ryujin470Modder behind the 'Swiss army knife of PC gaming' deletes their 20 year-old Steam account with anti-Valve manifesto: 'By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve… there was zero hope'
Modder behind the 'Swiss army knife of PC gaming' deletes...
The author of this article reflexively and illogically defends Steam (like usual):
But at least some of what Kaldaien complains about isn’t necessarily on Steam’s shoulders. It’s well within devs’ powers to provide players with access to older game versions on Steam (KOTOR 2, which I recently replayed, lets you access its pre-Aspyr version via a beta branch, for instance), but many of them elect not to. That strikes me as an issue with individual devs rather than Steam as a whole, and as for Steam Input? Well, again, if there’s a problem there it’s with developers electing to use that API over OS-native ones that’s the issue.
He literally completely misses the modder’s point. Steam itself will not run on the original machine you purchased KOTOR 2 on. You can buy a gaming machine, purchase a game through steam and 6 years suddenly no longer be able to simply because Valve has decided that the version of Steam that you bought the game through is no longer ok and now you need to upgrade your hardware and OS to play the same game you’ve been playing for years.
This issue has multiple facets and the answer changes depending on the end result you want.
The author of the article sees the problem as “Old games you bought on steam are unplayable on modern hardware”. Kaldaien sees the problem as “Steam cannot run on older hardware anymore, even if the games I bought still work there”. Both people want the same thing (To be able to play the games they bought) but are looking at it from different angles.
Ultimately, Steam is a DRM tool that has a very good storefront attached to it. If you want true ownership of the software, buy the game in a way that will let you run the software by itself. Valve expects that the overwhelming majority of its users will keep up with semi-modern hardware (In this case, a machine capable of running windows 10/SteamOS) which I don’t feel is is an unreasonable ask. However, expecting Valve to retain support for an OS that hit end of life 20 years ago is unreasonable.
I agree with the opinions of the article’s author. It would be far better to ensure that support for the old titles you bought are accessible on modern hardware rather than making sure Steam is still accessible on a PC running windows 98. This is one of those corner-cases where piracy is acceptable. You already paid for the game, you just need to jump through some hoops to play it on your 30 year old PC.
Or just support GoG and buy the game from them.
This seems like the wisest option for the long term. I just recently decided that any games that are available on both and don’t make use of Steam-exclusive features I will buy from GOG instead. Up until that point I had been buying games on Steam by default when they had sales, but GOG has equivalent sales at the same time. Unless the game takes advantage of some Steam-exclusive feature, there seems to be no good reason to buy it from Steam instead of from GOG.
I like Steam, but they are catering to a certain audience that doesn't care as much about game preservation. Now that GoG is doing the opposite... it is the optimal place to buy those old games you want to keep forever. Seems simple to me. It's healthy to have two different markets anyway.
I just move the games folder out of steam.
I'd love a tutorial on this on Linux.
The games folders are the same on linux. Theyre just in home>deck>steam instead of c>programs>steam, or whatever the paths are.
I agree with you, but I started thinking about this not even from a game preservation perspective but from a DRM perspective. This article was a timely reminder that if I buy any media with DRM, no matter how purportedly lenient and user-friendly it is, the DRM controls when and where I’m allowed to use that media in perpetuity unless I break the DRM, which I understand is illegal in some jurisdictions. Imagine having to jump through hoops or even break the law just to keep using the media that you “bought” with your hard-earned cash.
RobotZap10000I do the exact same, but I also buy multiplayer and VR games on Steam, because I run Linux, and GOG Galaxy isn’t out on Linux (yet). I really don’t want to faff about getting all of that working on each individual game. I bought Rain World and FTL on GOG, but Star Wars: Battlefront 2 on Steam.
slauraureHeck I just run GOG Galaxy in Proton to not have to patch everything manually.
You can run Heroic Launcher on Linux and it ties into GoG, didn't know if you knew. (I run Linux too! There's dozens of us xD)
I already use it, but thanks for recommending it. It’s really great. Here on Lemmy, I think the number of Linux users is in the thousands, not dozens.
entropicdriftHere on Lemmy, I think the number of Linux users is in the thousands, not dozens.
Can confirm
Thanks for pointing this out about multiplayer and VR games. I had wondered about this exact thing, so I appreciate your confirming it!
I didn’t really point much out. I only know that multiplayer games use either Steam or GOG Galaxy to log in and that there aren’t many more OpenXR runtimes besides SteamVR on Linux (I know of WiVRn, but I had an Nvidia GPU and couldn’t figure out how to compile the Vulkan extensions required). I find it tedious to manually set up save file synchronization for my GOG games, so I really can’t be arsed to go so far when Steam just does it all for me.
Thanks again. I’m not doing VR yet, but plan to eventually. I can totally see where multiplayer could be an issue too, especially if friends own the games on Steam instead.