>I feel like at this point Valve have proven themselves to be good stewards of the Steam platform in this regard. Games aren't retracted and they're very reasonable with refunds.
This is not true, I still apreciate Steam for theyir work on Linux stuff so I am not hating on them, but facts are fact.
1 You need to start Steam to play most games
2 The Steam client dropped support for older oeprating systems
In my case I had an old laptop with a few games, Steam updated itself to a version that was not compatible with the OS so my son could not use the laptop, I was using this old laptop only when traveling so the issue was sudden to me, I had no time to fix this crap.
The fair thing to do is for Vale to create just a SteamLauncher that allows you top run your games, no Store/News/Social/Workshop, it could run in offline mode.
Maybe this was a stupid bug that the client fck itself, but it sucks to turn off your laptop working fine, turn it on in a few months and now you need to do research and debugging and fixing.
Tou don't, the default shortcuts it creates uses an url like format and steam to track down what exact binary you want to run, but if you double click the exe in the directory it works with steam closed. Lots of games (specifically indie games) have no DRM at all, you can freely copy to some other storage and play it later.
>Lots of games (specifically indie games) have no DRM at all, you can freely copy to some other storage and play it later.
I doubt your "lots" claim, it is ambiguous, do you maybe mean a very few ?
I found this
>Total number of DRM-free games: 1,075 out of 41,147 games in total.
Steam DRM is actually optional for devs, and even if it isn't, it's (allegedly) very easy to get around. If you download your games onto a new PC, you may be able to just copy the files over to the old one and launch them directly. Even if you have to crack the DRM, it's at the very least morally OK.
It's more work, but that's life when using old hardware. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a software provider to support old hardware/OSes forever.
>I don't think it's reasonable to expect a software provider to support old hardware/OSes forever.
I agree, but the hypocrisy is that old games might not work on the new OS that Steam client requires. So if you upgrade to a new machine to play your old game you might not be able to play it.
This is not true, I still apreciate Steam for theyir work on Linux stuff so I am not hating on them, but facts are fact.
1 You need to start Steam to play most games
2 The Steam client dropped support for older oeprating systems
In my case I had an old laptop with a few games, Steam updated itself to a version that was not compatible with the OS so my son could not use the laptop, I was using this old laptop only when traveling so the issue was sudden to me, I had no time to fix this crap.
The fair thing to do is for Vale to create just a SteamLauncher that allows you top run your games, no Store/News/Social/Workshop, it could run in offline mode.
Maybe this was a stupid bug that the client fck itself, but it sucks to turn off your laptop working fine, turn it on in a few months and now you need to do research and debugging and fixing.