HarkMahlberg

"Even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward."

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.

It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows

Denial.

All software breaks.

I mean, there is still an industry of Cobol engineers maintaining mainframe code for banks from the 80s.

my gramps, that's not the beacon of good business practice you think it is 🤣

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.

Then why are you still here?