>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.
> 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.
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 .