this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Remember times when there were no launcher? Just double click and you're running the game. Good times indeed.
Steam was considered an abomination when it was released. Drm and a launcher to run HL2? GTFO.
Yet here we are where everyone loves Steam. Its no surprise other companies wanted to follow knowing that in 20 years, a horrible consumer policy could become beloved.
Do you even use steam? There is reason why its so loved. Everything else they bring is good enough price for me for steam being a launcher and drm.
Only problem I have with steam is worrying what will happen if valve goes bad or disappears in the future. But I hope it has sunk in to them by now that they will get much more money by being customer friendly and nice instead of being pieces of shit like some of the competition. I still hope that gog will become good competitor to steam.
Steam will stop working in Windows 7 from the 1st of January.
So decades of games that run perfectly fine on older computers (some lauched as little ago as a couple of years) will stop working if you got them on Steam.
Meanwhile in GOG you can get offline installers which will keep on working forever and ever in the hardware and software the game is compatible with.
Have Steam = be forced periodically to update your computer to keep on playing something you've had for ages. (Mind you, the workaround is to use Linux to play steam games, but people should not be forced to install it and deal with it just to play games from the previous generation - which are still fine as games go, since the gameplay is great and the additional eyecandy for more recent hardware does little to improve gameplaying fun - and in fact are not forced to if they got the games from GOG).
You most definitelly traded something quite big for the moderate convenience from Steam, it's just that you pay it in a delayed way and think "this is great" all the way till then.
There are many hills to die on about what is wrong with the world and I dont think steam is among the first one should choose imo. But yea, there are things that could be better with steam even if I personally havent had problem with it. Its just that valve not being just as shitty as other corporations seems to be the best we can hope for. I rather have them than nothing or something worse.
Over three decades of gaming and almost as much of software engineering means I'm pretty weary of things with unecessary dependencies on an external 3rd party, because they're bound to stop working when that external 3rd party decides to stop supporting it and/or goes bankrupt.
In my experience this is not a "might happen" thing, it's an "it always happens" one.
(This was actually a well discussed subject around Steam back in the day when it first came out: all games with DRM that depend on a server on the Internet maintained by a 3rd party will sooner or later stop working when that company doesn't feel like supporting it anymore, and this is inherent to that DRM architecture rather than Steam specific)
I would hardly call "dying on a hill" to prefer to not be dependent on some external company's mid-level manager's decisions about what's "outdated" for stuff I would like or need to keep on working.
That is true. I shall try to keep your point in mind actually, I should add this to the list of things i need to consider about backing stuff up and preserving things I can that might disappear.
That's definitely a Windows issue and not a Steam issue.
So far it's just a warning from Steam that it will happen on the 1st of January 2024, and it's definitelly not an issue with Windows: Valve is chosing that the Steam launcher will not be supported in a specific Windows version anymore, and because most games bought via Steam check with Steam on startup in order to start - even when that's not at all required by the game itself - it might mean (depending of how they do it) that games will simply refuse to start even though the game itself was and still is 100% compatible with that version of Windows.
Will they stop working, or will the launcher stop working? I haven't tried all my titles, but I know many of my older games launch fine without Steam kicking them off.
I am waiting to see what happens, since we're not yet at the 1st of January (it's for 2024, not 2023 - sorry for forgetting to point it out)
This is about games that check with Steam when they start to see if you're authorized to launch them, even though it's not the game itself that needs anything from Steam, and Steam is just the DRM layer.
Steam says they will stop supporting the Steam Launcher for Windows 7, so does that mean only the application frontend stuff (the store, downloading of games you bought and so on) or does it also include the components used by games with Steam as DRM to check if you're authorized to run them?
I suspect it's the latter (since Windows 7 is now all of 5% or so of the installed base and the legislation about digital purchases is crap so they're not forced to refund your for removing your access to the games you bought, so they could get away with it), but hope it's only the former.
It would be hilarious (in a near insane wierdly laughing kind of way) if I had to use a pirate hacked steam DLL to play my own games from Steam.
On a functional level, I think the obsession with ownership is overrated. If you collect physical media, for the sake of collecting, sure. On steam though, we all know you're lying if you say you've played half the shit in your library. Maybe a quarter to any meaningful level.
That being said, I love watching the people who think they're going to have some claim to a mass refund if it did shut down.
I'd say i have 1/4 unplayed games, maybe little less because I have many games that I played before steam started tracking gametime. But most of those are from family share anyway. I find it insane how some people just buy games and never even install them.
And I know there is no way I would be getting anything back if steam suddenly shut down, you are effectively buying a licence to play anyway instead of full ownership. But this is the world we have to put up with and steam is the least shit thing about how game industry works nowdays. Without steam I effectively just couldnt play games by now, which is also kind of troubling. Though if steam never existed and there had been nothing like it, managing all the games would have been nightmare even if you ignore updating them.