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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly the kind of libertarian "personal responsibility" philosophy that Valve would use as an excuse to justify themselves. You don't need to be carrying water for a multi billion dollar company, they can take care of that themselves. Unless you work for Valve. I don't know, I'm sure it pays well.
Unfortunately we don't need to wait. We have every reason to be skeptical and critical of the way Valve is run now, specifically how they promote underage gambling via Counterstrike.
Whether Gaben personally agrees with that assessment, or whether he's wiped his hands clean of the damage his company has done, the fact is that someone at Valve created this system, and they will still be there.
This is what happens to a society that worships money. Even if presume a wealth hoarder wanted to make a good faith effort to improve other people's lives, he's so insulated from reality that he couldn't even fathom doing the one thing that would make a material difference: parting with his money, paying his employees what they're worth, paying the taxes he ought to owe.
Instead he comes up with some cockimamey scheme using the tools at his disposal. It's like he's trying to distract himself from the obvious right answer. And that removes any appearance of good faith immediately.
if Nintendo or Sony were doing the same levels of layoffs
But they're not. Well, Sony did layoff 900 people last year and took deserved flak for it. But you're right, it's not even close to the level of Microsoft the last 2 years.
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”
Call it bad faith, but I literally don't believe them. They can say it but that doesn't make it true. Why would anyone trust these companies? Their goal is to get you physically addicted to gambling. It is every company's wet dream to get kids addicted to their product and leeh off their income for the rest of their lives.
I bet we'll see all of those things - the ads, the sponsors, the jerseys, all of it - within a year of this program going live.
Yeah once you explore the whole map, it becomes a typical looter shooter where you're just grinding for 6 crown weapons. I will say though, having only played for a couple years, the dev team did a remarkable job adding new content over time, and not all of it locked behind DLC. Picking this game up on sale for $5 felt like I won the lottery. It might be "just ok" but I did have dozens of hours of fun in the game with my brother and friends.
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.