Yeah, kinda beating a dead horse here, but it’s giving “2024, Year of the Linux Desktop, inadvertently sponsored by Microsoft.”

Sure.

Then you get the occasional fun experience of a maintainer fucking up a package definition or two, and all of a sudden you can’t update your system or run a program because there’s a tangled mess of dependency conflicts and you get to spend the afternoon force reinstalling system libraries. Love ya’ Void :')

Been trying NixOS which is great for avoiding that kind of thing, but it comes with it’s own set of annoyances. I really ought to just settle on a more stable distro like Debian lol.

From the MS website:

Recall utilizes Windows Copilot Runtime to help you find anything you’ve seen on your PC. Search using any clues you remember or use the timeline to scroll through your past activity, including apps, documents, and websites.

A “feature” coming to Windows 11. Essentially a keylogger on steroids… Powered by AI of course, because what isn’t these days.

True.

I could maybe see an argument being made in favor of having these kinds of security measures for the first month after release to protect sales, since it’s usually the period in which most sales are secured; devs do need a sustainable income after all. But that would also necessitate ignoring the potential performance degradation resulting in a poor first experience for players, and many publishers just leave it in for the lifetime of a game, which is a disaster waiting to happen (as seen here).

Overall, I think piracy is mostly a pricing issue above all else. With AAA titles getting increasingly more expensive and being released in broken states, it’s not surprising that people don’t want to spend $70 on a game that they might end up hating and opt to “demo” the game first. Refund policies can help alleviate the issue, but are hardly a silver bullet, with games inserting tons of fluff at the beginning to ensure you exceed the playtime threshold.

Either deliver the games you promise, or price them according to what’s actually there, and I’m sure the majority of gamers would be content in paying full price. DRM only serves to increase friction for the honest people paying for your games.