Steam does not provide installers for games, this means that whatever game you want, needs to be 100% functional and already be parsed/deployed/installed by steam on your hard drive.
That game needs to be DRM free, meaning that it has an executable available that can be launched without steam running or requiring any sort of authentication or input from the steam servers/services before being able to launch, play or even interact with the menus
So only the DRM free games will remain, and only the installed ones at that. Anything that wasn’t will be lost to the wind the moment the distribution service or storage (yours or theirs) bits the dust…
Exactly, the game publishers and distributors are often not the developers themselves. Only one to distribute direct in recent memory was World Of Goo 2, and even that was sold primarily through the Epic store.
I don’t care that they remove it from the base version of the game, but if you’re going to remake the damn thing I want the full, authentic, experience. If it requires me to download “horndog pack” as a free add on, so be it. Getting anything less is just a subpar product that isn’t worth discussing.
But the problem is usually much larger where a game requires you to login to play even the single player component but is unable to do so with entire services going down, such as gamespy or others, more on that here:
There’s quite a few others, but I do agree with the point that there should be an aggregate for all of these, that could be presented as a universal list that hopefully stops growing in the coming years.
There’s also the problem of “going digital”. Previously you’d have at least the physical disks/mediums of the game in your possession but with the ever growing digital only culture, the moment a game gets delisted and you can no longer download it, that is it. Cult classic or not.
P.S - Nintendo seems to have liked your Buddhist idea of impermanence and has done that to Super Mario 35, existed for a total of 6 months. Personally, I would’ve liked to at least try it seeing how it hasn’t been all that long ago.
It’s just the cult of goblins going in, looting and then storing it all in your backpacks in your hovel. There’s occasional enemies and you need to outmaneuver or outgun them, or both. If that’s your jam, it’s great. But overall it’s just a miserable experience, especially when playing solo.