Originally posted by: Lonyo
Steam hasn't run on Win 98 for 2 years now.
And they actively excluded it with an update.
One day it would work, the next they push out an update and it no longer works.
http://steamreview.org/posts/win98supportends/
I don?t blame them, when the OS has less than .25% of users its just not worth the effort. That being said they are not taking away your games. You still have them once you upgrade or go to a friends house and install them.
Yeah I can see the frustration of something working then have it stop working at no fault of your own, but really in 2007 MS had ended all support for the OS and you could pick up cheap\discarded XP box that was 4x the machine you would have been using.
So if its 2015 and MS has ended support for XP and less than a quarter of a percent of users on steam are still on XP and they decide to end support so be it. If I?m that stuck on keeping an old machine running Ill download a pirated version of the game to play. Am I violating the terms of my license, yeah, is it likely Ill be hauled into court over it, unlikely.
Heck, I downloaded Loom (from the early 90's) not to long ago, I have the CD somewhere and didn?t feel like taking an entire weekend digging through boxes and bins looking for it. Now if the police came knocking on my door wanting to discuss my "Pirating" a game that hasn?t sold in 15 years I would take the time to figure out where the CD was to prove that I owned the game. Then just so happened a few weeks later Lucasarts announces that its going to sell their old games on steam. I'll likely buy them again when they go on a weekend sale that way Ill never have to look for the damn CD again.
So, I find it very convenient and totally non-obtrusive, so its a big WIN in my book. There is no perfect solution, you can buy the games from a store and deal with storing and keeping track of the CD and associated Keys, dealing with a different DRM scheme on each disk (some worse than others), be able to sell\trade\give the game to a friend when your done, NOT be able to install the game on a whim on a PC when you don?t have access to your library of disks. Or buy it from steam where its the same DRM across the board, never have to store or hunt for disks, can play your game from just about anywhere, but cant give the game away when your done, and loose access to your games when your time capsule of a PC is no longer supported.
EDIT
Also, lets not forget that alot of newer games are requiring activation what happens when they drop support for that game or the company goes under? Your still screwed even if you have the retail box. So there is a similar risk with retail that there is with steam but this borders on the topic of whether DRM is the devil in binary form rather than a steam pro\con topic.
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