Same here. Terry didn’t even bother to change up the artstyle. Forget being inspired by something, his game looks like a straight-up copy. What a tool.
Outdoors with proximity to 1-3 other people, where he can move at will and distance himself vs indoors, courtroom full of people and he’s sitting while people move around. Probably not the same. If the guy has risk factors for developing complications with COVID, which we can see he has one which is being overweight, I don’t think it’s reasonable for the court to force him to attend when he could attend remotely.
He was mere feet away from total strangers who may or may not have been masked when he opened the door (taking the video at face value, and assuming he didn’t send the production team up there to tell the residents to mask up first). Much more dangerous than a courtoom of people with N95s on, none of whom he would need to get as close to as he did for those Deck deliveries.
Interacting with maybe a dozen people outside with a mask on for a few minutes at a time is almost certainly much lower risk than being in a courtroom with, likely, many more people and stale air for hours. It’s certainly helpful if everybody is masked up in the courtroom, but people are notoriously bad at wearing masks properly, they’re going to require Gabe Newell to unmask for questions, and there’s a lot more factors you don’t control in that scenario… outside delivering stuff you can always walk away if somebody isn’t giving you the space you’re comfortable with… Regardless, all risk is cumulative and you may want to limit the number of times you do higher risk things as much as possible. Even if you rarely do some riskier things, it doesn’t mean you’re okay with that level of risk all of the time. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to want to manage and minimize your exposure if you’re high risk.
Going door to door in fresh air is something else than sitting in a room with lots of other people and “you’ll be fine” is an insane argument. You’ll be fine until you aren’t. Every person should be able to make that risk assessment for themselves and courts should not be able to force someone to risk exposure to anything.
It amazes me that covidiots still don't understand the difference between inside and outside spaces for that matter. If people breath and cough around the outside, shit will just be swept away by the wind. If people do that in enclosed spaces, then they'll just start to saturate the air with germs over its prolonged time. And then you even expect them to take off the mask when they're in the witness stand? Do you think that's like a germ free zone? lol
My family refers to vaxxed people as covidiots. So I tend to associate it with antivax people. I will accept my negative number either way. Apologies for the confusion.
I wouldn’t say I’m hurt. More embarrassed that I accepted a definition without further scrutiny.
My philosophy is to always be learning. Sometimes trauma impedes it and a wake up call is necessary. So I appreciate your time and thoughtful response and will take this lesson as an opportunity to do better for myself.
I wasn’t strictly talking about the definition of covidiot, I was referring to the virus’ transmissibility; indoors vs outdoors.
There has been a lot of misinformation during covid, from both sides, and virtually everyone needs to accept that they were wrong about certain things.
For example, I was forced to change my mind about the safety of the vaccine. I still personally believe most people should have been vaccinated, but we need to accept that it didn’t do what was expected.
At the end of the day, Covid is a respiratory virus, and the consensus of indoors vs outdoors transmissibility had been reached decades ago.
I appreciated the measured response, it’s rare to see people sincerely reflect on their beliefs so quickly without feeling condescended.
Others have explained to you why it’s different, and that that happened 2 years ago and a lot of things health related can change in that time. But even if he had done that yesterday, even if it was the same, he should be able to choose to attend remotely, he’s not asking to be excused, he’s not asking to change anything, all he’s asking is to be able to do it from his home, and I wouldn’t deny that to anyone unless there’s a reason to be physically there, which there isn’t.
Yeah, I don’t really think anybody should have to go to court in person, and I can definitely empathize with somebody wanting to avoid COVID (even if they’re not super high risk, you never know how it will affect you it seems). I kind of understand the bias towards in person things, but I really wish people would get over it. Sometimes it’s just a lot more practical to do things remotely, and while a video call isn’t quite the same as being there in person I think it’s something we can deal with. It certainly doesn’t seem like it would be that much worse for testifying tbh.
I mean, yeah, if you drop those two as the alternative, every time, fuck those guys every day and twice on sunday. But… Gaben’s got a very different record.
I’m of the opinion that he should have to testify like anyone else just to preclude Trump and their ilk from trying to get out of testifying in person.
Court is boring AF, he’s just using covid for an excuse to avoid having to go. I can’t really blame him for trying, but I’m not surprised it didn’t work.
Actually no, I’d let the science speak for itself. Being outdoors with a mask on significantly reduces your chances of contracting COVID-19. Being in a crowded room with lots of other people significantly increases your risk. Gabe is right, just like any other CEO would be right if they said the same thing.
I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.
Your point about the screenplay reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves with armchair commenters on AI these days.
Yeah, if you hop on ChatGPT, use the free version, and just ask it to write a story, you’re getting crap. But using that anecdotal experience to extrapolate what the SotA can do in production is a massive mistake.
Do professional writers just sit down at a computer and write out page after page into a final draft?
No. They start with a treatment, build out character arcs, write summaries of scenes, etc. Eventually they have a first draft which goes out to readers and changes are made.
To have an effective generative AI screenplay writer you need to replicate multiple stages and processes.
And you likely wouldn’t be using a chat-instruct fine tuned model, but rather individually fine tuned models for each process.
Video game writing is going to move more into writing pipelines for content generation than it is going to be writing final copy. And my guess is that most writers are going to be very happy when they see the results of what that can achieve, as they’ll be able to create storytelling experiences that are currently regarded as impossible, like where character choices really matter to outcomes and aren’t simply the illusion of choice to prevent fractalizing dialogue trees too much early on.
People are just freaking out thinking the tech is coming to replace them rather than realizing that headcounts are going to remain the same long term but with the technology enhancing their efforts they’ll be creating products beyond what they’ve even imagined.
Like, I really don’t think the average person - possibly even the average person in the industry - really has a grasp of what a game like BG3 with the same sized writing staff is going to look like with the generative AI tech available in just about 2-3 years, even if the current LLM baseline doesn’t advance at all between now and then.
A world where every NPC feels like a fleshed out dynamic individual with backstory, goals, and relationships. Where stories uniquely evolve with the player. These are things that have previously been technically impossible given resource constraints and attempts to even superficially resemble them ate up significant portions of AAA budgets (i.e. RDR2). And by the end of the next console generation, they will have become as normative as things like ray tracing or voiced lines are today.
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
They largely are going to remain the same. Specific roles may shift around as specific workloads become obsolete, and you will have a handful of companies chasing quarterly returns at the cost of long term returns by trying to downsize keeping the product the same and reducing headcount.
But most labor is supply constrained not demand constrained, and the only way reduced headcounts would remain the status quo across companies is if all companies reduce headcounts without redirecting improved productivity back into the product.
You think a 7x reduction in texturing labor is going to result in the same amount of assets in game but 1/7th the billable hours?
No, that’s not where this is going. Again, a handful of large studios will try to get away with that initially, but as soon as competitors that didn’t go the downsizing route are releasing games with scene complexity and variety that puts their products to shame that’s going to bounce back.
If the market was up to executives, they’d have a single programmer re-releasing Pong for $79 a pop. But the market is not up to executives, it’s up to the people buying the products. And while AI will allow smaller development teams to produce games in line with today’s AAA scale products, tomorrow’s AAA scale products are not going to be possible with significantly reduced headcounts, as they are definitely not going to be the same scale and scope as today’s leading games.
A 10 or even 100 fold increase in worker productivity only means a similar cut in the number of workers as long as the product has hit diminishing returns on productivity investment, and if anything the current state of games development is more dependent on labor resources than ever before, so it doesn’t seem we’ve hit that inflection point or will anytime soon.
Edit: The one and only place I can foresee a significant headcount drop because of AI in game dev is QA. They’re screwed in a few years.
How do you train AI to notice bugs humans notice? Kinda seems like thats the softwares exact weakness, is creating odd edge cases that make sense for the algorithym but not to the human eye
One of the big mistakes I see people make in trying to estimate capabilities is thinking of all in one models.
You’ll have one model that plays the game in ways that try a wider range of inputs and approaches to reach goals than what humans would produce (similar to the existing research like OpenAI training models to play Minecraft and mine diamonds off a handful of videos with input data and then a lot of YouTube videos).
Then the outputs generated by that model would be passed though another process that looks specifically for things ranging from sequence breaks to clipping. Some of those like sequence breaks aren’t even detections that need AI, and depending on just what data is generated by the ‘player’ AIs, a fair bit of other issues can be similarly detected with dumb approaches. The bugs that would be difficult for an AI to detect would be things like “I threw item A down 45 minutes ago but this NPC just had dialogue thanking me for bringing it back.” But even things like this are going to be well within the capabilities of multimodal AI within a few years as long as hardware continues to scale such that it doesn’t become cost prohibitive.
The way it’s going to start is that 3rd party companies dedicated to QA start feeding their own data and play tests into models to replicate and extend the behaviors, offering synthetic play testing as a cheap additional service to find low hanging fruit and cut down on human tester hours needed, and over time it will shift more and more towards synthetic testing.
You’ll still have human play testers around broader quality things like “is this fun” - but the QA that’s already being outsourced for bugs is going to almost certainly go the way of AI replacing humans entirely, or just nearly so.
Do you think that same result would have happened if horses had other skills outside of the specific skill set that was automated?
If horses happened to be really good at pulling carts AND really good at driving, for instance, might we not instead have even more horses than we did at the turn of the 19th century, just having shifted from pulling carts to driving them?
I’m not sure the inability of horses to adapt to changing industrialization is the best proxy for what’s going to happen to humans.
You jest, but yeah, there very likely will be, especially given that there’s already full self-driving cars today on roads. The difference will just be that in ~10 years (by the end of the next console generation) that there will be better full self-driving cars on the road.
My experience with starfield is “ughh this is annoying, ughh this part sucks, oooh thats kinda cool” and then I check my save file and have over 130 hours. So basically my typical Bethesda experience. 10/10 would do again.
This also shocked me when playing Starfield, I basically just completed one of the faction quests and basically just spent time building and stealing ships and my playtime is more than 100 hours. WTF.
I saw a bit of those on stream and thought maybe the time affected the quality of the result… but no. It’s just filler shit to get your space dragon speech spell or whatever. Then the enemies are all bullet sponges. It all seemed very transparent and very familiar.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew with the sequel, or you’re just going to repeat history. I liked the game since launch, but it was still very evident CDPR wanted to do more than they realistically could while still actually releasing a product.
Great vision, perhaps too much; but poorly managed their time and resources. Stretched too thin on portability to every available console at the time of release. Constant changes of scope. Etc.
Just do like Baldur’s Gate and release a portion as early access, then release the full game on all platforms when it’s ready. Ideally skip early access and just release when it’s actually ready, but the early access option is acceptable.
Honestly part of the benefit of early access is the diverse hardware and diverse playstyles being tested. I’m sure part of BG3’s success was due to them taking feedback and bug reports from the early access players that submitted things and implementing the fixes and changes based on customer feedback. It definitely gives unique insight for the developers while the game is still being made.
It’s a very noticeable improvement in realism in games that do this. Quantic Dream games have also done this, even in Heavy Rain from 2010, and it really goes a long way in making a game into a story.
I love story based games, and the story is my favorite thing about a game, usually. Unfortunately, so many games try to tell you a story like a movie would or like a book would. They intersperse cutscenes between gameplay to tell you what you did or are doing. That’s… boring at best. Video games can tell stories in a unique way that other mediums can’t, because they’re interactive. DDLC is my favorite example, that game has a story that can only hit as hard as it does because you the player are an active participant in the story. Or Dark Souls, where the story exists for you to find, or not… everyone has a different understanding of what the story of that game is after their first playthrough, and the deeper you look the better your understanding is. Tell interesting stories in a way that uses the medium to the fullest and you’ll gain an audience. Recite a screenplay every 10 minutes between spurts of unrelated gameplay, and people won’t care about your story.
Freaking YES. Movies need to spoon-feed a bit and so does TV, but you have a whole medium that lets people be as confused or not and that’s a great thing. If a player doesn’t care, there are options to not dive deep, if they do they will. My first playthrough I was confused what the genophage was. I heard bits and pieces but was genuinely confused. You know what I did? I walked over to my crew mate who mentioned it and asked him! Why is that so hard, the unknowns al_are_ the suspense! It’s what keeps me playing.
Compare that to mass effect Andromeda where they introduce it by having two characters explain it at length in front of the player. This event that would be on par with WW2. So natural. “Hey friend, I was just thinking about WW2. You know, that war that involved the acid vs the allies fought between 1939 and 1945 in which we saw a fascist leader march across Europe?”. Jesus hell have some respect for your players, stop fucking spoon feeding us.
If you don’t understand an acronym the first time you see it, you should consider looking it up. I will save you the trouble though; I was referring to Doki Doki Literature Club, a popular indie game with a long title that is commonly abbreviated.
I’m sorry but I disagree. You’ve decided to use an acronym that most people wouldn’t know, so I’d like to think it’s basic politeness to write it entirely the first time to avoid any doubt.
Yeah I’m aware of the game, but there was no fucking way I’m going to get that. It’s just common courtesy to spell an acronym out in parentheses the first time you use it. Pay attention next time you read an article on a news site that includes acronyms.
Fair enough, I assumed the game was well known enough to not need that. I still stand by what I said though, If you don’t understand an acronym, you can Google it and save some time instead of passive aggressively chastising someone on the Internet
I didn’t think I was being passive aggressive, but I guess I was kind of annoyed so maybe it came through in the comment.
The thing about googling acronyms is that sometimes there are more than one. And yeah, I probably could have used context to figure out which one you meant, but I’m… just not going to do all that lol
I apologize, I’ve been responding more emotionally than I meant to. I read the initial response as rude, and that set me off a bit. Your feedback was good, I just got hung up on what I perceived as the tone.
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 later, one random day you’re suddenly no longer able to play your game, 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 available 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.
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.
Valve is forcing them to upgrade their software and hardware to keep playing games they already purchased, on the hardware they purchased it on.
However, expecting Valve to retain support for an OS that hit end of life 20 years ago is unreasonable.
It is very reasonable. No one forced Valve to build their business model this way, and they are one of the most profitable companies per employee, ever. It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows, they would just have to hire a few more people to do it. Gabe would still be a billionaire.
It is very reasonable. No one forced Valve to build their business model this way, and they are one of the most profitable companies per employee, ever.
Literally every software company built their business model this way. Go open a support case with any software vendor complaining that their product won’t run on Windows 98 and see how many help you out beyond “Buy a computer from this millennium”
It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows, they would just have to hire a few more people to do it.
You are failing to understand just how much has changed since Windows 98. It’s a completely different environment that requires specialized knowledge to develop for. They can’t just dust off some old source code and re-release the client. The entire back-end has changed. It would be a massive undertaking that would appease about 12 people total.
Gabe would still be a billionaire.
Sure, but I would argue that there are a lot of better things that Valve could be doing with those resources than supporting Windows 98
Literally. People miss the fact that Steam is still a 32-bit app just to support older games. The rest of the world has moved onto 64-bit operating systems and applications. It’s shocking they still support 32-bit in 2025. So the argument that they aren’t supporting older titles is a little misleading because that’s the whole reason they still run a 32-bit client.
Most operating systems are no longer even offered in a 32-bit variant, 64-bit only.
I haven’t had a device with 32-bit hardware in almost 15 years. The last device I can even think of that was still 32-bit within the last 15 years was a Google Nexus 6 in 2014. All the Pixel line have been 64-bit.
Steam is literally one of the last 32-bit holdouts. Everything else has moved on. Even Discord dropped 32-bit support last year.
EDIT: Also, for reference, since Windows 98 is heavily mentioned in the arguments, those operating systems included 16-bit code. We’re talking about dropping 32-bit code, 16-bit code is deader than a doornail. Windows 3.11 was the first introduction of 32-bit code. Windows XP seems to be where they dropped all 16-bit code in 2001. We’re talking over 30 years of hardware changes.
All versions of MS-DOS and the below versions of Windows had 16 bit code:
MS-DOS (all versions)
Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x (all versions)
Windows 4.x or 9x (Windows 95/98/Millennium Edition) (all versions)
They keep a bunch of 32-bit libraries for backwards compatibility with older games that they launch. You can find numerous discussions about this in the Steam forums as well as on sites like Hackernews.
If you want, I can give it to you from a Valve employee:
We will not drop support for the many games that have shipped on Steam with only 32-bit builds, so Steam will continue to deploy a 32-bit execution environment. To that end, it will continue to need some basic 32-bit support from the host distribution (a 32-bit glibc, ELF loader, and OpenGL driver library).
Whether the Steam client graphical interface component itself gets ported to 64-bit is a different question altogether, and is largely irrelevant as the need for the 32-bit execution environment would still be there because of the many 32-bit games to support.
Literally every software company built their business model this way. Go open a support case with any software vendor complaining that their product won’t run on Windows 98 and see how many help you out beyond “Buy a computer from this millennium”
No, they didn’t. I can install the software I bought back in the day on the computers I bought it for, using the license key provided. GoG also famously uses a model where GoG does not care what OS you’re using.
You are failing to understand just how much has changed since Windows 98. It’s a completely different environment that requires specialized knowledge to develop for. They can’t just dust off some old source code and re-release the client. The entire back-end has changed. It would be a massive undertaking that would appease about 12 people total.
Lol, I’m a software developer that started by writing legacy windows software, I know exactly how much (little) has changed.
Sure, but I would argue that there are a lot of better things that Valve could be doing with those resources than supporting Windows 98
I don’t care. They have the resources to support it.
Either strip the DRM out and pay whatever you have to to the publishers to do that, or keep supporting the systems you sold your software for.
The idea that Valve is blameless for shitty behaviour because other tech companies also do that shitty behaviour is nonsense. They have been the dominant platform forever, and have had an insane amount of resources available to them.
The GOG Preservation Program ensures classic games remain playable on modern systems, even after their developers stopped supporting them. By maintaining these iconic titles, GOG helps you protect and relive the memories that shaped you, DRM-free and with dedicated tech support.
The fact that their games are DRM free means that doesn’t matter one iota. If you buy a game from them on a set of hardware you’ll be able to play it on that hardware forever, regardless of whether their desktop client changes.
But if they keep it updated for modern systems that means as time goes on the files they are offering to install… won’t work on old hardware because they’ve been updated to the modern era.
Sure if you grab a file from them and never get a newer, more maintained version, it will play on exactly the hardware and software you had when you bought it… But if you lost the install file somehow and went to grab a new copy five years later the updated ones may no longer run on your old hardware
Sure if you grab a file from them snd never get a newer, more maintained version, it will play on exactly the hardware and software you had when you bought it…
That’s literally the entire point.
Also, they can still offer the olde versions of the file for download.
Lol, I'm a software developer that started by writing legacy windows software, I know exactly how much (little) has changed.
It is this perspective that exposes your bias and colors your perception.
We live in a post-Heartbleed world. We live in a post-UAC world. We constantly find new bugs and vulnerabilities, and they cannot always be patched without massive changes to the architecture. We cannot forever maintain old systems that cultivated bad habits in it's users.
Not all change is good, but all change is inevitable.
No that perspective is what makes me understand that when corporations talk about obsceleting things for security reasons, it’s almost always not actually because of security, because it would be a little less profitable to continue support.
And Valve didnt have to build a business around always checking in DRM if they didn’t want to support old clients, and they have more than enough resources to continue support.
Can I hold you to the decisions you made 20 years ago? I bought that program you built decades ago, that means I'm entitled to your continued support. And don't you even think about getting paid, your support should be free. You shouldn't have built and sold the software if you can't support it...
Yes, they can have their software continue to support Windows by simply not breaking the version that works for windows, without having to provide full customer support and service for it.
Literally any game sold that didn’t include always checking in DRM through a particular desktop client. i.e. virtually every single PC game not sold through steam.
Lots. Do you know how much corporate software is still of that vintage?
Literally like half of AutoCAD’s products still use the graphics and windowing APIs from that era as one example. The WinForms API are clunky by modern standards but also relatively trivial for a programmer to pick up and code with.
I mean, there is still an industry of Cobol engineers maintaining mainframe code for banks from the 80s.
No. The question at hand is whether you expect any company, or any person, to indefinitely fix and maintain legacy systems. And yes, your argument is indefinite support because you want the purchasing machine to be granted use of the software in perpetuity, you want it to never lose access to the software. You provided no deadline by which anyone is allowed to stop fixing things that broke. And yes, things break naturally as a function of time.
And yes, things break naturally as a function of time.
Why don’t you go ahead and explain the exact mechanism that causes software to change and would cause a computer to interpret it differently over time, without a human intervening and updating it to break it.
I am aware that some corporate infrastructure is hopelessly tangled up in legacy systems. But we are talking about consumer support here, which I know you know is very different.
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 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.
I 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.
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.
In my opinion, that’s not on Steam to support their client on a long past EOL operating system. Not withstanding the added development workload and costs, there is also significantly more risk associated with supporting an OS that isn’t receiving security patches.
Not to mention the modder’s example Windows fucking 98. Steam still supports Windows 7, which was released in 2009. Your 6 year old PC will be fine.
In my opinion, that’s not on Steam to support their client on a long past EOL operating system.
It is on them since they “sold” you a game. They didn’t have to build a business model that popularized always checking in DRM, that meant that they were deceiving you when they sold you a game, but it was more profitable for them to do so.
I’m not sure valve deceived you. It’s not fair that we can’t run purchased old games on the OS they were built for. they could really show instructions on how to make them run on that OS, maybe even make a simple but official lightweight client that can download it for you, on that old OS.
but if you are on windows 10, what can they do with a game they sold you that won’t work correctly on anything beyond XP?
yes, the above things they could, and should. but even today you are not locked out: copy the game files to USB, drop in the goldberg emu, and play the game on your XP machine. It’s a single file, not eben needs internet.
if the game had DRM? I am not sure that’s the fault of valve. didn’t the devs put it there?
and if you accept the “solution” to drop steam, and start renting your games? you won’t be able to do even this (edit: because they have real drm, not measly steamdrm that’s easily stripped out). you are literally locked out both if you stop paying, and if the service stops making that game available because their license expired, politics, or whatever. and you literally can do nothing about that.
I’ve been running steam on an unsupported OS (osx 10.13.6) for almost a year and a half now, and the only issue is a banner at the stop claiming that steam will stop working in 0 days.
I don’t remember what if anything I did to make this happen, but I’ve had no trouble buying, downloading, or playing games in that time.
And what was his “merit” again (since that’s how they like to frame it)? Oh right, fooling people into voting for him. Just PR and courting big shots for campaign money.
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