this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
76 points (88.8% liked)
Gaming
32066 readers
116 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.
And though Valve shouldn't always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don't really agree with his arguments.
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father's Gateway. Maybe he means the game's original system requirements, as listed "on the back of the box" so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.
The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that's why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It's why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.
I think they mean modifying the minimum requirements, because their electron based abomination of a client does not support older systems
so unless you know to use the goldberg emu, it will possibly make those games different, or at worst unplayable. I know of games that glitch with modern hardware, in one instance because it is so old the dev never thought about graphics hardware with 2 GB VRAM or more, and it was never patched either.
its suprising that such a high profile person does not know about goldberg emu (or various other solutions), so they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?
That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.