Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to "mostly positive" or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you "only censored the racists don't worry. We're getting brigaded"
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always... Read the reviews. If the good ones are all "lol cute dog" and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are "waaaah there's a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah", you can be certain the game's actual reception among non-idiots is higher than "mostly positive".
Reviewers that aren't the developer's friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing "chuds are mad about this" next to the "buy now" button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game's sales right there.
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game's developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about "removing toxicity" after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game's "negative reception" entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about "woke devs" or "DEI" or "the chinese translation is bad".
Yep, the only resilient form of preservation is digital files stored in multiple locations with no DRM. No account system redownloads, no piece of plastic and metal. Only drm-free releases or pirate copies
3ds games do not pass the "hammer test" of digital product resiliency. They aren't even properly tied to an account. If I smashed your digital-purchase-laden 3DS with a hammer, or threw it off a bridge, you'd never legally get those games back again. Even buying a secondhand 3ds with the right games installed (as legal purchases) violates the license terms.
currently, while the servers are up, the Switch passes the hammer test. Buy a new Switch, sign in to your account, re-download your games.
Note that neither of these are true preservation because the threats to game preservation are more varied than "smashed your console with a hammer". And also that physical copies are borderline meaningless in an era where the majority of games have DLC. If I hammer-test your 3DS but you have Smash as a cartridge, you're still never gonna legally play as Cloud Strife again.
The Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch all got hacked thoroughly before the console's end of life and thus the legal preservation situation is mostly irrelevant, but the currently ironclad Switch 2 is a ticking time bomb.
yt-dlp, but most of the time you'll use some form of front end. All the "youtube downloaders", even the shady websites, are using yt-dlp. For selfhosted purposes, I like MeTube for individual downloads and Tubesync for keeping up with channels.
Valve could prevent this by doing it like the Steam Deck and requiring an x year old Steam account with at least y game purchases on it to be allowed to order one. Businesses aren't going to grab secondhand consumer hardware to save a buck, and even if they are the majority of Machine buyers wouldn't be looking to sell (and the margin necessary to get someone to effectively put the price of a Machine on layaway then ship it to some business and pay taxes twice will probably erase any gains the company would possibly see from using Steam Machines instead of Optiplexes)
Taylor Swift has a private jet and flies around in it a lot. It caught on as a meme to point out that this one musician's travel is responsible for approximately the same amount of pollution as a small town of car drivers. This mutated into "Taylor Swift is literally always on an airplane at all times".
"The cloud" is somebody else's computer. Somebody else leases you the space and compute, somebody else can turn the physical machine off or terminate your access to their service. Self-hosting is about removing as many somebody-elses as possible (you're still on the hook for stuff like power and an ISP, though a lot of self-hosted stuff is also designed to function purely offline so it's just power for that stuff).
This headline keeps being repeated by this one for profit CEO. Have you looked at the business model being "disrupted"? It's ads and upsells for premade CSS widgets.
Steam's DRM will still lock you out if you're logged out (not in "offline mode" that can only be entered by logging in online and then toggling it). Some games on Steam are truly drm-free and navigating to the executable will start the game without even running Steam at all. It would be nice if Steam exposed which games are truly DRM-free.
Note that native Steam shortcuts will never work without being logged into Steam (in normal or offline mode), because they're steam: protocol links. To play DRM-free Steam games steamless you need to navigate to the actual file or make an OS shortcut to the executable.
It makes sense because GOG was never going to drive year over year growth for the publicly traded CDPR. Operating as a private company, it doesn't need to provide shareholder value and can be sustainable by simply "being profitable" forever, like Steam. Publicly traded CDPR holding GOG was a ticking time bomb but for once it seems to have been defused.
GOG isn't "attacking" steam for market share though? It has a legitimate niche in the market: being a storefront that bans all DRM and also doesn't require a launcher/account to buy and install games. GOG's main competitor is piracy (because DRM free means trivial to pirate), so its main features to compete with that are ease of use, trustworthy installers, and consistent + easy access to game patches that pirates don't often keep up with.
You don't legally own any software you purchase (bar true FOSS), even if that software is stored on a disc or cartridge. It's a meaningless distinction to make.
The best thing about GOG is the ability to never use a client or launcher at all. The ability to just download the installers from the website and store them locally means that your GOG games will outlast the following: GOG as a company enshittifies, GOG as a company dies, your account gets banned from GOG, you lose access to your GOG account, your favorite game gets a game-ruining update from its developer, some song license expires and devs are forced to patch or pull the game...
Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to "mostly positive" or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you "only censored the racists don't worry. We're getting brigaded"
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always... Read the reviews. If the good ones are all "lol cute dog" and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are "waaaah there's a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah", you can be certain the game's actual reception among non-idiots is higher than "mostly positive".
Reviewers that aren't the developer's friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing "chuds are mad about this" next to the "buy now" button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game's sales right there.