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Comment by brandur | Hacker News Reader

Valve should admit fault and pay the fine. Although they finally have a refund system in place on Steam these days, previously their system could be considered borderline fraudulent.

In the past, I bought ~3 3-D games that claimed Mac support, but turned out to be completely non-functional on the platform because I had an Intel GPU. Upon pointing it out to Valve and the developers, they would deny fault, and reply that I should have read the system requirements more carefully. That may be true, but given that the majority of all Macs sold today come with Intel chipsets, there should have been a marquee warning in a 50 point font indicating that Mac is "kind of" supported, but not really.

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Hmm, I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things.

At some point you as a customer need to accept just a tiny bit of responsibility for your purchases, it's not up to companies to babysit you and check if you actually need the thing you're buying. Especially on a storefront like Steam, where you can buy a game on one platform to play it on another.

> I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things.

Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years.

When I worked at retail, IT support and at Apple Care almost every single PC game issue a customer brought to me was for, you guessed it, them buying it without looking at the requirements and their PC not meeting the requirements.

Look at it from someone without a technical background (the majority of PC owners): they don't know what their system has, they don't know what many of the terms mean or what's better than another and they don't understand drivers. At all.

The PC games that required the least amount of support? They were the runs that could run on practically anything and, granted, running on something sub-optimal is going to not be as awesome but hey at least it runs. There are many game frameworks that support this type of graceful degradation. I would like to see more companies adopt this attitude so anyone can buy any PC game and expect it to at least run.

> Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years.

Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"?

What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs and requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong.

> Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"?

This is confusing to the majority of consumers. I did support for ~3 ish years across multiple jobs for people who needed computer help. I can count the amount of people I talked to who understand what you just typed up on two hands over those years.

It's simply not consumer friendly. Us folks who browse HN? Yeah, we obviously understand. But the majority of folks actually buying the games? Nope.

> What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs

I'm not sure I follow. I went to school for game dev and, granted, I chose a different path but I know many game developers and they have multiple paths to degrading the experience onto some pretty terrible chipsets. Many dev studios do this while still pushing the limits on higher end machines. I always thought FarCry was great at this, I never had an issue running it on crappy Intel GPUs but it looked like crap at the same time.

> requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong

It's simply not intuitive. Yes if you own a PC and buy something for it you should know about it. But when you work in support for any amount of time you realize this is far, far from reality. You're not going to be able to educate everyone and surely, into today's world of download from an app store and tap, it's only going to be more common to expect everything to "just work".

I would argue that consumes shouldn't need to care about their specs if you want to provide any type of decent user experience. Tablets and modern hardware is actually getting pretty close to making this a reality. There are honestly not a lot of games out there that can't run on the terrible Intel GPUs.

Bear in mind that you had an enormous sampling bias: almost all the people you saw were the people who couldn't understand minimum requirements. You didn't see the people who could understand minimum requirements, so you don't know what proportion the first set is of the entire population.

(I don't disagree with your larger point that Steam should take a lot more responsibility to put up roadblocks to purchasing games that won't run on the system the Steam client is running on.)

Fair enough

It's not true that integrated GPUs are just not powerful enough to run modern 3D games. They're not going to push the same qty of triangles that a discrete GPU will, but any commercial game understands that only a tiny segment of the market is going to be aware of that, and it degrades onto the lower-specced hardware, as the other poster is saying. I'm sure Witcher 3 is among them. If your game literally can't run on something that isn't DX12 or OGL 4.5 (i.e., latest-gen hardware) and at least a mid-range discrete GPU, you should absolutely make sure the consumer has every opportunity to be well aware of that prior to purchase.

It's also not a big deal as long as you refund the purchase. There's no reason not to refund it within the first 30 days / first few hours of play time if the consumer's PC can't run it. I'm not one of these people who believes that consumers are automatically entitled to refunds, and in fact I ran a service that offered no refunds due to the nature of the product, but refusing in the case of an incompatible PC, when you can see the consumer has hardly used the product and it's not past the return window, is just being asinine.

There's also no reason that Steam shouldn't be able to check your computer's specs before you install a game and see if they meet minimum requirements, and then give you a warning before you proceed if they don't. It'd be awesome if that warning automatically included a "Refund Me and Remove the Game from My Library" feature. It'd be even more awesome if Steam kept track of everything this happened on and offered you the same games at 20% off once it detected an upgrade. :)

Regardless, avoiding this confusion/complexity/consumer irritation is a large reason that consoles are more popular than PCs for everyone, from the developer to the retailer to the end user. Your standard consumer knows if they have a Xbox (or at least they did before there was the Xbox 1 and the Xbox One...), but they don't know if their GPU supports a certain API level or the difference between their low-end mobile nvidia GPU and a Titan X.

> It's not true that integrated GPUs are just not powerful enough to run modern 3D games. They're not going to push the same qty of triangles that a discrete GPU will, but any commercial game understands that only a tiny segment of the market is going to be aware of that, and it degrades onto the lower-specced hardware, as the other poster is saying. I'm sure Witcher 3 is among them. If your game literally can't run on something that isn't DX12 or OGL 4.5 (i.e., latest-gen hardware) and at least a mid-range discrete GPU, you should absolutely make sure the consumer has every opportunity to be well aware of that prior to purchase.

That's just not true for any kind of this years AAA titles. They may barely run on an Iris Pro, but everything else is not going to provide even remotely usable framerate (if it'll start at all). I think you're hugely underestimating the huge 3D performance difference between the laptop Intels and a gaming GPU card like the currently most popular GTX 970. Intel GPUs are connected to a significantly slower shared RAM over significantly less bandwidth, they're noticably more thermally restricted (since they're sharing cooling with the main core) and have significantly less processing cores.

Having said that, I do fully agree that having a clear UI to tell you if your game is playable on your current machine is in order. As far as I know, you can already refund the game without problems, there's just not clear warning. And I DO want a warning, not an error check - we've seen countless cases of misdetection when games refused to run on hardware they didn't recognise correctly. Not to mention the usecases like mine, where I regularly buy games on Steam on my Mac just to play them on Windows.

I haven't personally tried this with recent games, but as a rule, AAA titles do degrade to older hardware on their own, and when they don't, there are communities that publish modified resource packs and super-low-end configs to squeeze maximal FPS out of a low-end graphics solution. I used one such solution to run Team Fortress 2 via WINE many years ago on a very crappy AMD machine with integrated graphics. Yes, the game looked like an N64 game, but it was playable at a good frame rate.

Lowering your resolution (play windowed) and going to minimal built-in configs is usually good enough for hardware up to 4-5 years old, which is reasonably competitive with the console lifecycle. Older than this and you usually need to get into hacking the resources/config to make it playable.

There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs.

> There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs.

Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :)

Let's see the most successful games of the year:

- Battlefield 1, needs at least GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon 7850 with 2GB of VRAM. Will not start on Intel. - Call of Duty: Inifinite Warfare. Same requirement. - Overwatch, actually runs on Intel HD 4400. Needs at least 660/7950 to run well

etc. :)

> Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :)

You're using Steam statistics as if they applied, proportionally, to the PC gaming industry when its users are majority PC gaming enthusiasts. This also means Steam makes up a small amount of most gaming company's sales. The majority is still done through big box stores. The statistics are interesting but I'm not sure how useful they are for determining target requirements from most gaming companies.

BF 1: The GTX 660 is 4.5 years old. Radeon 7850 is 4.75 years old. It appears to start on an Intel HD 4600 (released in mid-2013, so 3.5 years old, 1 year newer than minimum requirements for discrete GPUs) in this video [0] and Intel has released drivers specifically to counteract bugs in BF1 [1]. That certainly sounds like it starts on at least some iGPUs to me?

For the record, I played BF 1 at 3440x1440 on my GTX 670 (which I just replaced with a 1070 on Xmas Eve). It was plenty playable. No, I couldn't crank the settings to ultra, but most casual PC gamers don't expect to be able to.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTO6GvhC16o

[1] https://communities.intel.com/thread/107556

If this was a normal case of not being able to run a game because I don't have the horsepower, I might agree, but it isn't.

The Intel GPUs are plenty powerful enough to run the games, but some OS X driver quirk makes them difficult for game developers to support. You can buy a brand new top-of-the-line Apple laptop (e.g. 13" of the new MBP line), and still not be able to play. Here's a thread of someone complaining about it for The Talos Principle for example [1].

When you have a brand new computer, it's not too unreasonable to make certain implicit assumptions about your ability to run a three year old game that ostensibly is supported by your OS. For the case of many games for Steam on Mac though, that instinct would be wrong. It's not the end of the world, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a customer to expect a refund if it happens [2].

Given that probably the vast majority of Macs sold today have only an integrated Intel GPU, Steam should really be going a step further here by either removing the Apple logo from them, or putting a caution sign through it. It's just too easy of a mistake for a customer to make, and there are so many potential buyers to make it. A tiny footnote in the system requirements isn't enough.

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/257510/discussions/0/62632918...

[2] And as mentioned above, Steam finally does offer refunds now, but they didn't for most of the platform's history.

> The Intel GPUs are plenty powerful enough to run the games, but some OS X driver quirk makes them difficult for game developers to support. You can buy a brand new top-of-the-line Apple laptop (e.g. 13" of the new MBP line), and still not be able to play. Here's a thread of someone complaining about it for The Talos Principle for example [1].

They're really not. They may play most of the smaller games, but the AAA blockbusters will hugely struggle on anything but the Iris Pro. Especially if we take into account the additional ~30% OpenGL performance penalty on macOS vs. Windows.

> They're really not. They may play most of the smaller games, but the AAA blockbusters will hugely struggle on anything but the Iris Pro.

You've refuted a claim that I didn't make.

I mentioned The Talos Principle specifically. The game is perfectly playable on an Intel GPU with smooth graphics throughout until you run into graphical glitches ~20 minutes in which have the effect of immediately killing any fun that you might have been having. They're not a performance problem.

Of course Intel GPUs aren't powerful enough to play modern AAA blockbusters [1]. The companies making these are well aware of this too, and don't release them for Mac, with a Windows/PS4/Xbox One spread being pretty much universally standard these days.

[1] With a few exceptions where huge effort has been invested to have games degrade gracefully for older/underpowered hardware. A Starcraft 2 for example.

Also, while it would obviously not catch every case, a warning that hey, this game won't work on your current system seems like a pretty low bar. The valve clients definitely can and I think do capture system hardware.

To be fair, the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the Steam website. Could they put the system info in a cookie?

No, the client can push it to a valve hosted db.

So yes, there are corner cases. Eg if you've never installed the client this won't help with your first purchase. But so what?

> the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the Steam website.

No one told them they had to architect it that way. It'd be a reasonable requirement to have the purchasing experience from within the desktop client be aware of what the computer running the client can actually support. If that means doing something a little bit smarter than a simple embedded browser, then so be it. The Google Play Store knows which apps are and aren't compatible with all of my devices, and I don't consider that to be an especially high bar (but rather, the minimum).

Would be trivial to pass the data as custom HTTP headers.

The client connects to the backend with a binary protocol that, among other things, gives it a token which it hands off to a web API that returns a valid cookie for the Steam store. They inject that cookie into the integrated browser instance.

That's the tech they already have on hand.

Indeed: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

PC game hardware requirements are fuzzy though. It wouldn't be impossible, but it isn't obvious how to do it either.

Well I think instruction set is a pretty easy bar to start with. Heck you could do it automatically. Is the executable compliant x86? is the User's machine x86? I could program a prototype for that in a few minutes if I had the info valve does already.

Stram games that you buy are not restricted to a single machine. I often buy games from a phone client and later (not) play them on one of my two PCs. Seeing any compatibility warnings when I buy would be quite weird.

Valve would obviously keep every hardware you've ever logged into the steam client on. So if you've played a steam game on the Sunahe account on a windows box, aha, Sunahe has windows! No warning.

But a red box for graphics intensive games that says "We've never seen you on a device that can play this" is, again, a low bar. Or a windows only game for an account that is mac only.

Not very useful. If you have at least once played on an old computer that you don't use anymore but which had windows installed this would break.

And before you say that steam could detect that i don't use that computer anymore, they would have to ask for confirmation and that would be unexpected and annoying in my opinion.

Generally the necessary UX would be too complex to be useful.

All that effort just to avoid something PC gamers did for a long time - check hardware requirements to see if it'll run on their device.

Steam already records the pcs you login from and even let you make them (steam guard)

The Google Play store already does this for Android phones. It remembers all the devices you have used, and warns you, but lets you purchase anyway if you really want to. It's a solved problem.

Yeah, I regularly buy games on my Mac and then install them on my Windows PC.

At the beginning Steam tried to be "smart" and made it really hard to buy a non-Mac game on a Mac which was extremely annoying.

Right, but is this a useful metric? I'm pretty sure 100% of Steam games are x86, and that users know that. Are there even any Mac PowerPC binaries on the store?

The caveat is that it wouldn't be retroactive, at _best_ (to say nothing of how they'd need to quantify comparison between extremely different hardware types) - currently the hardware requirements are freetext fields with no constraints, which is how you get things like the requirements on [1].

[1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/391570/

Steam could have some sort of automated benchmarking service - start with a server with a decent video card, and post the specs. Hire a gaming bot maker to make some kind of testing AI, and let it just play through games and automatically post the FPS statistics.

Or maybe someone could start an independent startup that provides this automated benchmarking service. I guess it's a legit excuse to learn how to write a gaming bot, as a weekend project.

Sure, but you'd still need volunteers to run (and not cheat) their benchmarking service on the long tail of far too many hardware variants for them to purchase and keep in a dark room somewhere, as well as some way for vendors to set the minimum requirements in a useful manner (e.g. ideally a one-dimensional scale per type of requirement), or it's not going to get used.

I think it's certainly doable to some approximation of correct, and that Valve is probably in the best position of all the game distributors to do it with their existing HW survey infrastructure (and quantities of app on their platform) giving them a large background in what they're looking to quantify, and for whom. I just wanted to observe that it's far from trivial, and would still involve some level of crowdsourcing data (or paying someone like PassMark to use their single numbers for performance of given pieces of hardware as a scale for vendors to map things against, though the different workload numbers show that making this comparison isn't simple...)

Steam had a benchmark in CS:Source and i'm disappointed they haven't added a more modern one. I know they track hardware data, but I like to do comparisons when I upgrade and using various other benchmarks and tracking/comparing results is hit or miss.

Openbenchmarking.org is not good enough?

They could either use a bit of their cash to pay a handful of contractors to hand tune up the requirements for their estimated 8k apps [1], or just do a two day best-effort programmatic match and issue an order to every seller to update the guess. It's very manageable for a business to do.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/41rbhi/how_many_game...

If you have under 2 hours played on any game they give you automatic refunds if you request it. Did you actually ask for a refund?

Game developers on Steam != Valve

That is a relatively new thing. In the past you had to get a hold of their support, which was hit or miss, and hope they would do you a favor.

Exactly. Steam operated for a very, very long time with no refund system at all. It's a positive thing that they've finally added one after all these years.

(And they only did because EA's Origin has had a return policy from its founding. Competition is good. Monopolies are bad.)

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