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Love to see it from GOG. Now if only they had a Linux launcher akin to Steam Big Picture Mode.
They would be the dream imo
Check out Heroic Games Launcher. Launches games from Epic, Steam, and GOG. Runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. When they release their latest launcher (2019), it still had example code from the Windows Vista days. Using extremely old libraries to manage storage I believe (or at least accessing storage). So they can’t even actually develop a launcher for Windows. When I messaged then about it, they didn’t care.
I’m here wondering if this quote is going to age like milk or not.
Well, if you download an installer from gog and save it to a disk, it’s yours forever, regardless of what gog does. Of course, the window to do so might close with very short notice.
I imagine what they mean is that, in the future, GoG does what seemingly every other successful company that has “good morals” does when they get rich and famous… Renegs for more $$$
See Netflix “we’ll never have ads” and using sharing accounts as a promotional tool. And Googles “do no evil”. Etc.
Obviously they can’t undo your ability to install what you already have, but they could prevent you doing it in the future.
Literally impossible for it to age like milk. They can’t remove games from your library, the way every other storefront can
You don’t need to back up games yourself. Piracy exists. If a storefront disappears, or otherwise you lose access to a game you licensed, you can always just fish it back from the high seas. Just only buy games without DRM or which’s DRM has been cracked already.
Assuming the cables feeding the interwebs into your place are still working, and a nice long download time for newer titles
I’m not understand. I’ve had an Xbox for many years. Have many games and have no physical discs. All games still work
This is the message we need to hear. The bread and butter. I get so tired of people nitpicking GOG and Mozilla over every relatively minor thing when they are some of the only people trying to hold back the deluge of bullshit.
The Nazi thing is nota nitpick though. They need to address that properly instead of the “sorry we got caught” response they gave.
It’s not a nitpick, but also that newsletter is not indicative of GOG being a Nazi organization. The idea that they specifically decided to advertise a new game based on Slavic mythology specifically so that they could send a mass advertisement to half their user base intentionally using Nazi symbolism is wild. It is much more likely that some marketing dimwit Googled “Slavic runes,” and copied some random ones from the first site they found.
Screenshot of the first result for “slavic emoji” on google
It’s one data point, not a pattern. Definitely something to watch out for, but there’s literally nothing else in the history of the company to suggest that they have any white supremacist tendencies
Almost like “slavic emoji” means something… Why does my dog keep crying?
Given it was an advertisement for a game inspired by Slavic mythology, “Slavic emoji” means “advertisement for a game inspired by Slavic mythology” in this case. Do you think the developers of The End Of The Sun are nazis?
The Slav’s use the same emoji’s as the rest of the world.
I think some idiot was trying to be edgy (👀) and GOG’s PR dept obviously sucks, they put the shit out to begin.
btw, that’s not a special slavic emoji
deleted by creator
It’s literally the first result when searching the phrase “Slavic emoji” on google. Hanlon’s razor applies. Most normal people are not aware of any nazi symbols other than the swastika
Hanlon’s razor applies.
That’s why I’m trying to be patient.
Why do suppose that would rank so highly in a search result?
Yeah I agree with most of what you said. It’s concerning though, they could have easily responded with a responding “Nazi shit has no place here, super sorry we let that slip through”
It is much more likely that some marketing dimwit Googled “Slavic runes,” and copied some random ones from the first site they found.
That’s the part I find doubtful, this sequence can only be found on a site by or about Nazis. I feel like even the dumbest idiot would clock that, but I’ve underestimated idiots before
this sequence can only be found on a site by or about Nazis.
I mean, that exact sequence is in the header of the first result for an ostensibly innocent google search. Spend some time where normal people hang out, and you’ll find that a lot of them can’t clock Nazi dogwhistles. I’ve personally had to explain the significance of “14/88” to people who thought I was nuts for calling the My Pillow guy a nazi
Oof, yeah that’ll do it. Seems like emojidb needs a report button.
GOG’s founder did eventually give a better reply here (scroll to Mikee’s comment): https://www.gog.com/forum/general/nazi_symbols_in_an_email_and_bs_excuse/page18
I’m not convinced GOG owes us any explanation beyond that. Even in the worst case where the accusers are right and it was an intentional dog-whistle, the marketing guy who did it probably gave his superiors the same explanation we got, in which case GOG management genuinely believes they already 100% told us what happened.
Also, the argument that GOG not sending the email to Germany proves they knew that it was bad ahead of time on an organizational level is common enough to be worth addressing here. It ignores how localization is often done, one person writing a template that then goes to others to localize and send out individually. I assume adding some review time between localization and send out is among the process changes they mentioned.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that. The first half of mikee’s comment is exactly what I was missing from the official “apology”.
Is this about the Gog Newsletter thing? I’m not 100% informed, but didn’t they pretty much admit that they weren’t aware that ᛋ displayed as ϟ in some devices?
It’s not even a “sorry we got caught” thing, they had nothing to gain by sending a Nazi symbol in their newsletter. What more are they supposed to say?
They specifically didn’t send it to German accounts cause they knew it could be shown as Nazi symbolism.
This isn’t a “sorry we fucked up” this is a “we knew it could go wrong but didn’t care enough to do anything about it”.
Personally I don’t really care that much. These promotional emails aren’t reviewed by every company member, so even if it was deliberately used Nazi symbolism, its at most someone in the advertising department. But I also understand why people are really upset about this.
An explanation for them not sending it to Germany could be that the localization team for the German region, probably being more aware of such nuances, spotted it and removed it whereas those who did the localization for other regions just didn’t spot it, so it slipped through.
There could be arguments about communication between teams but, honestly, localization teams don’t really need to communicate with one another so it isn’t surprising that they didn’t.
Most likely it actually is a “oops we fucked up” situation.
Yeah that is not hard to do at all. This is not an unreasonable standard.
Mozilla is the best browser to ever exist and I will die on this hill.
You mean Firefox? Or is Mozilla the actual core or something? I thought they were just a company or a foundation or whatever
Yea, they mean Firefox. Mozilla is the non-profit foundation, along with its subsidiary company by the same name, that makes it along with other open-source software.
Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.
They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.
Do they? Maybe for minor releases but I’m pretty sure Firefox is currently doing major releases every 4 weeks and starting from September they’re going to do it byweekly. Personally I don’t see what the big deal is but I can absolutely see someone on the fediverse being outraged by the idea of a more frequent release schedule.
Ran into someone complaining about the same with Edge and updates going to every 4 weeks. Showed them the release log where they have been releasing one to two times a week - minor updates but still updates that require the browser to be restarted but that the person never noticed.
byweekly I think you mean semi-weekly. Bi-weekly is twice per week
Also it means every 2 weeks. Which is the case here.
Semi-weekly however ONLY means twice per week.
Also it means every 2 weeks
Only for people that can’t speak English
https://writingexplained.org/bi-weekly-vs-semi-weekly
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/semiweekly
https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/bi-vs-semi-weeklymonthlyannually/
You are pedantic-ing and getting it backwards.
Every fortnight
I’ve been a gamer for almost 4 decades, so I have quite a lot of experience wanting to run games that I remember were a lot of fun and it turns out they are so old they won’t run anymore.
Typically it’s one of 3 things:
- The hardware I have now won’t support it (say, I don’t have a floopy drive anymore, or they’re from an entirelly different architecture such as the pre-PC game consoles). There’s also quirky ones such as games made at a time when CPUs were so slow that the game just runs as fast as it can (which was fine for older CPUs, but not for CPUs which are thousands of times faster) rather than use the system clock to set its tempo.
- The OS I have won’t support it. Say, it’s a DOS or Windows 3.1 game
- The game has DRM which relies on shit which doesn’t apply anymore (for example, OS quirks that aren’t present in newer OS versions).
There are often ways around the first two - for the hardware sometimes you can get modern versions of older hardware (for example you can actually get an external USB Floppy Disk Drive) and if it’s old enough there will be emulators, whilst for the OS it’s either emulators or adaptor layers.
Only way around the third is either a game crack or the game having no DRM to begin with.
Now, outside the transition of hardware architectures (say, from Amiga to PC) this used to apply maybe after a game was out 10 - 20 years. In the Phone-home DRM generation this seems to apply much faster - the game maker just turns off their servers 5 - 10 years after the game is out and now you can’t legally play that game anymore.
All this to say that GOG and Pirates are the only ones fighting the good fight on making sure we won’t suffer this shit some years from now, which is even more important now that we’re in the Phone-home DRM age.
Just a quick reminder that discs that you burn yourself at home do degrade pretty quickly, much faster than pressed discs. I personally have had burned discs that failed after approx. 6 years. It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs. Even pressed discs can fail after 20 years if you are unlucky.
Using 2 big HDDs (2 for redundancy) full of your installers might be safer in the long run and also easier to manage and backup.
Note: Don’t use SSDs for this either. They can easily corrupt and lose information if not powered on for as little as a year, in some cases.
That’s why I print out all my downloaded games
I hope you also laminate them for longevity.
I laminate my punch cards for longevity. Wouldn’t want them breaking down.
I prefer to cut archival cards from 0.7mm 316 stainless steel sheet 👍
Clay tablets have been demonstrated to last much longer than paper or metal
I suspect corrosion-resistant steel alloys haven’t been around long enough to prove themselves in that regard XD
I can already see them rusting down by the harbour. Meanwhile people still find bits of ceramics left from ages last on the beaches.
So if you bury your clay tablets in a treasure chest it should be good.
Corrosion-resistent is not the same as non-corrosive.
I suppose gold as a noble metal would be stable over a long period, as it’s non-reactive. But certain kinds of acids can still dissolve it, unlike ceramic
Nonsense. I got some high quality copper from a merchant I fully trust and I bet this will last forever.
Was his name Ea? His name isn’t known today for being engraved in copper…
Sure, but what if there’s a fire!? My favorite game is Ocarina of Time. I don’t want to risk losing it, so I memorized the binary digits that comprise the code. Can’t be too careful!
Hope you keep your brain safe. Even then illness can easily rob you of those memories.
Fully agree. This is why I’ve made multiple children. Then I train them on the binary digits the way other parents teach shapes, numbers, and the ABCs. Can’t be too careful, it’s best to have multiple backups
The trick is to name your children after the save file
The special ones, yes
I eat those to gain their power.
Typing them back in after the apocalypse will take a while, but you’ll be able to impress all the other wasteland mutants with a working copy of Half Life Alyx.
You should really move to microfilm. It saves so much space!
It just doesn’t smell the same
Print them on clay tablets. Those will stand the test of time, especially with the right level of error correction. (Sorry for the ad cancer - I didn’t want to promote a specific brand or spend forever finding a good review site.)
Can confirm, clay tablets can last thousands of years to archive your
grievancesdata.Unfortunately I’m allergic to clay
Yeah a HDD with another for periodic backups would be a lot more reliable.
Use M-Disc media. It’s said to last 1000 years. It’s expensive and very slow to rip at the suggested 4x speed.
I’ve been very satisfied with them, and you just need a regular Blu-Ray drive.
Cheapest solution is an HDD + one more for backups. M-Discs for 15-17€ per 100GB are for the games you wanna take to your grave.
I mean they are games that i no longer have to worry about data corruption or loss. Like ever. And i can Will these to family & friends. The cost is easily worth that!
Yeah, normal burners are more like printers, where the write laser activates or deactivates a pigment which then either reflects or absorbs the read laser to represent 0/1. But that pigment can degrade over time, turning 1s into 0s.
M-discs are instead etched and iirc use constructive and destructive interference so the reader (which is the same reader as normal discs, just the writer needs to specifically support M-disc) reads the 0/1. It will also degrade over time, but since it’s a thicker layer of difference, it will last significantly longer than a thin layer of pigment. And I bet that special m-disc specific readers could be made to read it again after it degrades to the point where the interference technique stops working, since an image could still show where the high and low points are, even if the waves don’t align perfectly anymore.
In practice, I’ve found that the drive was way easier to find than the media for m-disc. Like most optical disc writers these days seem to support it but the discs are expensive af compared to non m-disc.
Though when I was going through my old burnt CDs and DVDs, I was surprised at how well they were holding up. I was expecting at least some read errors by now but everything has been fine so far.
Well, other than the data quality lol. Not like the readability of the file but stuff that took days to download back then would download today in seconds and a good monitor I got well after my early files was only 720p for its resolution. The data I prized as a youth is kinda sad today.
blu ray in this economy?
Are tape drives still a thing?
Yup
If I were more serous I would probably get a couple of those. I remember it being part of our procedures at a gov office.
What about Verbatim AZO? I’ve heard good stuff about those, and they’re not expensive.
Also, as far as CDs go, I’ve found that an old degraded player which doesn’t read burned discs anymore but plays pressed discs will still play burned AZO discs just fine.
And reminder that solid state drives (including thumb drives) can lose data after a couple years if they are not plugged in from time to time
It can happen even faster if you use low-quality discs.
Yep. I got some no-name DVDs at Kaufland as they were just EUR 1 for a 10-pack. They started having read issues after just 4 years.
Also, they easily peel apart with just fingers and no effort.Edit:
Packaging:
Media ID: MBI 01RG40The worst case I experienced was a disc that disintegrated after a couple years. It got an actual extra hole in it, in a way that looked like somebody spilled acid on it and the acid burned right through the disc. In reality it just lay in my drawer.
In your acid draw?
Big Disc propaganda
Big Disc Energy
From what I recall, only self-burnt CD’s and DVD’s degrade quickly, while self-burnt blu-rays last significantly longer, even if not m-discs.
Apparently blu-rays are even worse than other discs. This is from the abstract of an accelerated ageing study (sadly I don’t have access to the whole paper):
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
Yep! Quote from digitalfaq
The BD-R write-once type is based on a completely new concept for the recording layer utilizing a two-layer structure composed of silicon (Si) and copper alloy (Cu) inorganic materials. When heated by the recording laser beam, these melt and the Si and Cu alloy become a composite forming recording marks. Because the material is inorganic, it is not affected by light, thus realizing a disc with outstandingly high reliability in terms of archivability.
And another quote from the same source
Write-once recordable DVD-R/DVD+R media (as well as CD-R media) all uses synthetic organic based dyes – usually azoic dyes (metallized azo chelates or azo metal chelate). Some of them are based on other synthetic organics, such as cyanine, dipyrrometheme or oxonol.
Your source is just a forum quoting manufacturer marketing texts.
In an accelerated ageing study blu-ray performed worse than other discs:
Overall, the stability of the Blu-ray formats was poor with many discs significantly degraded after only 21 days of accelerated ageing. In addition to large increases in error rates, many discs showed easily identifiable visible degradation in several different forms. In a comparison with other optical disc formats examined previously, Blu-ray stability ranked very low.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016/html
Plus you can store more games on each one. Don’t they cost quite a bit per disc though?
You can get a 50 pack of Verbatim’s standard BD-R for ~$40 AUD, or their premium Datalifeplus discs for ~$100 AUD. I’ve used both of these discs, and I’ve run burn quality tests and they’re both great. This is just talking about single layer discs, so 25GB per disc. 50GB discs are reasonably priced, 100GB and 128GB start getting a bit rich.
Oh yeah, its the very long life ones I was thinking of that cost a lot. If there are more regular ones at lower prices with still a moderate lifespan then that probably makes more sense.
Try M-Disc, it’s supposed to be as good as microfilm for archival.
yup. God knows how many Dreamcast games I’ve had to toss and reburn over the years.
I love GOG. I miss having a computer.
Anyone ITT saying GOG is run by Nazis because some AI or intern or something used slavic symbols on an email newsletter better not use any of the following brands:
Volkswagen, Porsche, BMW, Bayer, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, General Motors, Chanel, Fanta, Shein, Temu, Zara, H&M, Nike, Adidas, Puma, Gucci, Prada, Dior, Armani, Versace, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, KFC, Tyson Foods.
If you’ve ever bought any of these brands or even used one of their products once you’re also a Nazi, you exploit humans and animals and should be blacklisted from all jobs probably even killed or something idk.
There’s probably more brands. Comment them as you see fit!
/s
slavic symbols
Only 3, but I don’t know some of the brands so not sure if they own other stuff I do. Probably safer to assume all brands are unless proven otherwise.
Straight to the gulag for you!
Oh my GOD, they got KFC!?
With how it’s going with modern games (and current prices of hardware), you’ll run out of storage pretty quickly.
Pull out disc with a game from 10 years ago
Installs just fine and launches
“Connecting to online services…”
“Timeout: Retry? Quit?”
Huh?
It’s exactly GOG’s thing that games sold there can’t have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))
Probably why you won’t find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)
In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won’t install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).
But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn’t bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn’t have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.
no disk with GOG games
Did you just miss the context of the post about burning the installers onto a disc so it’s yours forever?
Sorry, I know this is nitpicking but that line just bugged me.
I did indeed miss that part.
Thanks for pointing it out.
They sometimes also provide alternative versions of games. I was very happy to buy Kane and Lynch (1 and 2), but the co-op feature is missing (both local and online). I guess that part was licensed differently or something
I don’t think GOG allow games like that on their platform.
GOG trying to drum up positive pr after that Nazi symbol newsletter.
Yeah, that was a major WTF moment
Didn’t they instantly flag that? It was for some slavic game thing and all of those symbols are rooted in cultures long gone that nazis appropriated.
The symbol alone was OK, but they doubled it to read SS, and they didn’t send it to Germany; which means it was 100% intentional and not just a little oopsie.
That’s because the German team flagged it.
I don’t think it’s a good look but to decry they’re nazis for an email showing runic alphabet and slavic symbols doesn’t exactly trigger me too hard. It really sounds like someone fucked up.
People out there still buying Bayer products and they genuinely were part of the Holocaust, a huge part of it. Ford, Volkswagen, etc.
No matter who flags “you platformed Nazi shit”, you immediately escalate this, halt all outgoing communication until you got a lid on this and fix whatever led to that happening.
Maybe if it was more severe. But like I said in another comment, what did they accomplish here? Is there some huge master plan? Did they all sit down and come up with a plot to transform us all into nazis? What’s the end game here?
Hanlon’s Razor dude, likely it was something stupid that happened.
There is no benefit for them doing this. And doing what you suggested would be some serious pandering for a bunch of unserious pearl clutchers who likely own hanes clothing, buy coke products and drive fords without a second thought of how it has affected the planet and other humans. The only reason most people care about this is because the news told them to or they read it on reddit. Unserious people.
Are you kidding me? They sent Nazi symbols to users.
Not just “nordic symbols that happen to be used in Nazi symbology” but an unmistakable sequence of symbols only used by Nazis (and people teaching others about Nazis).
Also how are you supposed to learn about anything if not the news lol? What weird argument is that supposed to be?
And now we’re all nazis for it, they sure got us 🙄
Have you never heard the revolution will not be televised? The government will not educate you about their own wrongdoings? I’m pretty sure most of us here treat all news with a little skepticism which is why most are here and stopped using reddit.
Sorry someone sending an email with some symbols as the tagline isn’t enough for me to get out the noose and piss my pants.
There’s a world where someone uses a kolovrat or a sigel without intending to relate them to the Nazis. There is not a world where they use both a kolovrat and two sigels in a row and don’t know what it means. Maybe someone at GOG didn’t catch on, but the devs knew what was up.
So we think the entire dev team, marketing team and anyone else involved had a whole meeting and plan to do this? What’s the end goal?
Hanlon’s Razor dude. Going to need more for me to decry the Nazi label onto someone.
Amazing bad faith response. Bravo.
no goal beyond having a laugh at triggering people with nazi symbols; same as NYT did with their Nazi symbol crossword.
The fact the apology didn’t make an effort to say something like “those responsible have been sacked” and instead said something like “nazis shouldn’t have all the Nordic symbols” told me all I needed to know about their workplace environment and the types that work there. no bueno for me.
Not saying I’m boycotting them, because ethical consumerism is near impossible, but I’m not going to rally behind them or applaud them for anything like they’re to be championed sans asterisk.
I really doubt that’s even what happened here. I don’t think the people who run the company, any member of the marketing team or even anyone important sat down in a meeting to decide this for a fuckin laugh.
It’s probably some dumb AI, some intern or some individual fuck or just a genuine mistake. The character doesn’t even render the same on every platform. Maybe if there was more than this one event I’d be more interested but I really think this is goofy.
Especially because I know most people crying about it have definitely owned something Microsoft or IBM related and don’t even consider it.
Most people only care cause they read an article about it and are genuinely looking for any excuse to hop on their high horse and act high and mighty.
It’s silly. I bet you can get most Wolfenstein games on GOG. We gonna be mad now because that game has Nazi symbolism in it? C’mon.
No one listens to the logos of God. It’s either the pathos or the ethos; the emotional arguments or the ones that fall squarely on authority holding up what they say is true. Like, I can explain to you that everything you experience is in your brain, so all experiences must correlate with something in your neurons, so these words you’re reading on this device are actually inside you, and thus the Earth isn’t real as the Buddha and the kid that bent spoons at the Oracle’s in the Matrix explain. Cognitive dissonance is king in this world, because the rift between what we’re told is going on and what is really going on is absolutely enormous. Some game studio trying to capitalize on a demographic doesn’t perturb me. Corporations are going to corporate. What bothers me is how the sheep behave in response to such dipshit shepherds who have taken the reins of the flock. You’ve let this happen to yerselves.
Wow what a super condescending way to say absolutely nothing worthwhile.
This rune displays differently depending on what program or app you view it in. The game itself was something about a sun which is what the symbol represents.
If GOG was full Nazi I’m sure they have better ways to express it. I think it’s super pathetic and screams of pearl clutching to dive on the Nazi label and freak out. It’s also so dumb to assume the entire team is in on it like they sat down and plotted this whole scheme. Could be a stupid intern, could be overworked skeleton crew, could be AI.
Sorry you’re gonna need more than that for me to become a giant weiner about a stupid game company I could not care less about.
Also stop being such a tool.
Hey brother, I know you think you are helping the world, but you’re telling off a cop.
The symbol alone was OK
Not really
No, it was the lightning SS symbols.
Combined with a kolovrat.
There’s no clearer way to say “we are Nazis” other than saying “we are Nazis”.
Depending on how your client rendered them.
Hey, watch you don’t criticize gamers’ favourite Nazi bar.
You could do this before that incident as well.
No shit, you somehow didn’t understand their comment.
I bet you will be forgotten about it in 2 days if it was Steam who send it
nah valve can eat shit too. look at that I can hate two things at once. dab on it.
You guys really trying to make an elephant out of a gnat.
sorry I like to remind people not to get cozy rooting for for-profit corporations that’ve shown some ick recently. took as much effort to remind as it did for the post, but whatever constitutes “elephant” in your book.
“SS” runes and a kolovrat is completely impossible to be interpreted as anything else but “we are immense fucking Nazis”
The only way you could be clearer is by writing “we are Nazis”.
These symbols appearing together means that someone put them there who is a Nazi or wants to teach others about Nazi symbols.
Last time I checked, platforming Nazis is very much an elephant kind of thing.
I absolutely adore GOG for being like this, and for consistently applying pressure to publishers and other marketplace vendors alike.
I just also have A Steam Library with like 1200+ titles, and it’s measured in Terabytes. And butrot in my physical media will be non zero, in long enough timescale.
I consider my continued patronage of buying games to be my subscription costs to the platform vendors. 🤣
butt rot
🥹
I’m not fixing it. 🤣🤣
GOG also has a 30 day refund policy which blows everyone else out of the water, and they’ve honored it the few times I used it
Yes! GOG is absolutely excellent! For what it’s worth, Steam Support from Valve can absolutely issue refunds past the two weeks window, and I’ve done it for me in the past if the request was justified. The inside two weeks window that everyone knows is just for a no-questions-asked refund as long as the hours count is below two played.
I’m glad to hear GOG has an even better method of handling.
Bit rot is already happening to my PS2 games. MGS2 is completely dead for me now. Its a copy I’ve had since I was a kid when it came out.
Archive multiple copies with something that has error-correcting codes. Use btrfs, zfs, par2, rar, raid-5, DVDs etc
The only way to be sure is to save it on a quartz matrix. Only issue is it’s read-only. Not rewritable ever. Once you etch your data into quartz that’s it.
Storage is amazing, though. All of human knowledge (so far) has already been etched into such a storage medium by the UN a few years ago. It fits in the palm of your hand.
Or… you could just follow the 3-2-1 strategy with normal drives and regular scrubs. For most purposes (including a game library) that’s way better.
Let’s play a game, of how much this would cost today.
But I want my game library to survive the sun’s expansion!
GOG seems to cap installer downloads to 4mbps. Cyberpunk’s installer has 28 parts. Huge bummer
(carribean proverb: maybe less to download if properly compressed)If only some girl could help things… Fit better…
Could be something wrong with CDNs in your area. I personally downloaded Witcher 3 offline version 2 days ago and I got the full 600mbps my ISP provides.
Try using IDM or Jdownloader, IDM worked well for me.
I’m amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.
Steam has a splash screen with ads whenever you open the launcher, I don’t have a console but I assume Xbox/PS/NSW2 also have some sort of advertisements. If the ads bother you that much, you can use innoextract instead of running their installer.
If you are talking about the smaller, seperate news window, you can disable that in the settings. My switch (1) also has a news feed but you can decide for yourself which news channel you want to subscribe too, or none at all. For GOG, there is no ad free version of the installer, you’d have to use third party tools or maybe powershell/cmd (I never tried the latter).
To preserve “pagan” games or are we talking about another GOG?
Yeah I’m still pretty concerned about that whole event but it seems like everyone has just forgotten about it.
I could have forgiven the initial email as a rogue nazi intern but their official response being “we made sure not to send it to Germans and its on you all for seeing nazi symbols as nazi symbols” is pretty fucking problematic. Also before anyone defends them as just being pagan symbols, the ones they chose to use were both modern creations by nazi germany
For anyone who’s not up to date: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
I definitely agree that using those innocuous Unicode characters in the way they did was someone’s subtle attempt at evoking Nazi imagery, but the whole Germany part of this story is meaningless. Germany is known for having excessive language restrictions, to the point where every marketing department has their standard library of phrases and whatnot to not use in Germany. They are used to making substitutions for the German market to swap out genuinely innocuous phrases simply because they have a different connotation in Germany or whatever. As far as we can tell, that was just yet another piece of marketing material that went through some automated regex filter for German subscribers and no one thought twice about it after seeing that fact.
From their reddit post in trying to cover up:
… I also recognize that placing two such runes next to each other could create an unfortunate association with symbols used by the Nazi regime. This was noticed before distribution, and out of respect for local sensitivities, the material was not sent to the German community.
They knew and actively chose to not send it to the country that criminalizes Nazi imagery. To me the Germany stuff is the most damning part.
Yeah 100%. Their response to the event is pretty much where all of my feelings come from on the subject. They explicitly state they knew they were releasing literal nazi iconography and then explicitly chose to put it out where it wouldn’t get them in legal trouble.
Not only that but IIRC they actually changed the original game dev’s marketing material to use the symbols without the devs even knowing.
It’s all pretty fucking damning and it makes me incredibly sad
Does anyone else offer DRM free games? This blows
It always amazes me when people from anarchist servers bend over backwards to make excuses for for-profit private companies.
That was about their German language newsletter though. They have separate, localised newsletters for several markets, which I’d assume are manually translated. Also, as a native German speaker, I really don’t think it’s all that different than other European language regions regarding sensitivities.
Their marketing team was warned that there was some offense images and it would stir trouble in Germany.
Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”
Do you not understand the root issue?
That’s conjecture. And I feel like that there are certain things that, when flagged, should be sent back up the pole. Not cause it’s part of the teams job explicitly, but because it should be common sense.
Rather than say, “Oh shit this will look bad.” They said, “Oh let’s just change it for Germany.”
I am saying that this Germany scenario occurs all the time. That is SOP. Very often, a marketing team discovers that “oh, this copy is considered Nazi imagery in Germany” even though it is entirely innocuous to any other culture, so they alter it for just the German market. So, because they are so used to not looking further into common false positives (inspecting the situation and determining if that might actually be Nazi imagery elsewhere as well), it is possible that this is what happened here. Someone may have figured this was just another false positive like all the other German false positives and just sent off a culturally sensitive version like they always do with false positives. This situation might just indicate that they need to make it SOP to investigate every false positive and question if they might actually be genuine.
Again, I do think it was intentional Nazi imagery for other reasons. I am just saying that the “Germany” reason isn’t a valid reason because that situation could have potentially been incompetence instead of malice. Even their corpospeak explanation of the situation complies with this possibility.
Roll my fuckin eyes.
Hey, as a “pagan” (practitioner of a Left-Hand Path centered on Lilith) myself, I’d warn you not to commit to religious intolerance conflating paganism, which includes Rodnovery, a Slavic Native Faith likely the one depicted in the The End of the Sun game, with the shitty nazi dog whistle done at the sole discretion of GOG. The devs of the game made it clear that they had absolutely nothing to do with the infamous GOG newsletter and its nazi dog whistle. We pagans have nothing to do with shitty far-right bigotry.
Sorry I should have written “pagan”. I know nazis will do anything to legitimize themselves. I just dont want to white wash GOG.
