Yeah. What I mean is that the Steam Deck itself doesn’t add anything special in that regard to fight piracy.

(Plus, I mean, Steam’s base DRM is like a screen door or a “please do not pirate” sign, lol. If Steam dies one day, Steam DRM won’t be a problem because you can basically crack it by breathing on it too hard. I assume that is purpose is to ensure that you have to violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions to pirate their games, not to actually slow down pirates at this point.)

They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.

I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it’s still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam’s servers for cloud saves.

(The fact that it’s hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I’ve absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)

Most likely a bunch of them were copy-pastes of the same site.

I know when I set it up I had to add them manually, but that was years ago. Maybe this is a new thing, or maybe your specific Ubuntu instillation was a custom fork of QB that included a bunch from the start.

(I really think it’s unlikely that base QB would include them, since it would make it more obvious that they intend it to be used for piracy - something they’d want to avoid for legal reasons. Yeah, I know, but I’d rather they not get shut down.)

It’s mostly been fine-ish for anything that can’t be infected with viruses (music, video, roms, etc - usually.) There are way better options today but as long as you’re not going there for software it’s still usable.

If I recall correctly, CODEX’s Denuvo cracker was Empress anyway, so it has been just her for a long while now. There have been one or two cracks by other people for games using ancient versions of Denuvo that nobody bothered to crack before, but she’s the only one doing anything with Denuvo’s current version.

Yeah, it says that they’re all “well we would have rather do it the other way for your sakes” but the fact is that if they thought they could reliably obtain money this way they’d be doing it already. A ton of legal fees are going to be wasted pursuing people they can’t catch for one reason or another, meaning that their desire to make the pirates pay their costs isn’t going to work as reliably as they’d want.

Mastodon account just posted saying they found the issue and it will be fixed later.

I think that it’s because now we’re starting to get judges who have an actual understanding of the internet and its issues. In the past, lawyers for copyright holders could make up whatever theories of it they wanted and frame things in whatever way benefits them the most; that’s no longer the case - these judges (including the original trial judge, the appeals judges, and the Canadian Supreme Court, who handed down the original decision at stake here) plainly understand in at least a basic way how the internet is used, what an IP address is, and the complexities of assigning responsibility related to one.

Whereas ten or twenty years ago you would have had judges who mostly depended on the plaintiff’s lawyers for their understanding and who would therefore basically give them anything they asked for.

The only reason people will continue using Unity is because they’ve already made )or are in the process of making) a game using it and switching to something else would waste massive amounts of time and effort. Unity is depending on this - this is basically them squeezing everything out of existing customers without regard for long term growth.

Remember, the whole idea here is that Unity is demanding payments for already existing games. They clearly don’t care about whether people keep using Unity for new games in the future; the executives who made this decision will have cashed out and will be long gone by the time all the existing Unity games in the pipeline are done and things dry up.

The most hilarious thing about this is that, assuming crackers prevent Unity games from phoning home, the best way to support game developers would be to buy their game and then only play the cracked version, never installing the version you purchased.

The easiest way to figure out where a game is writing its saves is to load it up in Sandboxie and save your game, then check sandboxie’s box content to see what got updated or saved and where.

Also, Cyberpunk is on GOG (because it’s made by the people who run GOG), there’s no need to get it through DODI unless you have a severely restricted internet connection and therefore desperately need the smaller size of a repack - you can get the clean gog installer from gog-games. You should just be able to install the latest GOG version over the old version with no difficulty.

Why was the post on this removed from the Reddit Piracy sub? I find that slightly alarming.