I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a ‘user agreement,’ or remove them from your library if/when they like.
I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I’ve turned off all auto-updates, and I didn’t make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don’t have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.
After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I’d never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven’t backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)
Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.
Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
I might’ve misspoke about never paying for a video game again. I do like the look of gog. I’m really out of the loop when it comes to gaming. I like more privacy- and ownership-respecting platforms, and I would (do) pay for those. What I meant was I’d caught a glimpse of the direction of the mainstream gaming industry with WC3, and I realized it wouldn’t work for me and had to get off it. I use LibreOffice. I’ll check out the libre gaming software, thanks!
I appreciate your point of view. The way I see it, I think maybe 95/100 people blindly trust big tech companies and 5 of us don’t (to the willing we’ll avoid mainstream social media, for example); the proportion is debatable, but I think it’s a very uneven divide. I don’t think we have enough power to “stick it” to big tech. I also don’t think we need to. I participated in the reddit blackout last summer and then I left it altogether for here (Lemmy), which I enjoy more and want to help grow more than I did the last place. I guess I do want some people to keep big tech in check and whistle-blow, at least to help spread awareness. I guess I’m just not the person for the job, and I think that’s okay. More tech savvy people would do well in those roles :)
Target Discord first. Games are non-essentials. Discord is a tool, beyond any one game, used beyond gaming. Don’t destroy your influence, don’t leave the conversation, don’t leave Steam just yet but use it strategically (and GOG Galaxy isn’t even for Linux).
Tech savvy people aren’t going to come and join our friends and join our family. For libre software by default, we must act.
You don’t need to use GOG Galaxy since you can download the offline installers for any game (including, for some, the Linux version).
Been buying from GOG for years now and never used GOG Galaxy.
It exposes their priorities.
If their priorities were to track customers, incentivise game integration with their store (i.e. gamemaker lock-in) and the possibility of taking games away from customers, all like Steam does, they would not maintain that glaring backdoor for all those priorities that is letting customers download full installers that they can keep and which do not check back with the store on install.
I’m sure that they would like the advantage of tying people (both gamers and gamemakers) to their store, yet clearly they’re not forcing that as Steam does, so what they’re prioritizing (in other words, their priority) is clearly not that.
Given that their unique selling proposition is “no DRM” or more broadly “customer freedom to use the games they bought”, it makes sense that that is GOG’s overriding priority, even if they would also like all the (for a store) nice side-effects of built-in DRM and phone-home installers like Steam’s.
GOG spreads anti-libre software, like Steam, but do they contribute to libre operating system software?