tbh it's not really necessary today because there are so many ways to share files. Additionally, the distributed network has major disadvantages:

1. No meaningful reputation. If you download software from a file-sharing service you're taking a huge risk.

2. Ease of use. It's a pain in the ass to new users, which means it doesn't thrive the way it needs to.

And the advantages aren't what they once were. There's so many sites nowadays and it's so easy to set one up that being resistant to takedowns isn't worth the trade-off.

They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.

While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They've been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.

But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said "give us money if you want us to keep doing this" I suspect people would have donated more.

I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.

Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they've uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.

I think that addition is mostly interesting because it shows the mindset of the site's owners - they feel bitter and put-upon, like they've put a bunch of work into the site and gotten little or nothing back. Maintaining the site must be a lot of work. Not that surprising that they'd decide to go private, I guess.

It's not a serious suggestion, they're just using this as a "fuck off" response to the record labels.

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.)

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.

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

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.