@stairknower@ArsonFel0ny@YngviCom I mean they stayed together for over a decade cheating on each other knowingly and Napoleon said he only divorced her cuz of politics, after which they stayed friends and he later in life said he regretted the divorce. I don't think he cared that much.
Hi Sandy, I hope you’re well. I have appreciated the recent discussions. I do not agree with your framing.
Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model. DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world.
By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not “pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended.
That doesn’t excuse people pirating the registered game. However, it’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number.
I also don’t think piracy is what “gutted” id - id is still around and still making games. Piracy may have cost money, but it wasn’t the reason Quake was hard or why people eventually went different ways.
So yes: pay developers. Buy the games you love. Support the people who make them.
But history is messier than “pirates killed the companies.” Sometimes the same free distribution that looked like lost sales was also the thing that made the game impossible to ignore.
@ArsonFel0ny@YngviCom They had an unspoken open relationship essentially, they both cheated on each other openly. This was actually very common among the french upper class at the time.
@minaenlace@YngviCom For the record the answer is obviously no, that's his military outfit, which interestingly enough was pretty modest, it did not denote his rank. During Civic duty he had other outfits, and at some point he enjoyed wearing his green academy of sciences outfit everywhere.