Steam forcing updates to Win 10/11 to play games - do you actually 'own' games bought through Steam?

"As of January 1 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows."

More importantly - "In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows."

[sixter]

Woah woah woah woah. Are you telling me that if I take my 2006 Mac Pro out of the closet, fire up Windows XP I will not be able to contine my Euro Truck Simulator 2 save with Steam?

I still have the 1GB SCSI hard drive feom my first PC, a 486 DX2 66 with a whopping 16 MB or RAM. It served me well. I kind of miss it. I ran OS/2 on it.

[spiritmacardi]

Fun fact: It's legal under the DMCA to crack/reverse engineer software that's been taken away from you due to lack of support.

[AxWarhawk]

Just wanted to note: Valve/Steam itself does not enforce games to have a license check. It's up to the developers whether Steam API initialization is a requirement for the game to run. The games we (PH3) port typically try to initialize Steam API (and GOG API) to provide features like achievements; however, if the Steam API cannot be initialized, the game just continues running normally in (what we call) DRM-free mode.

[Raxyz_]

Just gonna add this to the discussion: This isn't a digital vs physical thing. If people want to make sure their games will ever be owned, they need to start supporting DRM free releases. Like what GOG does.

[florbosagbag]

The issue is that Steam on older versions of Windows is effectively just Chromium. Chromium is dropping support for older versions of Windows and so the standard Steam client won't work. However, you could actually use steamcmd to continue installing, playing, and managing games on older versions of Windows with a stripped down version of the client. This is a first party tool provided by Valve. If you really want to stay on Windows 7, by all means. You just have to learn how look up the appids of Steam games.

[RolyPolyGames]

I remember as a kid not liking Steam because having CDs meant I controlled it "What if something happened to the steam?" I still think this, although steam doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but my concerns have changed to pretty much what you've said. I generally try to get stuff on GoG first. It has its own issues too - but man do I miss having physicals. I know eventually they will decay and I will need to transfer them onto something else, but its still nice.

[axlepurnell]

One of the reasons my GOG library has grown over the years, very easy to keep backups of all my purchases physically.

[BinaryCounter]

Game dev here: Steam isn't the only one doing this. Unity (the massively popular game engine) is dropping Win 7 compatbility soon too. Some early access players have been complaining about the Steam change, not knowing that Unity is gonna force our hand (for future games) anyway. It's unfortunate for us because the games we make are 2D pixel art games that would very happily run on old hardware running Win 7, or even XP for that matter. We're quite late in the dev cycle, but for our next project we're evaluating open source game engines. The Win 7 compatibility isn't the only reason for this. Unity has a reputation for being dishonest and shady with the devs that use it, and while working on some more advanced features of our game (mod support) i encountered multiple game engine bugs that have been reported but unfixed for several years. If Unity was open source, i could simply fork, fix and pull request.

EDIT: Changed the wording slightly to clarify that I mean for future projects. Unity version for the current one is pretty much locked.

[Dragonlord]

Gabe was mostly proven right when he said that piracy was largely a service problem, Steam caused piracy to plummet, and its convenience was a large factor in its success. If they remove the 'service', then they will simply be bypassed and people will hoist the black flag, doubly so if they have purchased it and are just illegally accessing something they legally purchased.

[Sigilstone]

Given what that dude said about Linux and "almost all games not running on it": there's some out of touchness going on both sides. Valve invests an entire division to making sure almost all games run on Linux

[lars]

The internet actually fights back. I remember when EA cancelled the old Origin launcher. They wanted you to forceupdate into the EA launcher and make the origin launcher useless. The internet said: no. Got a hold of old launcher data wrote some code and now we still use the origin launcher.

[kinshra]

You're buying a license to use the product until the license holder feels like dropping support for you. That's why it's not only important to buy physical where you can but also pirate & seed pirated content

[Tenajeh]

From the very beginning, Steam-bought games would not belong to the "buyer". I was there, when people uproared because they bought Halflife 2 on CD but needed a working internet connection each time they started this OFFLINE game. And they had to install the Steam client to activate it at all. Today's situation was practically announced loudly back in 2004 and there was never any question that it wouldn't end up exactly like it did.

[SamuraisEpic]

i don't actually think this was a choice Valve made lightly. rather i think the reason for this is because some chromium frameworks that Steam depends on has hard dependencies on newer versions of windows. so in essence, if steam wants to keep running properly, then they have to migrate.

[KingcoleIIV]

This is why game emulation and game preservation is so important.

[silajim]

As some people commented, it's not a Steam issue per se, currently the steam app is basically a web page rendered in chromium, if chromium drops support for something, they just can't support it. So it's actually a syndrome of "make everything a web page" more than anything else

[ikcikor]

2:40 ... yes, that's actually exactly what they are doing. Steam Proton is a piece of software that allows you to run Windows-only games on Linux. It currently supports a huge majority of titles on Steam, and these days only ever struggles with games which implement extremely invasive anti-DRM systems or refuse to enable Linux support in their anti-cheat system (for almost every single popular anti-cheat that currently exists, it's simply a toggle checkbox)

[diminios]

Interesting statement I recently read. "Piracy can't be stealing if paying for it isn't owning."

[brendlowert]

The smart thing for Valve to do would be making a legacy client which only lets you download and play the games you already purchased. They don't even need to actively maintain the client, since nothing on the customer's system is going to change anyway.

[vivisimonvi]

Thank you for bringing the issue to a mainstream platform. Valve should definitely see this video as they are generally seen as pro-consumer. Even Gabe Newell himself once was quoted as essentially saying that if Steam were to ever go out of business, there will be a "killswitch" in place that would make your games functional without Steam. In these dark times of anti-consumer moves from large corporations, it's almost too good to be true to hear nowadays. I hope at least Gabe sees this video.