Steam - Dropping XP and Vista Support

I don’t have a problem at all with this. Hell, I dropped both OS’s as soon as windows 7 was released and I dropped 7 when 8 was released and dropped 8 when 10 was released.
Why did you move from 7 to 8?. There was barely any difference. I was quite happy with 7 until they released 10.
 
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No offense, but I don't think you and some others here are getting the point. It being twofold. For one, there is the general assumption (certainly supported) that Valve guarantees you will always have a way to access to a game you bought. If it becomes impossible to run Steam on the only OSes a game supports, this compact is broken.
Furthermore, some games that have only been released on Steam and are not being supported anymore (because either the rights owner doesn't care or cannot be determined anymore do to some copyright mess-up) could be lost altogether. No matter what platform you run or what mods you use. You may not think that a loss but a lot of people may disagree.

It's a hypothetical situation. Do we have specific games that we know will be lost forever? What percentage of games won't work anymore? Maybe a small fraction of 1%? We're going to let a fraction of a percentage affect better Steam integration for the billions of dollars worth of other games? If you're really worried about losing the ability to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Schoolgirl Hookers 4 that only works on XP SP1, then pirate a cracked Steam version and treat it like abandonware. Or shell out $2 to buy it on GOG. Or wait for it to come out on ClassicReload / Archive.org

I see this as natural selection. These days, if a game is worth playing, people will ensure its survivial. If it's a shitty game, it was meant to be lost, and good riddance.
 
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This is worrisome to me if only because I can see Steam making a similar announcement in 5 years or so, saying they are dropping all support for windows 7.

I have almost all my games on steam, so this would suck. I'm looking into a dual boot windows 10 and windows 7 setup eventually, if only to ward off the possibility of losing my steam games.

At least right now it isn't a worry. The latest steam survey shows a healthy 35-40% margin of steam customers are on windows 7, still.
 
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I suspect eventually windows 7 will be dropped. Not today of course; but probably in 10 years.

This is worrisome to me if only because I can see Steam making a similar announcement in 5 years or so, saying they are dropping all support for windows 7.

I have almost all my games on steam, so this would suck. I'm looking into a dual boot windows 10 and windows 7 setup eventually, if only to ward off the possibility of losing my steam games.

At least right now it isn't a worry. The latest steam survey shows a healthy 35-40% margin of steam customers are on windows 7, still.
 
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It's a hypothetical situation. Do we have specific games that we know will be lost forever? What percentage of games won't work anymore? Maybe a small fraction of 1%? We're going to let a fraction of a percentage affect better Steam integration for the billions of dollars worth of other games? If you're really worried about losing the ability to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Schoolgirl Hookers 4 that only works on XP SP1, then pirate a cracked Steam version and treat it like abandonware. Or shell out $2 to buy it on GOG. Or wait for it to come out on ClassicReload / Archive.org

I see this as natural selection. These days, if a game is worth playing, people will ensure its survivial. If it's a shitty game, it was meant to be lost, and good riddance.

Left to your interpretation of natural selection, we'd have lost even the very concept of history long ago. Profit oriented monopolists and a shallow majority of consumers may not be the best judges of what "deserves" to be preserved. So much was lost from the mainframe era (due to both technical reasons and the ignorance of those who could have prevented it) that might have shed light on the emergence of this medium - and, who knows, might even be "fun" for you or other to re-experience today if that's relevant - and this trend (together with the switching off of proprietary game servers) might spell another dark age.

Sure, GoG is helping a lot, and so are Abandonware archives and individual modding/preservation efforts. The problem here is - aside from Valve going back on their apparent promises - that some games are exclusive to Steam and have no one to adapt them to more modern OSes. Once Win7 support is getting dropped - likely within the next 10 years - there are going to be hundreds of games that stop working. Some might be RPGs that are ok and even important but just not fascinating enough for anyone to invest hundreds of hours to hack/retrofit them to run on another OS than they were intended for.

On the other hand, Valve could just define a legacy Steam version for WinXP and Vista that lets you access your older games but does not receive further support and is doesn't have to run more recent titles.
 
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Why did you move from 7 to 8?. There was barely any difference. I was quite happy with 7 until they released 10.

I thought Windows 7 was vastly superior to Win 8 which was terrible imo at least for desktop systems. Win 8.1 was a significant improvement, but Win 10 is better still.

This is worrisome to me if only because I can see Steam making a similar announcement in 5 years or so, saying they are dropping all support for windows 7.

I have almost all my games on steam, so this would suck. I'm looking into a dual boot windows 10 and windows 7 setup eventually, if only to ward off the possibility of losing my steam games.

At least right now it isn't a worry. The latest steam survey shows a healthy 35-40% margin of steam customers are on windows 7, still.

I don't get what you're saying here. What makes you think upgrading to Win 10 would cause you to lose your Steam games?

Do you mean your installs? That should only happen if you reformat your system, and even then it's only a matter of re-downloading those games. You're not going to lose your saves as long as you're synced with Steam Cloud.

I suspect eventually windows 7 will be dropped. Not today of course; but probably in 10 years.

Thanks, Nostradamus. ;)
 
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I don't get what you're saying here. What makes you think upgrading to Win 10 would cause you to lose your Steam games?

Do you mean your installs? That should only happen if you reformat your system, and even then it's only a matter of re-downloading those games. You're not going to lose your saves as long as you're synced with Steam Cloud.

No, I meant if I didn't want to upgrade to windows 10, then if/when Steam announces one day in the future they are dropping windows 7 support, then I would lose access to my games, since I would be on windows 7. After looking into it on the internet, I did discover the solution of dual booting both versions, and that it is easily done. In this scenario, I would only boot into windows 10 to keep up with Steam requirements and to play my steam games, if they eventually did require windows 10 as the baseline to be compatible with the steam client.
 
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On the other hand, Valve could just define a legacy Steam version for WinXP and Vista that lets you access your older games but does not receive further support and is doesn't have to run more recent titles.

This seems like a simple solution and would be much more consumer and customer friendly for steam to do. :thumbsup:
 
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XP and Win7 were both great O/S offerings from MS. But I think Win10, though it had some pretty terrible bugs during that first year that had me reinstalling it multiple times on multiple computers, is probably the best version of Windows yet in terms of functionality. IMHO, Win10 needs to clean up a lot of its old interfaces so things aren't so hodge-podgy looking. But it does have a very good search for finding Windows related utilities.
 
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Left to your interpretation of natural selection, we'd have lost even the very concept of history long ago. Profit oriented monopolists and a shallow majority of consumers may not be the best judges of what "deserves" to be preserved. So much was lost from the mainframe era (due to both technical reasons and the ignorance of those who could have prevented it) that might have shed light on the emergence of this medium - and, who knows, might even be "fun" for you or other to re-experience today if that's relevant - and this trend (together with the switching off of proprietary game servers) might spell another dark age.

Sure, GoG is helping a lot, and so are Abandonware archives and individual modding/preservation efforts. The problem here is - aside from Valve going back on their apparent promises - that some games are exclusive to Steam and have no one to adapt them to more modern OSes. Once Win7 support is getting dropped - likely within the next 10 years - there are going to be hundreds of games that stop working. Some might be RPGs that are ok and even important but just not fascinating enough for anyone to invest hundreds of hours to hack/retrofit them to run on another OS than they were intended for.

On the other hand, Valve could just define a legacy Steam version for WinXP and Vista that lets you access your older games but does not receive further support and is doesn't have to run more recent titles.

Again, you're giving a hypothetical situation to something that isn't even an issue yet. Games have been lost in the past, but this was pretty much all pre-internet and software archival age. If people are lamenting Valve's move on this, thinking it's some new situation, then they haven't been paying attention all these years. This isn't much different then paying for an MMO only to have it close down as time passes, or people having old apps on their iphone that don't work anymore when they're not designed to work on newer versions of iOS.

If this is concerning to you and others, why not start a movement with others, and setup a group solely for preserving these Steam exclusive games that could be lost? Could even be a fun and friendly community.
 
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Why did you move from 7 to 8?. There was barely any difference. I was quite happy with 7 until they released 10.

Just to try out the new start menu. I’m usually an early adopter anyway. Didn’t like the new start menu though and used a program from stardock to revert to windows 7 start menu and then it was pretty indistinguishable from 7.
 
If this is concerning to you and others, why not start a movement with others, and setup a group solely for preserving these Steam exclusive games that could be lost? Could even be a fun and friendly community.

But we already are, aren't we, well, kinda. We're preserving them by what we do best, namely grumpily shaking our heads and muttering about those awful modern times and mores. ;)
 
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XP and Win7 were both great O/S offerings from MS. But I think Win10, though it had some pretty terrible bugs during that first year that had me reinstalling it multiple times on multiple computers, is probably the best version of Windows yet in terms of functionality. IMHO, Win10 needs to clean up a lot of its old interfaces so things aren't so hodge-podgy looking. But it does have a very good search for finding Windows related utilities.

An OS with integrated ads and a walled-off store for "apps"? I'd seriously consider switching to Linux before I'd go there...
 
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But we already are, aren't we, well, kinda. We're preserving them by what we do best, namely grumpily shaking our heads and muttering about those awful modern times and mores. ;)

I'd say let's start a preservation thread/group on The Watch, but I don't think @Myrthos; would like the possible legal issues it might run into.
 
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An OS with integrated ads and a walled-off store for "apps"? I'd seriously consider switching to Linux before I'd go there…

I don't disagree with your criticisms. And if that's all you see when you see win10 then I guess you have a point.

I see so much more than just the warts though. You can also remove a lot of the warts if you want.
 
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I switch to windows 10 a few months ago; honestly i prefer 7 by a wide margin. Too lazy to roll back.

The snooping, ad and other ms crap (can't shut down their browser which runs at startup or uninstall some of their bundled apps that I will never use) is just insult on injury.
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If more games came out on linux I would stop running windows. Games like xcom (1,2); borderlands 2; divinity original sin; … run quite well on my linux box; but other games like witcher 3 and divinity original sin 2 are not available for linux (simple games will usually run fine under wine but a few won't).
 
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Yea when I google it they made that a change in their latest patch (well latest patch a couple of months ago). It does soemthing funky where it consumes 25MB of internet traffic every startup which is why i noticed it in the first place and wanted to shut it down.

Huh. That sounds strange.
 
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