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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

For me, it's that my 20 year old account has games I bought 20 years ago. I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time. No other company has demonstrated that kind of reliability, except maybe Apple.

Plus, I think Steam is a superior product.

That being said, I also try to buy on GoG as much as possible, since I really prefer to have DRM-free games and I want some competition in the market.

I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, but will never buy anything from the Microsoft store because their products are bundled into encrypted archives (so no modding/changing games). Plus, it has a nasty habit of leaving 40+GB binaries on my system that can't be deleted from within Windows.

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> I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time.

Unless the publisher pulls it or pushes an update cutting music because of license deals expiring. Or gets a stealthy replacement with a worse remaster. Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.

I agree with most of your comment ... but "OS drops 32 bit / x86 support" gets a hard disagree.

Steam provides the game. It "will be around for a long time."

It is not Steams job to ensure the game runs on every device or OS version for eternity however. That is up to the publisher of the game.

If you install Steam on an older version of the OS that does have 32bit/x86 support, Steam does its job.

I do think however that Steam should add clarification to the "game requirements" to specify OS version or hardware however.

I believe GP was referring to the fact Steam itself is 32-bit only, with the singular exception of MacOS (last I checked, if this has recently changed, I apologize).

So even if your game is 64-bit, you still need 32-bit libraries and OS support to run the DRM. Sucks when either your OS doesn't support 32 bit (MacOS, OpenBSD), you don't want to add 32 bit multilib, or you're doing funky emulation on a non-x86 machine where you can only effectively emulate x86_64 (see: ppc64le).

These are all niche situations (the last one almost facetiously so), but the point stands. I really wish valve would release a 64 bit client on Windows and Linux :/

> Unless the publisher pulls it

That's not true. I have a game that was pulled by the publisher (legal issues, don't know the details). But everyone who bought it can still download it and play it. Pulling it in this case just means no one can buy it anymore.

It was actually shocking to me when I found out that stuff I bought on other online stores wasn't available anymore for whatever reason. For this reason I still buy stuff on steam but I don't have enough trust to buy anything in another store.

I still have every game I purchased; even ones that have long been pulled from the store.

The music cutting issue is valid. However, it can be overcome by leaving the game downloaded and turning off updates for it. Plus, the game will always be available, which was my point.

But the flip side to that is Steam also automatically moves games up a tier. So a base game bought at launch might get automatically updated to a special addition which includes all the DLC and/or texture pack updates.

> Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.

I can still download the game, which is all steam promises. From there, I can make it work via VM.

>except maybe Apple.

Apple obsoleted all 32 bit iphone apps a few years ago, so not even remotely comparable to steam in this area imho.

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