This touches on one of the reasons I am inclined to pirate – the majority of the time it’s not the author or developer that you pay, it’s the distributor or streaming provider (who often takes a 30% cut), then the payment processor takes about 5%, then the publisher takes a significant and usually undisclosed portion, until finally (and this differs between media) the actual creator sees perhaps £10 of a £60 purchase. Until the vultures clear the field and stop taking hefty cuts, or if I trust the publisher, I am inclined to find a way to actually pay the developer, or not at all, because even though it takes effort to research the sources and distributors, I would much rather vote with my wallet and not accept astronomical distributor fees and anti-consumer practices.

When I was younger I found an album I really liked on Bandcamp. The monetisation model the artist used meant you could actually pay 0 for the music. As I was tight financially I took it but was extremely grateful. This can be seen as consensual piracy, because in my eyes that produce is worth a certain value that can be exchanged with money, even if the seller doesn’t say it. Anyway, Bandcamp takes a 15% cut which is low for the industry, and this particular artist was also independent, meaning they were their own publisher/record label, so when I could I honoured that ‘pay what you feel it’s worth’ approach and bought it a couple years or so later for more than a commercial album. Trust is also extremely infrequent in capitalism, and I appreciated the design.

If DLSS can reach its fifth generation AI can destroy component supply for a second year

Forget Liberation, original AC Mobile is the real shit (link)

I use Freesm. Looks like ElyPL is geared for custom skins and externally hosted servers. Both is good I guess.

I own the game, I just don’t like relying on server logins to fucking play single player/locally. Freesm lets you have the whole game without a M$ account. Combine that with a self-hosted server in offline mode and I can play multiplayer with an offline profile.

Yes, and their doc pages and personal site of the same name. Here’s hoping they don’t resurface the same code under a new name