I'm a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.
And though Valve shouldn't always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don't really agree with his arguments.
Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10...
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father's Gateway. Maybe he means the game's original system requirements, as listed "on the back of the box" so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.
The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that's why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It's why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.
The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.
I... Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn't just run natively on my Windows 10 PC... I need DOS Box. Heck, that's exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can't run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?
Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, ... [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!
That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it's ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.
It’s Valve’s responsibility that Microsoft stripped DOS support from their OS in Windows 10?
Starting with Windows 10, the ability to create a MS-DOS startup disk has been removed, and so either a virtual machine running MS-DOS or an older version (in a virtual machine or dual boot) must be used to format a floppy disk, or an image must be obtained from an external source.
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father’s Gateway. Maybe he means the game’s original system requirements, as listed “on the back of the box” so to speak.
I think it’s more about if you don’t upgrade your PC.
Say you bought a game on Steam, while Windows XP was current, then just kept that PC, didn’t upgrade for whatever reason. Why would you, your game is running fine. But now Steam doesn’t support Windows XP anymore or Windows 7 for that matter, even if the game itself would run on it, making Windows 10, eventually 11, then whatever in the future, effectively the minimum requirement to play your game. The dev isn’t really at fault, because the game could technically still run on that OS, you just can’t download it anymore.
I agree with him in that regard, that it these things suck, however few people are actually affected by this. I think there should be some sort of “Legacy Client”, but then you have to deal with security. Just saying, connect your Windows 98 machine to the net for an occasional DRM check isn’t really viable. Installers would be the obvious answer, but that’s not what Steam does. Maybe Linux could be the answer, but I don’t know if it could be basically the same at one point with kernel version requirements or something like that.
Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible,
I think they mean modifying the minimum requirements, because their electron based abomination of a client does not support older systems
so unless you know to use the goldberg emu, it will possibly make those games different, or at worst unplayable. I know of games that glitch with modern hardware, in one instance because it is so old the dev never thought about graphics hardware with 2 GB VRAM or more, and it was never patched either.
its suprising that such a high profile person does not know about goldberg emu (or various other solutions), so they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?
That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.
Enter Monthly Subscription Game Libraries and DRM-free → Exit Steam
In lieu of even the simplest commitment by Valve to keep their DRM client free of system requirement creep, business models like Ubisoft+, EA Access and Game Pass represent far greater value to consumers. The claim is often made that you “do not own the game” with these services, but you do not own them on Steam either; Valve stops pretending to care if their store’s software breaks your game after you have played it for two hours.
I would rather pay a fraction of the price to play a game for one month than pretend digitally distributed games have the lifespan of a boxed physical product. You can consume the entirety of a game within one month and pay an appropriate amount of money for the ephemeral service offered.
this person is extremely misguided. the a copy if the game files, drop in the goldberg emu dll, and done. works forever, in as many copies as you feel like. DRMs can stand in the way, but that’s exactly what makes it even worse on subscription platforms. and online only, or strictly multiplayer games? these won’t work whatever you do, but that’s not valve’s fault.
valve is careless but today other than GOG, it’s still the best (read: least bad) popular storefront, and subscription based systems are simply just the worst.
Enter Monthly Subscription Game Libraries and DRM-free → Exit Steam
I strongly disagree with this paragraph, as we saw with Netflix and video streaming monthly subscriptions are a trap which allows a massive increase tot he cost to the consumer and a noticeable drop in the quality of the content in a way steams model simply does not.
Micro$oft is like the new EA. This is the exact same shit EA did 10 years back when they bought up dozens of studios, milked the shit out of them, and then closed the studio so the executives could get bonuses. Now EA has like, 5 studios that make games while the rest got gutted for the IP and then taken out back with a gun.
I think EA was still worse. At least in my perception.
I think EA actually bought studios just to get the IP and immediately get rid of the employees. I also think they tried to milk a few of the IPs before letting it go downhill.
MS, from what I can tell, gave studios quite a lot of freedom to do what they do best. I don’t think they intentionally wanted to fuck over studios, but they rather sacrificed them.
Don’t get me wrong: that’s still bad. But there’s a difference between fucking studios over with intent and reacting badly to changed circumstances.
Unlike EA, Microsoft can afford to wait a little and then get rid of the employees. They let them do what they want because they have no idea how to run a gaming studio anymore. They don’t have any incentive to have expertise, which is why the old Xbox IPs like Halo or Gears died so COD can live in another part of town. They are like tech venture capitalists now, not even just in gaming.
In a real ‘what if’ moment for Taito he even “made a prototype for a new games console, but that was not approved by the sales team as they were purely focused on arcade games.”
The Taito sales team, as it was back then, hovers in the background of Nishikado’s recollections like a ghost: it clearly exerted great influence on what the company would allow the creatives to make.
Marketing people are bunch of idiots. They stop real creativity and replace it with copies of what succeed somewhere else.
1983 was a uniquely American event. Japan and Europe were unaffected, and as no Japanese consoles had any success in the US at the time they wouldn’t have aimed for an American release anyway, while Europe only bought computers.
Good article, I just wish it would say why the game still isn’t available. I never played this game but went down a little rabbit hole looking for it and ET: Quake Wars and it’s insane the hoops you have to jump through to play these games that used to sell. I still hope to jump through those hoops one day and try it out.
I'm unsure if you ever figured out how to play ETQW, but your comment inspired me to go find out for myself. In case you didn't, this discord looks to be the answer:
I watched some videos of ET:QW and it looked really dated and I lost interest haha. I bet having nostalgia for this is probably required. I still really want to play gunman chronicles, I can hang with a Half Life engine game!
I mean, it’s true. Killing game services in a way which ensures people have absolutely no way to use the games they bought is… a choice.
And now a million Europeans have just officially expressed that they don’t agree with “developers” (really, publisher higher-ups) being free to choose that.
Maybe if we stop paying for unfinished games we won’t have to care about the drama the comes before the release. We can just see the finished product. Then we don’t have to guess how crap like this might effect the game.
I’d rather have another team try to execute Subnautica. Unforgivable to make a survival game where enemies go through walls, you can fall through your ship, and your save becomes corrupted if you build too much.
It’s a AA game that was rough around the edges. Not much there to make you think “without the original devs the game will be totally wrong.”
Corporate fuckery is not a good smell to gamers. Smells like month old genital pus.
Just starting an article by explaining “Unknown Worlds Entertainment has been acquired by Somebody Interactive, the parent company of Hunka Chunka Studios and Rumpy Pumpy Inc” and we’re already suspicious, because corporate acquisition means the game now has more parasites to fund - layers of upper management, investors, etc.
Then we hear about major names that are the people that had the vision for the original game being replaced “immediately” in a press release full of bullshit corpowank marketing boilerplate…it means this game is almost certainly going to be cancelled, the studio shut down and the staff laid off, probably after a lot of players have purchased the game in early access.
There’s quite a bit of overlap in Subnautica and KSP’s player bases, and we’ve already had our asses burned by Take Two Interactive.
So, I’m not going to be joining any early access campaign. I’m not paying for the game before it is finished, I’m not playtesting it for free, I’m not pre-ordering anything and I’m not buying any merch, and there’s a reasonable chance I’m not buying the game at all, because it has already been smeared with the aforementioned month old genital pus.
I don’t think I want to buy games from companies that have parent companies. Parent companies make everything fucking suck.
Absolutely. I won’t touch shit until I see the EULA. The fuckery with the ownership of mod code was enough to burn me for KSP. How the fuck do you seize ownership in completeness for an entire code base just because it happens to extend your product. That is like Pillsbury claiming ownership for your grandma’s cookie recipe because it contains their flower as the primary component.
“Wah wah DOTA wah wah.” So fucking what. It isn’t a stand alone, just because someone makes an entirely different game inside of your game and it is more popular than your game does not give you the right to claim their code and profiteer off someone else’s passion project without compensating them. You want to own the code, buy it. All of the players still have to buy your game to play the mods, so you are still making even more money you dillholes.
I remember seeing it on the store shelf. Flipped it over and saw it looked like so many of the other FPS out at the time. Its reviews and place in history seem about right even if people are having nostalgia boners over it.
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Aktywne