Yeah my Recycle Lite software from then when they were called Propellerhead stopped working too as the key didn't activate anymore. Now I know why. They really don't give a fuck for a long time already.
How does the ‘first level is free, pay if you want the rest’ model hold up today? I recall when the original Doom came out. Everything, including network play (maybe not the BFG) was available to try. We were all playing pvp on the university LAN on the free version.
It died because to make games fit on discs/media they need to be compact making it very hard to ship a limited version without shipping all content. Back in the days generally all the “try before you buy” games shipped the full content leading to cracks that simply unlocked it.
Today a company that doesn’t have a hard-on for DRM could of course run with the model and just chalk up piracy to advertisment and people that wouldn’t buy the game anyway. Kinda like any company selling on GOG.
Of course those are the minority, most companies want / need DRM in some form and the model just works against it. It might be possible to make it work with something like Denuvo but I doubt anyone would be happy about that.
Demos are wide spread these days. There’s a ton of them for a wide range of games available on steam and the switch store. They’ve made a big comeback the past few years.
Heck, I just played the demo for Octopath Traveler 2, but this was a self-published demo by the studio. It was enough for me to know this game wasn’t for me but I’m thankful I didn’t have to buy it and refund it as a result.
Well, from the perspective of the shareholders, you’re doing everything right if you’re making more money. And sadly, not enough people push back on this sort of thing to make it not profitable.
It’s an instance of Invidious, which does not use ActivityPub. Invidious is software you can host to portal to YouTube while preventing most of google’s ability to track and advertise.
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