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Comment by Latty | Hacker News Reader

Shame GOG don't care about your privacy. When they published a profile page for you without asking first, leaking your personal data and what games you owned to anyone you had friended before, I contacted them and they just straight up said they didn't think it was a problem.

No DRM is a marketing gimmick for them, they don't actually care about the privacy of their customers.

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No DRM is not just about privacy, far from it.

The most important aspect is that as long as you have a compatible system and a good backup policy, you will never lose access to what you bought.

No DRM can help with privacy but they are mostly independent. There is DRM that doesn't violate your privacy, like hardware keys typical of arcade machines, oldschool copy protection and game cartridges. And I think Nintendo has privacy-preserving DRM for digital games too, the problem is that if you lose the console, you lose the game.

And as you have shown, you don't need DRM for privacy violations.

Oh, for sure. I'm just saying that "they don't use DRM, therefore they care about privacy and we should support them" isn't going to hold. I agree no DRM is better, but as you say, there is more to privacy than that.

Probably not in the beginning, but once you have a successful model going it's inevitable that the sociopaths/careerists invade and take over. It's unnatural and unstable for a company to believe in anything but accumulation.

CD Projekt Red also sell Windows exclusive software (Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, etc.), which, one can argue, is also a form of DRM.

That is a very tenuous argument. With DRM, one has to work against the grain of a software to implement it, whereas focusing on one native platform is almost the opposite - one has to go against the grain to make it cross platform. In that sense, DRM is an artificial limitation, whereas supporting just one platfrom isn't one.

Wasn't Cyberpunk compiled for Linux to run on Stadia though? Not shipping the Linux binary looks like an artifical limitation at that point.

Judging by the QC nightmare that game appears to have been, supporting just one installation configuration on an OS with the direct support of the company running that configuration (I wouldn't be surprised if Google had chipped in resources to get the Stadia port through) is a much different level of resource commitment than supporting it for a user base.

"Shipping a binary" is not the same as actually porting the game - porting requires a ton of expensive QA, and no port is better than a bad port because the latter 1) gets bad press for the main version of the game and 2) misleads customers who expect quality from your brand.

You certainly could argue, but that doesn't mean it would be a good argument. How far can you take this? Are cars that only take premium fuel also DRM? What about a conduction stove that doesn't work with all pans?

https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-made-cyberpunk-2077-playable-...

By adding yet another indirection. Compiling the binaries for Linux and just shipping it with a fat "no warranty" label on top would have been 100x better. Even Linux distros do that (GPL: `THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.`)

You want them to sell their product with a "if it doesn't work it's not our problem" label? I'm sure there are consumer protection laws against that.

The no particular fitness of purpose clause in nearly every EULA you’ve ever clicked through is literally that.

EULAs that are shown post-purchase are invalid in all of EU, there have been numerous court cases about it. If software makers want a legally binding contract it has to be shown before purchase - if you already have bought something and are just installing it, the EULA presented during the installation is meaningless.

EULAs are mostly invalid garbage - they include "TO THE FULLEST EXTENT APPLICABLE UNDER THE LAW" is clever lawyer-speak saying "this only applies if we can legally get away with it". They include that because if they didn't, then any explicitly illegal demand they made would void the entire contract.

Just because the EULA requires your firstborn son, doesn't mean they have any claim whatsoever.

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