masterspace

The key lesson to learn from this:

Be kind and understanding when you feel ignored, it's difficult but it's important to have the self confidence to truly accept that it's not you, they're probably just busy with a million life things.

False.

No, it's not. Autodesk sells that software to consumers and corporations literally every single day.

Try and code a WinForms app, follow any tutorial you can, and notice that it's very possible and not that onerous.

People these days just accept the shit tech companies feed them because they're using to eating shit from them.

We're not talking about support, we're talking about not breaking the software we bought after the fact.

The question at hand is whether or not there are enough engineers to feasibly support Windows 98. Try and work on your reading comprehension.

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.

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.

Yes, and thats literally completely irrelevant.

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.

Steamdrm requires periodic online check-ins, which is the same thing for the purpose of this discussion about them forcing system upgrades.

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.

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.

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.