I have used it one (1) time in my life, ans it was my first experience with OpenStreetMap in general. It was pretty fun!
It's very intuitive and makes you learn just how detailed and specific map data can be. Can't say much about missing features since I don't event know what can be done.
Recommended experience, it's like playing Pokemon Go without the evil part :)
Then again you produce public open-source data when you contribute to OSM, and nothing prevents the military from using it for morally questionable purposes... at the end of the day the only difference is the intermediary that could make a profit selling the data, no?
No, the huge difference is creating the good part. Where is the open data for the general public created from Pokemon GO? You can't stop the military using open data but that is on them. The evil is them getting your private data to have an exclusive advantage people have no control or transparency over.
I was talking about a difference for the bad outcome in this case... if Pokemon Go was open souce and public, the military could have done the same, for that matter the might be doing the same with OSM data to some extend right now and it would be harder to know about it.
Open-source software and data are obviously public goods I support. I was just pointing out that the only "evil" parts here are rent seekers reselling this data and the military... not the people assembling the data (players).
You have no idea what they are selling though. You can ask to get bad things removed from Open Street Maps. It isn't just the money making aspect it's the secrecy too.
Street complete does load width - it can be quite useful for example for the fire fighters. They can try to plot some routes based on OSM data, then check if the narrow places are actually there and reach out to the city to address them, so their fire engines can get through.
That's a fair use for the data, but it would be hilarious if StreetComplete asked users to get a trundle wheel and measure the width of roads around embassies or seats of government...
I was questioning the qualification of Pokemon Go being "evil" here, it's the data broker and the military who are evil in this case in my opinion. (Making it open-source also doesn't help, as I said we'd only short-circuit the intermediary who sold this data).
Maybe it's a useless nuance, but I don't think Pokemon Go gamers should feel/evil or even that they should be careful the next time they try to entertain themselves.
Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though.
However:
> The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen
workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it?
I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry.
This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc.
On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now".
Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!
Well I'm talking from experience as a mobile indie game developer.
Pretty much every year I'm getting warnings from Apple or Google, or 3rd party SDKs, that unless I make sure to update libraries, or comply with a new rule, they are going to take down the game.
One of the latest rules was some sort of a digital services act (again another regulation) that made it very difficult for indie devs not to share their personal address and phone numbers.
That's not related to SKG though, that's storefront policy.
In principle, as long as _you_ are not blocking using the binary on hardware that supports (i.e. a player already has it installed on an old phone), you're in the clear.
SKG is explicitly _not_ advocating for lifetime support, compatibility with new devices, etc
But there are 3rd party SDKs that rely on outside servers that will stop working and the app could have unexpected behavior. It doesn't have to be complete crash, but it might be enough to degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.
Being bootstrapped with no investors, there's no extra resources, and no financial benefit in making sure that the app can function well even with these 3rd party services, servers etc. not working.
> degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.
Yeah, it's a good point, the law that may result from parliament does need to be clear on where the line is drawn.
Personally, I would expect singleplayer and LAN to work at EOL
Edit: on 3rd party libraries & services, I would expect that such vendors would need to make their software compliant for their customers after any law change on this front. No one is gonna buy GameLift if it's a legal liability for their EOL plan
> I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want an accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
This is a really good analogy, except you made one mistake: it’s not difficult at all to design something to be accessible and respectful of privacy as long as you do it from the start. If you try to build something inaccessible and privacy-invading then get caught and have to retrofit accessibility and privacy at the last minute to avoid fines and lawsuits, that’s when it becomes difficult.
And you see this exact mistake crop up in the Stop Killing Games criticism as well. People say that it’s difficult because they are thinking about taking the status quo and retrofitting longevity. For instance, trying to retroactively obtain licenses to distribute components that they didn’t originally have. When in practice, the effect of a law like this is that it would push game developers to make the right choices up front like picking appropriately licensed components, so there’s no barrier to keeping the game alive when the time comes to cease support.
It might also have escaped your attention that the EU was perfectly willing to create accessibility and privacy regulations, so if you are likening Stop Killing Games to these things then it stands to reason that this is not a reason for the EU to avoid Stop Killing Games legislation.
This is my second business after already having experience with GDPR. Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business and it's not a trivial cost. Moreover, it's still changing frequently, just about 2 years ago there was a major change were asking for simple consent was not good enough and now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement. From research I made, the tools that provide good coverage are not cheap, I pay a lot of money for these services, and they are also 3rd parties that without them the game experience might degrade. Just a little example, if the privacy consent service times out, the game load time increases to about ~10s at least.
Moreover, I have to also pay a company just to be my representative in the EU and have a stupid email address that is completely useless.
I don't know these things definitely don't make my appreciate regulations, and I think if you want to add more layers of regulation, you have to be really thoughtful about them, because often like DRM, eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
> Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business
If privacy regulations can break your business, then I think there’s a very high chance what you are doing is exactly the sort of thing the regulations are explicitly designed to discourage.
> now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no regulation saying you have to implement that. That’s a consequence of you making the choice to trade user data. Somebody who does not choose to do that has much less work to do. This is an example of the regulations working as intended. You’re supposed to see the friction and make better choices up front to avoid it, not make the same choices then complain about the friction.
> eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
If I have to watch ads, I personally prefer personalized ads as they waste less of my time if I happen to see an ad for something I would actually want. I think generally, scaring people with "oh noes they'll have your annonymuized data" is not that dissimilar from scaring about radiation radiation from their wifi router.
Anyway, the discussion was about the harms of regulations and why developers would resist these. I personally know several indie mobile developers that had games that their core business model was ad monetization, and the regulation made these businesses less viable, and it's likely that players who enjoyed these kind of games, will now see less of these indie games.
I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike. I think legeslation has to be super careful when it comes to regulating businesses, anytime I had to deal with compliance around accessibility, privacy, transparency etc. I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses, while good intentioned small businesses need to spend money on compliance before they even know if the business is going to be viable.
> I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike
Are we supposed to just accept that games will die because of the profits of some game dev studios?
> I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses
I think regulation is a superweapon that should mostly be used in cases where there can be severe long-term damage (physical and health dangers, loans, etc.) or in cases where what it regulates is simple and easy to comply with.
For example, it makes a lot of sense to regulate gasoline so there won't be any lead in it. It also makes sense to standartize and simplify loans which can also have severe impact on people. I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree, which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people, especially not SKG.
> If it would be so important for players to ensure their games stay alive, they'd just stop buying these games and they'd apply pressure on devs to do that
Unfortunately, it only works on paper. In reality publishers can add stuff after the release when people already paid money for it (classic bait and switch). So buying only "good" games does not guarantee that they will stay that way. Also, we did try "applying pressure", it didn't work, that's why we are here currently.
> I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree
Nobody is asking to regulate the games themselves, only how they are distributed after their end of life.
> which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people
People make money using specific videogames. So there are consequences of shutting down games for good.
Most of the discussions I've seen about this disregard the fact that on paper it's all nice, but in practice it's a rabbit-hole of constraints. Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included is just one concern, and many times they cannot be technically or legally included in client versions for players.
Personally, for all I care, even as a game-dev, I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game.
This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers, doesn't force them to comply with anything, and doesn't incur any additional costs. Maybe there'd be some tiny loss of revenue, but it's arguably miniscule if the games are already abandoned.
It pretty much already happening with games like the C&C Generals that have pirated abandonware versions.
Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players, instead they should just legalize reverse engineering.
> Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included
That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.
> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game
To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.
> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers
The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.
> C&C Generals
That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.
> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players
SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.
The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
I'm a developer of a mobile indie game and it's not true. Just to get started you need to implement tons of third part SDKs like Meta Ads, AdMob, Google Analytics, etc. These require actual handling of player choices, data sanitation etc. disregarding the loss of revenue with not being able to serve personalized ads, or even ads at all to large segments of players. And I'm talking about strictly optional rewarded ads.
These already harmed a lot of small mobile game companies, while the bigger mobile companies had much better means to deal with these.
I personally paid over $10K for different services just to comply, disregarding the loss of revenue over this compliance.
Did you ever build a commercial project or any business yourself? The nature of your comment implies to me you haven't. I highly recommend you give it a try, it might actually change your mind!
I didn't know it was impossible to build businesses without inserting to Meta/Google/others ad SDK to spy on all my users. Maybe we should stop normalizing these behavior.
Yea good luck getting any reasonable visibility on App Store or Google Play without paying good amount of $$$ to meta, Google etc.
Trust me I would have loved to throwaway this dependency on these platforms, I don't enjoy paying for ads. The market is not pretty, but there's a reason for why it's the way it is. For some reasons, players prefer downloading games for free and then paying potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars on IAPs, rather than everyone paying $5 for a game. I would have preferred it to be the latter personally, but the market doesn't seem to want to act this way.
Your videogame is a data-harvester for the purpose of ad-serving, why on Earth would GDPR compliance be easy for you? It sucks that the mobile market is essentially just a glittery front over privacy invasion vectors, but just because it's normalized it doesn't mean it's right. "Serving third party ads" is exactly the kind of thing the GDPR exists to regulate harshly.
That's cool and all, I really don't have a problem with the requirement to tell players to their face that if they play the game for free, they are sharing their data and preferences with 3rd parties. Denying content creators the ability to (a) restrict content to free loaders who refuse, (b) forcing companies to pay for services that so they could reasonably comply, mostly because the legal language is so ambiguous and broad, is something I do not appreciate.
> The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
I buy a VPS. I apt install nginx. Is it okay that by default, opening http://IP/index.html logs the IP address to /etc/log/nginx/access.log? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but I need a privacy policy (for an empty index.html). Maybe I need to ask a lawyer (who usually errs on side of caution) because people have been arguing about it for 10 years (and please don't answer here). And in the end, even if I didn't need to do anything, it sure is _some_ nonzero drain of my resources to have think about it at all (completely ignoring whether it's justified or not).
- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:
- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.
Yes. IP addresses by themselves are not PII and may be logged indefinitely. It's only after you start correlating them with other shit that you're collecting that they become subject to GDPR.
Same for cookies really. If you *only* operate a shopping cart, you don't have to display a cookie notice for "only technically required cookies". The point of the cookie notice is to dark pattern users into granting more access or just to annoy them enough that they continue not caring about privacy.
Consider for a moment that end-to-end encrypted messaging protects criminals of all sorts. Surely that’s a bad thing and requiring back doors for law enforcement shouldn’t be considered an attack on anybody?
I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.
The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
I was in the same boat until a year ago or so. FUTO^[1] finally provided a good text prediction/correction pair + that simply better feeling the Gboard has^[2].
[2]: I never investigated this, so I always assumed that GBoard predicted what key I wanted to press when close to two letters. With FOSS keyboards, with a physically identical layout, I tended to make way more mistakes.
I find GBoard to remain superior in multilingual typing, futo just can't seem to be able to switch to other languages consistently, even with the multilingual option enabled,
it's also not as good at "recovering" from typing too many letters (Gboard sometimes adequately completes with likely shorter words)
>If they've experienced these blocks for two years already, yet still are complaining about it instead of fixing it, then I expect them to actually try something else than just complaining about it.
I get why you would feel like this since it sounds pretty obvious. However, especially if we are being pragmatic, we should consider that reality is a little bit more complicated:
- We don't know the terms of their contract: how much does it cost them to use CloudFlare services, if they have a chance of "cancelling" just the CDN (in the case of them having more stuff contracted), etc.
- If they decided to pay for CloudFlare services and not some other companies, they might have reasons for not wanting to migrate.
- It does not change that a 3rd party unilaterally decided to start this practice (let's remember that even CloudFlare has finally talked about this and they are obviously pissed) affecting other businesses because apparently theirs is more important.
Honestly this doesn't affect me, but that doesn't change that I get why they feel like even if they could (which we don't know) move away from CloudFlare, they don't think they should just because Tebas said so.
If HN mods think the rule should be applied whatever the community thinks (for now), then yes, it needs a rule.
As I see it, down-voting is an expression of the community posture, rules are an expression of the "space" posture. It's up to the space to determine if there is something relevant enough to include it in the rules.
And again, as I see it, community should also have a way to at least suggest modifications of the rules.
I agree with you in "People who can't take a hint aren't going to read the rules". But as they say: "Ignorance of the law does not exempt one from compliance."
Hi! Yup, I didn't know it and your comment talking about this (completely agree btw) was made later, so sorry if it felt repetitive to you but thanks for coming here to let us know :)
> I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends
Plus I also agree in how harmful doomscrolling can be, specially for the young. Can't compare that with pedophiles though, sorry.
I don't know your age, but I think we can both agree in the fact that the Internet has changed a lot in a short period of time, and still does. I met some of my best friends online: games, forums, group chats.
However, as well as we could go out and play in the street without much concern some years ago and now the streets are for cars that can injure/kill you + other stuff, the Internet is no longer the same either.
Not only that, but now parents are also people who grew up with the Internet and no longer see it as something new or weird, so they are not as afraid as previous parents were. That means that children are raised without or with much less fear to online dangers.
Of course we are talking about a large-scale issue and we can't just use personal experience to justify anything. But I wanted to point out that using "Nothing bad ever happened to me" is specially dangerous here because we are not even talking about the same scenario.
> I don't know your age, but I think we can both agree in the fact that the Internet has changed a lot in a short period of time, and still does. I met some of my best friends online: games, forums, group chats.
It changes. Hasn't gotten materially less "safe" on the whole, though. And it doesn't change that much.
> However, as well as we could go out and play in the street without much concern some years ago and now the streets are for cars that can injure/kill you + other stuff,
You are out of your mind. Streets in general, in most of the world, are safer for pedestrians than they were "some years ago". And they are a whole lot safer than they were when I was a kid, which was rather more years ago than you seem to be talking about. What's changed is people's perceptions and tolerances about risk. And not entirely for the better.
Unless "some years" is somewhere over 100, you're just making up obvious nonsense here.
> Not only that, but now parents are also people who grew up with the Internet and no longer see it as something new or weird, so they are not as afraid as previous parents were. That means that children are raised without or with much less fear to online dangers.
Parents were not, in general, terrified of the Internet in the 1990s. Whereas there's a vast wave of paranoia right now. Again, what you're saying is just flat out factually false.
> However, as well as we could go out and play in the street without much concern some years ago and now the streets are for cars that can injure/kill you + other stuff
Tell this to teenagers regularly standing on the street corner in front of my house and being loud.
> the Internet is no longer the same either
Yes, but again, the real danger is having your brain turned into mush by algorithms, not pEdOpHiLeS. And the current social trend is to have even more walled gardens with algorithms.
> but now parents are also people who grew up with the Internet and no longer see it as something new or weird, so they are not as afraid as previous parents were. That means that children are raised without or with much less fear to online dangers.
The opposite. When I was a kid parents had zero knowledge about how computer works and what the internet is, I could browse shady or straight-up illegal websites all I wanted and nobody cared. Nowadays there's huge panic "my child saw a picture of a titty!" because parents are at least somewhat aware that there's shit on the internet. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place.
> But I wanted to point out that using "Nothing bad ever happened to me" is specially dangerous here because we are not even talking about the same scenario.
Okay. Can you point me to some statistics that fear-mongering is beneficial to the society at large? Because news usually paint a picture of the world getting more and more dangerous despite crime in general falling in most developed countries.
> Tell this to teenagers regularly standing on the street corner in front of my house and being loud.
I also have those, specially at night, but at least where I live they are a minority. I used to think the same but it's easy to forget about those who we don't hear about (literally).
> Yes, but again, the real danger is having your brain turned into mush by algorithms, not pEdOpHiLeS. And the current social trend is to have even more walled gardens with algorithms.
As much as I hate seeing how pedophiles are used as an excuse for absolutely horrendous technical and legal decisions (when in the first place I straight up don't believe them), I am aware that they are an actual danger. And when you are affected (also meaning your kid or whatever related) it sucks. It's a different type of harm compared to algorithms, "brainrot" and its consequences (which doesn't mean they they are less dangerous).
I completely agree in how terrible the possibility of "having our brains turned into mush by algorithms", and not only for the younger (even though they are specially vulnerable). It infuriates me even more when I see parents letting their 2yo get stuck with videos automatically recommended by some algorithm designed as if it was a mental weapon to completely lobotomize them, but then "I don't understand why do they behave like this". Also agree in the trend to have even more walled gardens with algorithms and how that sucks.
> When I was a kid parents had zero knowledge about how computer works and what the internet is, I could browse shady or straight-up illegal websites all I wanted and nobody cared. Nowadays there's huge panic "my child saw a picture of a titty!" because parents are at least somewhat aware that there's shit on the internet.
As with the first point, this is highly subjective, since different families grew and grow up in different environments (regional, cultural, legal, etc.) Where I live and with all the parents that I have discussed this topic (pretty frequent in my case), I found out that most of them understand up to some degree that the Internet has its bad stuff, but see that as inherent and inevitable, so they don't care that much. Maybe they already saw that stuff, but since they are OK they don't perceive a danger. You always find a couple of "Karens" in the other opposite, that's a worldwide species, but here a minority. I would love having actual data in how parents position with this in different areas and generations, I am really interested in this topic. Since I don't I work with that I have locally, but I know I can't just extrapolate that to the rest of the world.
> Can you point me to some statistics that fear-mongering is beneficial to the society at large? Because news usually paint a picture of the world getting more and more dangerous despite crime in general falling in most developed countries.
Unfortunately not, but the think is that I also agree here, panicking is hardly a good choice. However, that's not the same as ignoring the danger. If we are getting lower crime rates and safer environments it's because we are more aware (and take consequent actions) than ever of different types of dangers. That's my whole point: ignoring that the Internet has dangers because we happened to grow up in it and without issues isn't ok. There are dangers, we should be aware of them, and we should have mechanisms to avoid them or at least mitigate their impact (Virus? Antivirus. Pedophiles? Don't engage with certain interactions/requests, or idk, I don't have the answer to be honest). About the news... a hole other topic, but yeah, they live of sensationalism and I could argue how harmful and stupid that is for hours.
Well... I mean... Apple's never going to sell anything it can't get insane margins on. The moment it does, it's multiple will collapse. Also fairly certain there's no one left at Apple who remembers when they had a decent ux and #a11y research team.
Serious question: how does Bandcamp manage purchases? Are you buying a "license for listening to music" or can you actually download a DRM-free copy etc.?
You can get a ZIP of OGGs if you want. Those will last as least as long as a 2005 DVD rip from Pirate Bay. Feels good.
(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)
Zip of FLACs even. As space is cheap and abundant (or at least for me, buying only about 6-12 albums / month) that allows me to not worry about transcoding into whatever at some point in the future.
Indeed, what others have said. Bandcamp files are DRM-free, and they say as much on their site. The only time I use their app to listen is when I'm driving, since the app plays nice with Android Auto, but you can use any capable player you wish. I have probably purchased around 200 albums from there over the years with an average of about $12USD per and discovered TONS of new-to-me artists from there. It is my sole source of music these days and all my purchases are backed up on my home media server in the event Bandcamp shutters its doors or does something ethically stupid.
In addition to streaming, you can (and should) download the mp3 or flac files. Once you have them, they are yours.
Be warned though, the artist/label can decide for whatever reason to take the music they have listed on the website down, which includes what you’ve purchased, so while it’s rare, it’s possible for things to just disappear, so make sure you download before then.
I just create a tmux session on my proxmox homeserver and copy+paste a command whenever I make purchases. I can paste the command I use tomorrow if anyone likes.
I recently learned that foobar2000 can load the zip files of songs directly without having to unpack them, which is nice.
You get DRM-free copy, and unlimited amount of downloads for the music. In multiple formats, including flac and nowadays quite often 24bit flacs are also available.
I once bought https://djemynai.bandcamp.com/album/zao. Once is the keyword here, because it allowed me to download the audio files. You are essentially paying for the ability to be able to download, and then you are free to do whatever, just like old times. :D
It's very intuitive and makes you learn just how detailed and specific map data can be. Can't say much about missing features since I don't event know what can be done.
Recommended experience, it's like playing Pokemon Go without the evil part :)