Tagged: games
DRM-Free 2023 Writeup
Near (though not quite at) the start of 2023, I decided to avoid paying for anything with DRM on it for the entire year. If you don’t know what that means then that post will offer a detailed explanation, but if you just want the short version, DRM (Digital Rights Management) is any tool that allows a company to control what you can do with the stuff you’ve “bought” from them. In practice this typically means you’re not really buying it at all: if you look at the small print when paying for ebooks from Amazon or games from Steam, you’ll find that what you’re getting is not the product itself, but a license to it that can be revoked pretty much any time.
Back when I started my little DRM-free experiment, I wasn’t 100% sure how it would go. I figured that I might even make an exception if a particularly tempting Humble Bundle came along. I’d like to be able to say that I ended up exceeding expectations and never once gave into temptation, but instead I think the most meaningful way to look at this year-long project is to start with the occasions I sort of gave in:
Continue reading Going DRM-free for 2023
Or at least I’m going to avoid paying for DRM-hampered software or games. I’ll definitely keep using software with Digital Rights Management because my day job obliges me to use a work laptop that can only run, say, Adobe PhotoShop*, not GIMP or Krita. Also I’ve got a huge library of Steam games and I see little point in arbitrarily refusing to play things I already own.
*The laptop can not currently run PhotoShop either, as it was broken by a recent Windows update.
There are a few reasons I’ve decided to do this, but before getting into those it would probably be worth a really quick run-down of what Digital Rights Management (DRM) actually is. Long story short, it’s any tool that a company uses to try and confirm that the people using its digital product actually paid for it (though as I’ve covered before, it’s absolutely useless for ebooks and not much help for anything else either). The Steam client – which requires you to sign into the account you used to to purchase games before you can play them – is a handy example. CD keys – printed numbers that come with a physical disc and must be entered to install the contents – are another, though probably much less familiar nowadays. These tools are intended to prevent piracy, but tend to cause problems for paying customers more often than pirates.
That brings me to the first reason I thought I’d give this a go:
Reason Number 1: Keeping Hold of My Stuff
Recently I got to thinking about how to preserve my games and writing (and all the other people’s things I care about) long-term, and one of the problems with DRM is that – if it relies on some company’s server to confirm you own the thing – then your thing will stop working if that server ever closes down. I ran into a similar problem about ten years ago with OnLive: an early(ish) cloud gaming company. I liked their service enough to buy their “microconsole” (at a vastly discounted price). It was great while it lasted, and then the company went belly-up and literally everything stopped working.
Steam will be less prone to this (since it’s not actually offering to run the games itself, and also it’s huge), but if the service ever shuts down then there’s no reason to expect anything you bought from it will ever work again**. You might manage to download all your stuff beforehand and keep starting it up in offline mode (at least for a little while), but Steam’s support pages say that “If the Steam client is requiring a login, there is no option to bypass that without going online.” They also say that games with external launchers may not work offline to begin with. Steam have dropped a few hints that they’d make an effort to keep games working even if they shut down, but their own Subscriber Agreement says “The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.” Personally, I’m not inclined to trust anything else they say without a line farther down that document that says “In the event we close down, we’ll agree that you do in fact own the stuff that you paid for and we’ll guarantee that you can keep using it.”
**Technically there are DRM-free titles available through Steam – and lots of them – but this isn’t something that’s made obvious on any given game’s store page. Also, a lot of those must be modified to run without Steam, which is still a pointless hurdle that could be avoided by buying DRM-free.
This isn’t to say that Steam is terrible – thanks to Proton they’re making it much easier to run Windows games on Linux, they typically make online multiplayer a breeze, and their cloud saves are very handy indeed – but OnLive wasn’t terrible either. The fact remains that if you sink a ton of money into things that you explicitly do not own, and that you can only run in a client that some company has to actively maintain, you can’t act surprised if someday those things go up in smoke. And I’d like to avoid that.
Reason Number 2: To Prove That You Can
Back when the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality was running – a bundle of over a thousand games in exchange for $5 to charity – itch.io ended up coming to the attention of a lot of people who I can only assume had never come across DRM-free software before. The response was baffling. There were people on Twitter saying “Oh, sure – it looks like a great deal but you don’t get Steam keys, so you don’t actually own any of it” and it would be so hard to articulate my reaction that I’m just going to sum it up with a gif:
In a way, though, I get it. If you’ve only ever got hold of games through Steam – or especially if you’ve also chipped in for Humble Bundles, which nowadays typically offer Steam keys rather than direct downloads – then you might come to believe that having a title in your Steam library is the only way to “own” it. You might be so used to installing games through Steam and no other method that the things in that library seem permanent, and the DRM-free downloads from this itch.io place (with the deal that sounds too good to be true) probably seem ephemeral in comparison.
The irony is that the exact opposite is true. Any day now, Steam could be bought up by some billionaire Tony Stark wannabe who immediately says “Herp derp, I can do a videogames” and runs the whole thing into the ground. Fundamentally there’s nothing stopping the same thing happening with itch.io, but there’s also nothing stopping you from downloading everything you bought through the site, backing it up in a few different places for good measure, then continuing to use it until the sun explodes. Steam explicitly tells you that you don’t own anything, while itch.io not only promises that “Users shall retain a license to this content even after the content is removed from the Service,” but physically could not take it away even if they wanted to. This is the advantage of DRM-free software.
Reason Number 3: It’ll Be Mildly Entertaining
This is, to be honest, the biggest reason. I may have a huge Steam library, but I got it mostly through Humble Bundles so paid very little per game, a chunk of that went to charity, and though I’d be steamed*** if all those games went down the drain I’ve always been mindful of the fact that they genuinely might. I will almost certainly be paying for Steam games in 2024, and might actually cave in 2023 if a particularly good Humble Bundle comes along.
***Pun not intended but I’m leaving it in anyway.
In fact, the vast quantity of Steam games I already own is partly why I’m planning to see if I can ditch DRM altogether just for this year. It’s an opportunity to make a dent in that big backlog of games! Or at least be a little more choosy about what I add to the pile. Rather than paying for bundles and skipping most of their contents (albeit usually having paid less than the price of one game), I’ll try and keep an eye out for individual titles that I’m interested in, then forking out money in places that let the developers keep a bigger cut (and let me keep the thing I paid for!).
In the spirit of that, it would be great to have some suggestions. Do you know any great games available DRM-free? Have you worked on one yourself, perhaps? I’m not promising to shell out for everything that’s suggested, but I will at least think about it – and who knows? Maybe someone else is reading this and thinking “Hey, I should try and opt for DRM-free stuff…” and maybe they’ll also read the comments below!
New Game: Twinedle – and a competition!
I realise it’s far, far, far from the most original game idea ever, but I’ve put together a Wordle variant using nothing but Twine!
Twinedle – as the name might suggest – is a Twine version of Wordle. It deals with words of six letters rather than five (as the shorter guesses looked a little weird over my monstrous macro-generated link keyboard) but otherwise sticks as close to the original game as possible.
To try and help get the word out about this new game (since they have a tendency to drop under the radar without steady promotion, which I don’t really have time for), I’m running a really quick competition! For one day only (that’s until 00:01am on April 2nd, for the avoidance of doubt), I’ll be inviting players to tweet their streak with the hashtag #Twinedle. The highest by the end of the day will win a prize!
I have no way of confirming that the streak claimed is true, so I’m pretty much just trusting everybody not to lie. The prize is fabulous but of little monetary value, so I don’t feel as though any greater level of certainty is necessary. Further details are available on the game’s page on itch.io.
Linux Gaming is Easier Than You Thought
Every year Jingle Jam offers up a great selection of games as a reward for donating to the charity of your choice. I’m afraid it’s too late to jump on board for 2021 – I only heard about it at the last minute myself – but while redeeming my own 50-or-so Steam keys, I noticed something that I think it’s worth exploring even now the event is over:
Chances are you know me for my bestselling flash fiction anthologies, my novella about astronaut murder, or the game I made that uses real bananas as controllers so you might not be aware of this, but I’m an avid(ish) Linux user. Like so much in my life I never really planned on this, but a few years ago I built my own computer, installed Ubuntu to check the hardware worked, and never got around to getting hold of a copy of Windows. This was also around when Microsoft was trying its hardest to roll out Windows 10 to everyone whether they wanted it or not. I was working in a shop that sold second-hand computers at the time, and seeing the number of devices that came back faulty because of the upgrade more or less convinced me to jump ship for good.
The switch from Windows to Linux has for the most part saved me a lot of time and money. Malware? Not a problem. Work grinding to a halt for updates? Not a thing. For the basics – email, web browsing, document editing, etc. – it’s far superior in every way. Even if I can’t run a specific bit of Windows software (say, Microsoft Excel) there’s always a free equivalent out there and typically it works better anyway. The only problem is games: if you want to play Stardew Valley then you’ll need to install Stardew Valley. There might be similar offerings out there, but if you can’t run the thing you actually want to play then you’re missing out – this is why consoles have exclusives. And that’s why I find it noteworthy that the overwhelming majority of games in the 2021 Jingle Jam collection are playable on Linux:
As far as I’m aware there was no particular effort to support this particular platform. This isn’t someone picking out great games and saying “Check it out! All these specific games are playable on Linux!” It’s a fairly representative selection of titles that just happen to be playable on Linux. Of the 56 games included in the collection, the ProtonDB ratings are as follows:
- 24 Native
- 15 Platinum
- 7 Gold
- 3 Silver
- 1 Bronze
- 6 Pending a rating
For anyone unfamiliar with it, Proton is a tool that’s bundled with the Steam client and allows you to run Windows games on Linux. It’s not 100% successful – not all games will run and those that do may not run flawlessly – so ProtonDB invites reports from users into what works well and what doesn’t. Let’s take a little trip anticlockwise around that donut chart!
Right off the bat, 24 of these Jingle Jam games – nearly half – were actually released for Linux. This on its own is pretty fantastic: you’re looking at £650+ worth of games for a £35 minimum charity donation, so even if only 42.86% of them were playable you’d be getting a generous selection at a great price. However, it doesn’t solve the Stardew Valley problem: what if the thing you actually want to play is in the other 57.14%? Fear not, and read on!
Of the remaining 32 games, 15 (again, nearly half) are rated Platinum on ProtonDB. Platinum means “works perfectly out of the box” – it behaves just as it would on a Windows machine. So actually 39 out of 56 games should be entirely playable. That’s 69.65%: just over two thirds of them should run flawlessly! But what of the rest?
This is where that inner ring of the donut chart comes in. The big bit in dark blue represents games that will run fine for sure (assuming your machine is beefy enough in the first place). The chunk in lighter blue represents games that will run perfectly with a little tinkering (rated Gold on ProtonDB) or that can be expected to run tolerably despite minor issues (Silver). If you’re prepared to try the advice on ProtonDB in order to get things running, that gives you a total of 46 entirely playable games (plus up to three Silver-rated ones – this is the point at which it becomes uncertain whether or not they’ll work, and whether or not you’re happy to put up with the occasional crash or missing cutscene).
I’m going to skip a chunk here to point out that purple chunk headed “Pending.” These are games that just don’t have enough reports on ProtonDB to offer an idea how compatible they are. Of the six in the Jingle Jam: one has a couple of early reports suggesting it works fine, two have early reports suggesting that they work with very minor issues, and three simply haven’t been checked at all yet. These aren’t games I can be certain will run on Linux, but statistically speaking you’re looking at six games that will probably work rather than six that probably won’t. This is why I feel confident in extending my “these should be fine” light blue inner donut section of the chart to include the entire Silver category: for each of those that aren’t up to scratch, there’s probably at least one unrated one that is. You’re looking at about 87.5% compatibility here, with the remaining 12.5% overwhelmingly being “stuff that’s not yet known good” rather than “stuff that just won’t work.” So just how many games really won’t work? Have a scroll through the full selection and see for yourself:
| Game | Rating | My Notes |
| 12 is Better Than 6 | Native | |
| 20XX | Platinum | |
| Anodyne 2: Return to Dust | Native | |
| Barony | Native | |
| Barotrauma | Native | |
| Boreal Blade | Platinum | |
| Clustertruck | Native | |
| Crowntakers | Native | |
| Disc Room | Native | |
| Embr | Gold | Older reports state need for specific Proton version, newer ones suggest current version works fine. |
| Empyrion – Galactic Survival | Gold | Some performance problems, plus EAC anti-cheat issues. |
| Farm Manager 2018 | Platinum | |
| Figment | Native | |
| Fling to the Finish | Silver | Hit-and-miss compatibility. |
| Four Sided Fantasy | Gold | Minor controller issues – keyboard works fine. |
| Golf It! | Platinum | |
| Hearthlands | Native | |
| Heaven’s Vault | Platinum | |
| Helheim Hassle | Native | |
| Hyper Light Drifter | Native | |
| Jumpala | Native | |
| Just Die Already | Platinum | |
| Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2 | Platinum | |
| Kind Words | Native | |
| Make Sail | Native | |
| Murder by Numbers | Platinum | |
| Murderous Pursuits | Silver | Some performance problems, hit-and-miss compatibility. |
| Northgard | Native | |
| OCO | Pending | No reports. |
| Pankapu | Native | |
| Pathway | Native | |
| PC Building Simulator | Gold | Minor issues on some systems. |
| PictoQuest | Platinum | |
| Project Winter | Gold | Recent reports suggests it runs flawlessly. |
| Radical Rabbit Stew | Pending | First two reports suggest it runs flawlessly. |
| Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with Rising Storm | Gold | Some tweaks required. |
| Regions of Ruin | Native | |
| Rising Storm 2: Vietnam | Bronze | Game-breaking EAC anti-cheat issues. |
| Samurai Gunn | Platinum | |
| Scoot Kaboom and the Tomb of Doom | Pending | No reports. |
| Shift Happens | Platinum | |
| Sizeable | Platinum | |
| Surviving Mars | Native | |
| Tales of the Neon Sea | Silver | Cutscenes need tweaks to fix, minor issues elsewhere. |
| The First Tree | Native | |
| The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game | Platinum | |
| The Void Rains Upon Her Heart | Platinum | |
| The World Next Door | Pending | First two reports suggest it runs with very minor issues. |
| Ultimate Chicken Horse | Native | |
| Unrailed | Native | |
| Urban Trial Tricky | Pending | First report suggests it runs with very minor issues. |
| Valfaris | Platinum | |
| Wheels of Aurelia | Native | |
| Wildermyth | Native | |
| Witch It | Gold | Minor issues. |
| XTHRUST | Pending | No reports. |
There’s just one! Did you spot it? It’s Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. Even this is rated “Bronze” on ProtonDB – that’s “often crashes or has issues preventing from playing comfortably” rather than “Borked” (the rating given to titles that are completely unplayable). In this particular case, the issue appears to be that using Proton triggers EAC – an anti-cheat system – to kick the player from most servers. However, given that there appears to be no offline/single-player content at all, that’s genuinely a deal-breaker.
But still! In this reasonably representative assortment of games: 82.15% are basically guaranteed to work on Linux, with just a few tweaks necessary for the handful that are “only” Gold-rated; 16.07% might work, with either mixed or limited reports of success; and just a single game (1.79%) is known to be unplayable. Broken down that way, the chart would look like this:
This isn’t necessarily reflective of what your experience would be – a fan of competitive online games is going to run into more problems with anti-cheat systems, and you might find that the latest AAA titles are less viable than the indie games in this collection – but I think it helps illustrate that the games that won’t work on Linux are now massively outnumbered by the games that will. The number of working ones is growing too: things that didn’t previously work with Proton run fine in newer versions. Throw a stone at a bunch of games, and chances are whatever you hit will work on Linux!
Giveaway! (NOW OVER – ALL GAMES CLAIMED)
As a reward for reading (or at least scrolling) through all that, you’ve got a shot at a free game! I’m giving away my key for Rising Storm 2: Vietnam since it’s little good to me right now (and I’m not a huge fan of online shooters in the first place). Also on offer are a few games that I’ve already got. Crowntakers is good! I’ll be disappointed if that one isn’t snapped up. I can also vouch for Surviving Mars though I didn’t find it really grabbed me. Here’s the full range on offer:
There are no particular hoops to jump through here – if you want one, just leave a comment on this post to let me know. You don’t have to have an account but will have to provide an email (otherwise I won’t have anywhere to send the key). Alternatively, you can stick a Twitter handle in your comment and I’ll DM you if I can. Keep in mind that comments are moderated so you likely won’t see yours appear right away (and may also not see other people requesting the same game – feel free to mention a backup option). Further small print: if you want Rising Storm 2 then you must be 18 or over. Also, the Jingle Jam people were very clear that these Steam keys were perks for donating rather than a product that I’d bought. I trust them completely, but if you get your key and it doesn’t work then that’s too bad. I make no promises as to how keys will be distributed: first-come-first-served is likely because I’m lazy, but I will absolutely favour friends and acquaintances over internet randos if that choice presents itself. Finally, the keys should be claimed before January 1st. It’s possible they’ll work beyond that, but there’s no guarantee – again, you get what you get.
itch.io: Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid
There’s currently a huge Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid running over on itch.io. I’m kind of late to the party for this – at the time of writing there’s barely more than a day left on the clock – so ideally click that link before you even read the rest of this, but it’s such a great opportunity to contribute to a good cause that I figured it was worth rushing something out all the same. I’d been keeping an eye out for this kind of response to the crisis and I’m sorry I didn’t hear about it sooner.
All profits from the bundle will be donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and for your trouble you get a truly colossal quantity of games and whatnot. It’s over 1,000 items, valued at something like $4,000 altogether, and the minimum contribution is $5 (though you should seriously consider chipping in more if you can).
I don’t have time to put together a comprehensive list of game recommendations like I did with the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, but – good news! – many of the games I highlighted in that bundle are in this one too. Signs of the Sojourner is in there for example and normally costs $19.99. If you figure you’re basically getting that game at 75% off in exchange for bunging some money to charity then it’s a fantastic deal even before you take into account the 4,000+ other things that come with it.
Seriously, Signs of the Sojourner is a fantastic narrative game with a unique card-based conversation mechanic. There’s also Pikuniku (a neat physics-based platformer) and A Forgetful Loop which I’m astounded to have only just discovered today – it has writing by Freya Cambell who’s a familiar face at various games events (and a very nifty time-looping management mechanic).
I’m also steadily updating a collection of Bundle Games to Try over on itch. This is mainly just for my personal use and will include games from any large bundle (not just this one), but may help you pick out things you like if your interests are similar to mine. This collection includes weird little things that caught my eye as well as big-name games I’m already confident are great, and tends towards (though is not limited to) stuff that runs on Linux.
Anyway, that’s about as much as I’ve got time to mention but there are countless absolute gems in there I know of, many more that I look forward to discovering, and again it’s all for a good cause – so do yourself a favour and (if you haven’t already) click on over there now.
Draw Nine Live on The Solo Adventurer
Draw Nine has been livestreamed by a few people already, but this is the first time I’ve actually heard about it ahead of time. If you’d like to catch a live playthrough from The Solo Adventurer on Twitch, that’s coming up at 15:15 UTC today (April 9th, 2021). That’s 16:15 in the UK (and just under four hours from the moment this was posted, if that’s easier to work from anywhere else). Also, if this is your kind of thing then do check out the guy behind it, Chris Chinchilla. A quick look at his website shows he’s doing quite a bit with games/streaming/podcasting so could be well worth following.
itch.io: Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
UPDATE: The bundle has expanded considerably, and now includes over 1,500 items. It’s also raised over five million dollars. I’ll be adding new items to the lists below as I find them. If the thing’s still running at the point you’re reading this, do check it out: it’s a rare chance to get over $9,000 worth of goodies for as little as five bucks (though I really do hope you’ll chip in a bit more), all while supporting a great cause.
For the next nine days, itch.io is running a Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, with all proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund. There’s already been an extraordinary level of support (just over a million dollars – though that’ll probably become hilariously out of date even before this post is published). If you want to contribute to the cause, I feel as though this is a good way: I suspect that the sheer scale of the endeavour and the number of people involved will give it a reach that individual donations wouldn’t be able to match.
I’m not kidding about how big this is, by the way: it’s quite possibly the largest bundle of any kind ever put together, with over 700 games (and various other things) on offer. One thing to mention would be that some of these items are free or pay-what-you-want anyway: my own contribution, Draw Nine, has never had a price on it. Bundles on Itch are less about getting a fantastic deal and more about gathering together items for some kind of cause or on some sort of theme.
That said, this particular bundle offers over $3,000 worth of items for just $5, so it is also a fantastic deal. Please do consider bunging in a little extra if you can afford it, though: this is a truly extraordinary amount of work that’s being offered up and some of these titles would be worth much more than a fiver on their own. Itch has put together their own selection of top titles to look at, but since this is my blog and clearly you’re reading it, here are a few of my picks: Continue reading
Mash Mash Restoration
This weekend was Global Game Jam 2020, and although I had planned to tackle my fifth consecutive attempt at the event over in Brighton (back where I first started), I ended up going for a third year at the University of Southampton. The weekend was bookended by work on Friday and a competition deadline on Monday so all in all it was easier to avoid any long journeys. I took a fairly relaxed approach to the challenge (not sleeping under a computer desk like last year) and, with the help of Paul Robins, put together a project I’m really quite happy with. The theme this year was “repair.”
Mash Mash Restoration is the first Game Jam project I’ve taken the lead in that wasn’t made in Twine. I put it together in GDevelop 5 (much like Flappy Bard, Cookie Cracker and Bananarchy). As the title mich suggest, it’s (almost) a rhythm game in which you use three different sorts of repair tools spread across three conveyor belts in order to fix an endless stream of broken(?) robots. Continue reading
Hear Me on Voice FM Tonight
I got a chance to show Bananarchy at a game developers’ event in Southampton last night, and as you might expect its fruit-based control scheme attracted a fair bit of attention.
Later on in the evening I did a quick interview with Voice FM, which you should be able to catch sometime around 7pm tonight. You can tune in on 103.9 FM if you’re in the area, or use the “listen live” option online if you’re farther afield. At least a couple of other games people I know were also interviewed, so it should be well worth watching out for!
EDIT: The programme is now available on Catch Up through this link. My interview begins at 1:34:00, but do have a listen to the other developers featured in the second hour: they’re working on some fantastic things!
Make Your Twine Games More Accessible
If you’re interested in learning to make games with Twine – and especially if you’re interested in using them to build up a portfolio – it’s well worth considering how to reach as many players as possible.
Anything that runs in a browser (such as a Twine game) will tend to be played more often than something must be installed, and anything that’s primarily text and choice -based (like most Twine games) is generally more accessible to players with disabilities than something that depends primarily on using quick reflexes to respond to graphics on screen. By making just a few small adjustments to your Twine games – such as ensuring your text is clearly legible, and adding descriptions to any visual media included along with it – you can boost their reach even further!
This post offers a few quick tips, as well as links to further resources if you want to look into the subject in a little more detail:
Hey all, After our group discussion about my “Disability Media” Twine project on Frost accessibility, I went on to do some further research on how to make Twine and the HTML you put in it as accessible as possible. I hope to update this post as I learn more, because this is actually to some […]
via Brief Understandings of HTML Accessibility — Electronic Literature & Digital Writing [2]
Damon L. Wakes 