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.

And yes, things break naturally as a function of time.

Why don’t you go ahead and explain the exact mechanism that causes software to change and would cause a computer to interpret it differently over time, without a human intervening and updating it to break it.

Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

Yes, they can have their software continue to support Windows by simply not breaking the version that works for windows, without having to provide full customer support and service for it.

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.

In my opinion, that’s not on Steam to support their client on a long past EOL operating system.

It is on them since they “sold” you a game. They didn’t have to build a business model that popularized always checking in DRM, that meant that they were deceiving you when they sold you a game, but it was more profitable for them to do so.

Valve expects that the overwhelming majority of its users will keep up with semi-modern hardware (In this case, a machine capable of running windows 10/SteamOS) which I don’t feel is is an unreasonable ask.

Valve is forcing them to upgrade their software and hardware to keep playing games they already purchased, on the hardware they purchased it on.

However, expecting Valve to retain support for an OS that hit end of life 20 years ago is unreasonable.

It is very reasonable. No one forced Valve to build their business model this way, and they are one of the most profitable companies per employee, ever. It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows, they would just have to hire a few more people to do it. Gabe would still be a billionaire.

The author of this article reflexively and illogically defends Steam (like usual):

But at least some of what Kaldaien complains about isn’t necessarily on Steam’s shoulders. It’s well within devs’ powers to provide players with access to older game versions on Steam (KOTOR 2, which I recently replayed, lets you access its pre-Aspyr version via a beta branch, for instance), but many of them elect not to. That strikes me as an issue with individual devs rather than Steam as a whole, and as for Steam Input? Well, again, if there’s a problem there it’s with developers electing to use that API over OS-native ones that’s the issue.

He literally completely misses the modder’s point. Steam itself will not run on the original machine you purchased KOTOR 2 on. You can buy a gaming machine, purchase a game through steam and 6 years later, one random day you’re suddenly no longer able to play your game, simply because Valve has decided that the version of Steam that you bought the game through is no longer ok and now you need to upgrade your hardware and OS to play the same game you’ve been playing for years.

Small arms doesn’t mean pistols, it means weaponry that doesn’t have to be mounted to something else.

It includes automatic and semi-automatic military rifles (like M16s and AKs) and light machine guns (like SAWs and RPDs).

Again, those wars were fought primarily with military weaponry, not handguns.

Happiness comes from acceptance, not obsession.