this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
67 points (89.4% liked)
Gaming
32077 readers
139 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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 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.
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.
Can confirm
Heck I just run GOG Galaxy in Proton to not have to patch everything manually.
Thanks for pointing this out about multiplayer and VR games. I had wondered about this exact thing, so I appreciate your confirming it!