy (again, unless the game has an, as yet non-replicated, online server requirement). Crack the DRM (if there is any) and cold-store that thing. While Steam does have it's DRM, Steam also makes cold storing your game libraries exceedingly easy.

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Quoting: elmapulyou said discs, dont forget the switch still uses catridges.
its not rocket science once some one figured it out, or to figure it yourself?

anyway, people who are purchasing something do so because they want to support the developers and dont want to go into the extra trouble of pirate it, i dont understand why people think the proprietary catridges and discs count as "preservation" despite the fact that it can rot and its hard to copy, while completely ignore gog.

i dont know about you, but i dont want to purchase something physical, expect that someone else will figure out how to dump it and distribute online, only for, years later realize no one did and just realize that after my copy is rotten.
digital is the way to go.
unless we count delisted games... speaking of it, how many games got delisted from gog?

Are carts more complex than discs? Sure. Not overwhelmingly difficult, though. Pretty much the entire NES, SNES, Gameboy ( Color ), Gameboy Advanced, DS, PSP, PS Vita, Atari (2600, 7800, etc), etc, etc, libraries have been pulled, and, as there are switch emulators in existence, that means people do, indeed, know how to pull Switch games off their carts, so, their library will be pulled too.

Buying physical media still supports the developers, and, arguably, they're not pirating the game by ripping or downloading an existing rip, as they have the physical disc (in the US, I believe it is legal to make and have a backup copy of media you physically own).

You're not wanting to buy physically is totally your choice! You do what's convenient for yourself!

In regards to physical media decay... All storage decays, but, I feel optical disc media decay rates are highly overblown. I have DVDs that I have purchased well over 20 years ago (back when DVDs were first being released) that still work just fine. My PS1 and PS2 discs still work fine (at least so far as I can rip them and the rips work... I no longer have an actual PS1 or PS2 to test with). Even my older CDs still work without issue.

Buying from GOG is *great*! I have quite the GOG library myself, and DRM-Free is what draws me to them... but, unless you download and store all of your purchased GOG games yourself onto your own local storage for backup, you still run the risk of GOG pulling that media from your online library. Have they done that in the past? Not completely. That said, I bought the Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 games from them very early on. About a year or so later, there was some legal issue with GOG selling the Fallout 1 and 2 games and they were delisted from the GOG store. The games *remained* in my library during this, so I did not loose them, but, when Fallout 1 and 2 returned to the GOG store, they were technically considered different products from what I had purchased. So, as it stands, I have Fallout 1 and 2 in my GOG library, but their store does *not* identify that those games are in my library. Any future IP/legal dispute between GOG and Bethesda (who, I believe own the whole of the Fallout IP) could lead to me loosing those games from my library completely. Extending that, the same can be said for any game in my GOG library. Unless I back them up myself...

... and in regards to backing up a GOG library, that just turns them into physical media (hard drive) at this point, which brings it all back to the worry about physical media decay. Now, a decent hard drive can last you years, but, in my experience, hard drives tend to have a greater failure rate than optical discs... so, again, spread the love. Have your media on disc, and a few hard drives (one local, one remote), then you should be more covered than most.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: finaldestThe only exception being PC gaming as its simply impossible to buy games physically so I am sticking with Steam and maybe GOG in future if they ever give linux 1st class support.

gog is actually better than physical, you can have as many backups as you want, good luck riping your games that you have on physical media for other platforms, few people have the know how / tools to do that.

I will admit, it's not always strait forward to rip the physical media of non-PC discs, however, for most, it's not really rocket science either, and if a person is already at the point where they feel ripping their media is the way to go, they would probably have the where-with-all, if not the direct technical know-how, to figure the process out quickly enough. It's not the difficulty of ripping as the reason few do it, it's giving a shiz enough.

For those physical discs that have a higher than average ripping difficulty (looking at you, OG XBox discs), finding a rip online isn't horribly difficult either.

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Well, good for those that want it, I suppose. Honestly, I feel RGB has gone a bit too far in computers. Some can use it to great effect, I'll admit, but, more often than not, it really does just look like rainbow puke.

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Happy holidays to everyone and a happy new year!!

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Honestly, W4 charging that amount to port to the consoles doesn't bother me. If I developed a game I felt could bring in the money, then 2k a year shouldn't be that bad. Additionally, if I could find another group that can port for cheaper, W4 is not standing in my way to go that alternate route.

As long as Godot's development remains independent of W4's console efforts, I'm content.

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This is wonderful for Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan! Kinda envious of them, honestly!
Being from the US, it's sad not to see the Steam Deck at a retail store (probably because the US is letting the retail space die, I only say as half a joke). I was in a Best Buy a few weeks ago and stopped when I thought I saw a Steam Deck on display. Got a little excited thinking "Oh wow, Valve is finally putting their console in stores!"... then I realized I was looking at the Ally and immediately was saddened.

Not to rain on the Ally's parade at all! I love that there's competition in the mobile console space and bringing those prices down, but, I will admit I'm a Steam Deck fan boy of sort and I just really think it'd do even better if it was available in a way that Grandma and Grandpa could get one to give to little Tina or Timmy for the holidays.

Also, I have the original Steam Deck and would love to see/feel the new OLED version in the flesh (so to speak) to really see the difference before deciding to spend money on it.

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Amusingly, I'm starting to feel that, if the game developers are willing to sell their game(s) on Itch.io, then they're indie. Off the top of my head, I cannot recall seeing any AAA publisher ever putting there game(s) on itch.

In reality, the big publishers (Microsoft, Sony, Activision, EA, etc) do not want the term "indie" defined! Why would they? They'll let people debate over the term and, in the process, bring in customers that either don't understand what "indie" even means, doesn't realize a AAA publisher made their favorite "indie" video game, and/or doesn't care one way or the other. We can see this from their "Awards" show... worse than a Grammy or an Emmy show, these Game Awards are really just a circle jerk and massive ad spot with no real substance or meaning, and they're more than happy that most gamers realize that or don't care.

On a serious "what defines Indie" note, I think the term alone is too broad. Instead of an "Indie" category, the categories should definitely be more specific (with strict definitions). Like...

• "Best Solo-Dev Game" - Game developed without publisher by a single individual


• "Best Independent Team Game" - Game developed without a publisher by a team of less than 20 individuals


• "Best Small Publisher Game" - Game released by a publisher who only publish small studio (less than 100 employees) games.

Those are just some off the cuff ideas. A real award show (that actually cared about what they were awarding) would spend way more time thinking these details through, but, in my opinion, nowhere should the word "indie" be included in the category title... so as not to confuse the audience about intent or meaning..

That's my two cents, anyway.

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