>Windows 7 and 8 are both EOL by Microsoft. I don't think it's unreasonable of valve to drop support for OS's that Microsoft aren't maintaining

it's not unreasonable until you realize that Valve offers no other method for audiences that may be stuck with older machines to play the games that they purchased, which at the time of purchase they had completely met all of the system requirements.

A basic game should not have a set of rolling requirements that are ever-increasing. Valve decided that they wanted to hold the keys to the kingdom with regards to the games that they sold; thus it's a bit more unreasonable when they decide to nix a part of the audience without any recourse available to them other than "download what you need now, and unplug.".

Leisure Suit Larry required a 286 and CGA graphics -- isn't it a bit ridiculous that a Steam purchased 'Leisure Suit Larry' is going to soon require an OS greater than Windows 8.1? Yeah; I get that it's only by virtue of requiring their portal to download the thing , but they offer no alternative to this .

I haven’t been keeping up, but how many games on Steam still require Windows? I wonder if SteamOS (or another Linux distro) would be a reasonable option for people on older machines?

I tried to see if this info was available in SteamDB (and it probably is somewhere — I’m just not finding it in an easily-accessible way), but my feeling is that most games on Steam are still Windows-only.

Your feeling is wrong. Here[1] are all the LSL games as supported on Linux via Proton, they are all playable (yes, even the red/borked one as that's actually Linux native). Most games are usually pretty well supported by Proton[2], for example all the big releases from Playstation games (God of War, Spideman, etc.) have had day 1 support as well as a lot of other big games Cyberpubnk 2077 had day 1 support as well. The main exception being multiplayer games with anticheat is the biggest roadblock right now. Though progress is being made with all the big AC engines (EAC, Battleye, etc.) working in Proton but needs to be enabled by each individual developer.

1. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Leisure%20Suit%20Larry

2. https://boilingsteam.com/75-of-the-top-100-most-played-games...

> it's not unreasonable until you realize that Valve offers no other method for audiences that may be stuck with older machines to play the games that they purchased, which at the time of purchase they had completely met all of the system requirements.

They do - update to windows 10, for free, or install Ubuntu.

> A basic game should not have a set of rolling requirements that are ever-increasing.

They don't, but the platform that delivers those games can.

Can SteamCMD be used to download games? Or is it a hardcoded list of server side software?

At any rate, most of these users would be far better off moving to a linux distro than staying on a decaying OS, that's how I've kept most of my old laptops and such alive.

SteamCMD can download any game, I used to use it at uni to download games to transfer at home since my internet was very slow.

You willingly bought games on a drm service.

> I don't think it's unreasonable of valve to drop support for OS's that Microsoft aren't maintaining

I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste. I don't expect anybody to put effort into continued support for old stuff, but I do expect them to not break stuff that used to work. With Valve/Steam specifically you also run into paradoxical situations where they sell you old games on Steam, but those old games only run on old Windows version on which Steam itself does no longer runs.

That said, Valve is among the least problematic offender here, they put a ton of effort into Linux support for Windows games, they allow developers to keep selected older versions of games available and they have forums that make it easy to find workarounds. So most of the time, there is some way to get things to work, even if it's a bit more labor intensive than it should be.

But generally speaking, the whole software industry needs to get their shit together and figure out how to keep old stuff around and working. If I buy something digital, it should be at least available for as long as the company that sold to me exists. That's really not too much to expect. It's embarrassing how billion dollar companies are unable to just move their digital goods into a permanent archive once they lost interest in actively working on it.

> I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste.

Nobody's doing that. There's a free upgrade from both Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10, and the hardware specs from MS are the same for all three OS's. For anyone who doesn't want to install Windows 10 on their devices, Steam is officially supported on Ubuntu. If you want to continue to play games on your windows 7 device, you have the option to download those games right now, and archive them in whatever way you see fit to continue to play them on your device.

> If I buy something digital, it should be available for as long as the company that sold to me exists.

Hard disagree here. You spending $20 on something doesn't entitle you to a perpetual access to a version of something under your terms. You have the option to access the game still on your hardware.