This is a wild, ongoing story that is playing out in a rather bizarrely.

First off, here is Frogware's open letter on the situation from August 25, 2020.

Basically, Frogwares signed an agreement with Nacon (formerly Big Ben Interactive) to license and publish their game in return for funding, but Frogwares still owned the IP. Frogwares claims that Big Ben was consistently late with payments and did not honour milestones for further funding. They took on an EGS exclusivity agreement to help get funding. At some point during the development, Nacom bought another studio and then demanded that Frogwares give their source code to this new company, which Frogwares refused to do.

The released the game in June 2019 but then were told by Nacom that the milestones that were previously agreed to were cancelled, therefore Frogwares would see no profit from the game. Frogware filed a lawsuit and finally got access to some sales data but found it wanting in many regards. They also found that copyright notices on the game were incorrect with the result of misallocating the IP ownership. Their logo was removed from the PS4 and X1 versions of the game and they discovered that Nacon was presenting themselves as the IP owners for the game, and had bought domains for Frogwares' other Sherlock Holmes titles (most of which was published by Focus Home Interactive, with some published by Atlus in North America or self-published by Frogwares).

Frogwares believes they had what they needed to terminate the contract with Nacon, despite some complications with the French legal system due to the COVID pandemic, and so they pulled their games from various storefronts alongside this letter.

In January 2021, that French legal complication played out against them when the Paris Court of Appeals determined that Frogwares acted unlawfully and decided that Nacon would be able to put the game back on the market.

Today, The Sinking City was put back on Steam with Frogwares listed as the developer, but Frogwares says they did not make this version. It seems to be an older version, missing much the DLC and features like achievements and cloud saves.

Frogwares' own version of the game is being sold only on Gamesplanet, Origin, and the Xbox 1 Series, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.

So currently I get most of my music from soundtracks ripped from games and from Bandicamp. However, quite a few artists that go through traditional publishers are not on Bandicamp.

Now, while I could go through the hassle of installing iTunes on Linux through WINE, I dont want to because:

• WINE can be a hassle, especially if the app does some strange things.
• Id rather not support apple in any way if I can

So, are there any major platforms that allow downloading .mp3 or better yet, .flac files, especially for artists going through bigger publishers?

Okay, so it's been around now for a year and a half. What's the good, bad, and ugly? I know they've got free games every week, I know they've got a bunch of timed exclusives, and I hear they've still got kinks to iron out. I'm primarily asking from the perspective of an occasional gamer who prefers to be as hassle-free, launcher-free, and DRM-free as possible.

Recently, this post was brought back to the front page with some fresh replies and it got me wondering how those of you with large (digital) music libraries organize them?

I'm not very tech savvy so I primarily just have my modestly sized library saved in folders by artist, but that leads to some folders only having one song in them which can be annoying to navigate when I need to. I have been thinking about just having all my songs dumped into one folder, since I'm able to filter them by artist/album in Foobar anyway.

I'm currently reorganizing my Steam library, as I do every other year or so, and I'm curious as to how people here organize things (or not). Do you have certain categories or a taxonomy you put your games into? What are the benefits and limitations for the way you've chosen?

I've been wanting to buy some music recently from some artists that are only available through places like Amazon, iTunes, Google Play... However, I have specifically stayed away from most of these platforms for various reasons, the primary one being that I prefer Bandcamp over all of them (and up to now I never had the need to go anywhere else anyway).

So my question is, have you bought any music from these types of platforms online and what was the experience like?

Some specifics for what I'm personally looking to get out of this topic (you don't have to answer these if you don't want to, general experiences are fine too):

• Can I buy music through my browser alone? This one's primarily aimed at iTunes, because when I go to Apple Music and click on the "Also available in the iTunes Store" button for a particular song or album, nothing happens. So I'm assuming it's trying to launch iTunes which I don't have installed.
• Is the music available in multiple audio formats and can I pick whichever one I want after purchase? This is what I like a lot about Bandcamp, you buy the music once and it gives you a bunch of different audio formats to choose from.
• Did the audio files come with metadata and cover art attached (and were they accurate)? This one's not a big deal overall since stuff like Picard exists, but it's just a nice thing to not need to worry about.

I've been discovering recently how convenient Discord can make developing with the feedback of your community, or of selected members of your community.

This is assuming that you are already talking with your dev team and community on Discord and have a server for that.

Create your game on the Discord platform (they do the same thing as Steam basically), and integrate an alpha-access store page right into your Discord server as a channel. This store page can be restricted to whomever you want via normal Discord permissions. Binaries can be distributed wonderfully simply this way, becuase if you're talking with the community in Discord already, you can just send them to that store page channel embedded directly in your server where they can simply click "install" to test your most recent binaries.

The agreement with Discord restricts only a few things that I wasn't interested in anyway: They don't want you to do an exclusive deal with another distribution service (duh), and anywhere you advertise your game you must mention that it's also available on Discord in addition to wherever else you're distributing it. That's pretty much fine with me.

Anyway, I'm having a lot more fun with this than I had previously trying to distribute pre-release alpha binaries, so I wanted to see what you all thought about it. And what criticisms there are to be had.