Why do I play all these games? Because it’s important that they’re played.
Because every game is a story, a world, a moment in time crafted by someone who cared enough to create it.
Because each one teaches me something new—about design, about culture, about myself.
Because in a sea of pixels, there’s magic waiting to be found.
And because, honestly? Sometimes I just want to escape, explore, and lose myself in different worlds.
So yeah. I own thousands of games, and I’ll keep playing them.
That is what firewalls and sinkholes are for. Stupid telemetry.
Yet I never noticed such a “trend” in direct combination with steam. The whole industry goes to shit, but it’s not steam’s fault.
That shouldn’t be necessary and is beside the point.
Firewalls and especially sinkholes are VERY necessary, far beyond silly game telemetry.
They don’t allow this for a good reason. Imagine 1 million clueless gamers running an older version of their game because they’re too lazy too update. And, of course, then complain about a buggy game and the tech-support will drown even more and review would end up more badly. nothing worse than a fragmented game-world. how should online games work if every Joe and Jane got their “own” favorite version? the average user is a total clueless (pc-wise) person.
Also, you can install an older version. Just with more hassles. Also you could by GUI with many games IF the Dev wants you to be able to. Like a select few versions, if you’d prefer an older state. But, of course, only indie devs do that.
You misread my comment. I didn’t say they weren’t necessary.
Not talking about online games. Besides, the how or why do not matter, the point is the games are gone.
I pay Steam to deal with the hassles. I am not a software engineer.
Valve has the power to enforce this system-wide.
They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]
This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.
There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.
That shouldn’t be their decision.
Literally never seen that before. I think I see if the dev pushing their 4th update that day and now I have to wait a half an hour to play the damn game.
Not my problem. Guess I’d better just pirate the game instead.