I’m aware of the Evercade. I just don’t see that becoming a market that’s going to trend up and resemble the market that consoles had at their peak in 2009. So who’s going to challenge Sony’s supremacy? To me, it looks like no one, because even Sony isn’t poised to be supreme anymore.

Are 16-bit games not solved via DOSBox?

Also, I get where you’re coming from, but it’s the economics of it that are tearing down consoles. If you’ve got a set target, Game X launches on PS4. Now the PS5 comes out. It plays PS4 games, but it can’t ever run them better than the PS4 ran them. It also asks for an upgrade to run the “PS5 version”. It also demands you use a PS5 controller and not a PS4 controller. Game X is still super popular for more than the duration of the PS5’s lifespan. Now the PS6 is coming out, and the cycle will repeat.

Because of console cert, and all of those added costs, it’s far easier to get out the next indie hit on PC for less money. People go to play the indie hit, and it’s old news by the time it gets a port for Switch 2.

PS2 used to have tons of exclusive games that Sony didn’t even pay for the privilege. Now architectures and capabilities are so similar that if you’re making a game on only one platform, you’re leaving money on the table. So as the customer, you’ll probably end up going for the one with the most games you want to play, which has a greater chance of being PC every time the above paragraph happens.

Online gaming doesn’t have to come with a subscription fee, but they all choose to, and customers are savvy enough to notice their long-term costs after they’ve been gaming for some time.

Each of these things gets people to check out of the console space as it loses the value it once offered.

I can also watch a season of a TV show far faster than I can play through a video game at the size that AAA publishers keep making them.

I think the reality is that we outgrew our need for consoles the way they’ve always existed, with certification, exclusives, walled gardens, generations, etc. that no longer make sense. If you want physical to come back, it’s probably on a PC somehow, but people also don’t typically have disc drives anymore, and even offline games tend to get patches and updates that you’d have to account for in some way; the media you can store that on will have a more restrictive shelf life and cost more to purchase.

Yeah, I don’t think the weeklong one will accomplish anything either, but I often see people talk themselves out of individual action because they can’t control other people’s actions. If we all stop doing that, it’s called collective action, and it works.

This one did earlier this month.

The example I always found in investing literature is that the best class of investor is “dead people”, since they don’t time the market. Hard to say which one makes the point better.

I think there are more customers who will now not buy the game than there are those who would stop due to a few cheaters. People who don’t compete at the level I do aren’t going to run into cheaters in the first place, because they rise to the top so quickly.

At the skill level you’re likely to see a single cheater in a fighting game, you’ve already learned and conquered much of what the game has to show you, and I doubt that running into a cheater a few hundred hours later is going to deter you from competing. In this genre and community, we also know that ranked doesn’t count for as much as tournament results, online or off, and they’ll ban cheaters if they find them, no sweat.

It takes a trained eye to detect something like the above. They’ll even have toggles to adjust how often the computer cheats for them. Automating this detection will lead to false positives. But like I said, even without anti cheat, cheating is so rare.

There are still ways to cheat with legitimate inputs. You can have a cheat that auto detects when to use Baiken’s parry, for instance, and never let you land a hit. That’s one I’ve seen before. That said, it’s so rare that anti cheat is going to cost you more customers than it protects.

I’m looking for a far more automated solution. Syncthing requires a lot of setup to get going, and the use case for this project is playing a lot of different games that store save files in all sorts of exotic locations.

Yeah, so far, the same as the number of games that bankrupted their studios by releasing DRM-free. Maybe the new Silent Hill this year will be the first, but the last two released on GOG just fine, so it’s not looking good for your thesis.

You’ve already moved the goalposts so far, what does it matter? If Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year doesn’t show that DRM-free won’t just invite piracy, or Baldur’s Gate 3 just two years before that, no answer will be good enough for you. Few AAA companies choose to release their games on GOG. More will choose to if that’s where the money is. Indiana Jones didn’t come to GOG less than a year after its initial release because they just wanted pirates to have it, finally. When Divinity, The Witcher 4, and the new Cyberpunk games come out, a few things will happen: they will sell in the tens of millions of copies and make a boatload of money; they will be available DRM-free on GOG; they will still sell most of their copies on Steam anyway; people will pirate it (but they would have even if the games were only on Steam anyway). Mina the Hollower was make or break for Yacht Club, but they put the game on GOG because they wanted to make money from those customers as well. If they were so sure that people would have just pirated it, surely they would have opted not to release it there.

Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?

Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There’s no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.

Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would in a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth.

That’s easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur’s Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There’s no difference in one’s ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.

In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.

This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.

This looks great, but the one thing I need software like this to do in order for it to be useful is cloud saves (my NAS would be the cloud in this case), and I’d want those saves to be account-driven. Looks like it’s “coming soon” on their feature comparison page, so I’ll definitely check it out eventually. I’m months into a journey to self-host a bunch of other use cases, and this could be very nice for me.

More games release on GOG when customers show there’s money to be made there. If you make it important to you that your games are DRM-free and spend more money on GOG than Steam, you help tip those scales. It’s not fundamental. If DRM is poison for making money, then fewer games will employ it.

It was $50 before that and as high as $90 before that. $60 is kind of arbitrary, honestly.

I don’t think I can read books fast enough to make automation attractive either, haha. I break DRM on Calibre with two plugins, books purchased from Kobo, and then organize on Komga after manually dragging the files.