dandi8

I wish they were more upfront about the GOG release date.
I’ll gladly buy this once it’s available DRM-free, like its predecessor.

It replicates it well enough for me to still be playing it regularly 20 years later and well enough to debunk the myth that every multiplayer game must automatically become unplayable with time (“die”) solely due to the fact that it’s multiplayer.

I can also still play UT2K4 with my friends, should I want to. I can’t do either of these with a “live service” game where there is no offline mode or self-hostable servers.

Also, you ignored my mention of PZ, which is a multiplayer-enabled game which also won’t die when the developer dies (or abandons the game).

I’m still playing Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine with bots. I don’t need a community to play Project Zomboid with my SO. Your claim is factually incorrect.

Well then let me actually download the movie like it was a game, then! And how exactly does it take less bandwidth? It’s still tens or hundreds of gigabytes to download every time someone wants to install a game, most people only use the offline installers as backups.

What do you use for automating the backups?

And yet, somehow, GOG and Itch still exist, allowing you to download games completely DRM-free, as often as you like. If they ever go out of business, you can still use your local copies forever.

How do they do it? A mystery…

Isn’t he only a CEO? What exactly did he himself create?

You’re not “supposed to” upgrade every year, that’s the point. You should be able to use a 5 year old phone if you want to.

So something like a Synology NAS, I guess.

I also have plenty of experience emulating all kinds of things, including Windows - in fact, I have an instance of Win 98 in a VM right now.

That said, I can’t agree that it’s in any way easy for the average Joe. It’s not rocket science, but it’s by far harder than just having a working executable.

If nothing else, consider the legality of it - you must have a legal copy of the specific version of Windows, often the specific BIOS, as well. These are not easy (or cheap, often) to acquire these days.

Then you likely need to make sure your CPU supports Hyper-V, then install the entire OS…

Then you often need to make sure you’re emulating the specific CPU with the specific GPU, with the specific sound card, or else this specific Windows 95 game will CTD or be missing features. Old games were finicky and OS emulation for gaming is only easy on the surface.

I have a feeling you’re talking about emulating consoles, which is a bit different than, say, emulating a game that only works on Windows XP.