and my god the insults I received over the years about it.

Me too, me too. When I lost the internet for a mad long time and noticed my steamed games not working because the launcher was refusing to log in while offline (despite having a so-called offline mode) and questioning why a singleplayer game even requires all of this in the first place, I would then get told the problem was actually my internet provider and not the game’s or steam’s for creating this mess in the first place. Yeah, make it make sense. Incidentally I had to acquire a bunch of executables for those very same games like you did, and yep, they’d work offline as should be. Creator of service problem says piracy is a service problem, why is this not a headline already?

Then other DD platforms popped up, and people bought games there (myself included, fuck you direct2drive), and lost all the games and all the money when the platform died.

I’m getting Desura flashbacks. Lucky I downloaded everything I had when I felt the signs of it going down, but I know others weren’t as lucky. Silver lining is they’re still playable, DRM-free is nice, but like I established we’ve already moved on from that into bigger fish like “the credits reference a consulting company I don’t like.”

I’m so sick of this cyberpunk hellscape bullshit where you pay everything and own nothing.

And there’s not even any cyberware to show for it! But yeah at this point I’m focusing more on buying stuff other than games and playing my massive library of games from multiple decades. It’s just I really suck at that too.