Thank goodness. Have those copies resurfaced and gone into the possession of proper archivists and/or research collections?

Hell, Crunchyroll was a pirate site until it converted into not being one.

What with all the stories about the companies taking pretty hefty cuts for things, I'm gonna bet that the "supposedly" is doing some heavy lifting there, heh.

So they lied in court and got away with it? Sheesh.

And what exactly is that NFT, as distinct from the media it's linked to, useful for? Aside from simply saying that it is unique and one can have ownership of it.

Back when Mastodon was more in the news I told various friend groups to jump on it. I wrote up guides for them too. They largely didn't, and some of them even got annoyed at me.

Nowadays I see they're still somewhat mostly using Twitter though some of them have started to slowly warm up to Bluesky. Sigh.

Never used Goodreads before myself but Bookwyrm seems really cool.

Steam can definitely remove your access to games in your account. Though, to be fair, it generally doesn't, as it has little incentive to do so (outside of such cases as credit card chargebacks). There are a few cases though.

(Note of course that games delisted from sale in the store are generally not removed from accounts.)

To be fair, other stores certainly could too. But something like GOG is limited in what it can do, if you've been properly backing up your files, since you can still access your own offline installers even if you completely lose access to your account.

That said, as far as dangers to your Steam account go, I'd say that individual games getting removed is probably less likely than one of the following:

• you losing access due to not being able to login for whatever reason (e.g. forgot your stuff and also lost your phone but you had Steam's 2FA going so you can't login)
• getting your account stolen by a hijacker (which there are TONS and there have been for years due to the profitability of virtual item fraud and account fraud and the synergies between these two activities). If Steam screws up their side of things, this might even happen through no fault of your own -- for example, a bunch of people got hijacked several years ago when hijackers discovered that Steam's password recovery page would accept a blank input.
• having your account banned for whatever reason. Probably less likely if you're well-behaved and don't cheat and don't talk about piracy on Steam, etc., but it's worth noting that this could happen. Also, if you dabble in cheats and your account gets VAC banned, I'd imagine that having to use a new account ends up being kinda similar to being banned from your old one, due to the hassle of having to switch accounts.

There's an old story about Gabe Newell saying that if Steam ever shuts down Valve will make sure players are able to access their games, but there's a few problems with this:

• It's not actually in the Steam Subscriber Agreement.
• This is old info anyway.
• Given how big Steam is, it's more likely to be sold off than to go dark if Valve finds itself in financial trouble. And even if GabeN has truly promised this, the new owners of Steam are not beholden to such a promise.

As for Steam emulators, like SmartSteamEmu, I'm pretty sure they're not allowed but Valve just largely turns a blind eye to them and will do so unless they become a very significant issue in some way.

It sounds like bluffing.

In other words, it could very well be complete and utter bullshit.

Yeah, YouTube was better when it was a bunch of amateur cat videos.

Ah, I see.

And I've seen Steam fanboys on the Steam forums who insist that the rumors of performance problems are baseless. They can go pleasure themselves with rusty cacti.