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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

A lot of us predicted horrible things would come from Steam. Ads everywhere, forced updates, forced removal of games for all kinds of bullshit reasons, etc. Basically all the same arguments you get today about digital ownership and platforms. Fortunately for us, Valve has actually been a pretty good gaming-community citizen with Steam so we can happily say we were wrong.

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Forced updates did happen (only way to play the game if Steam was aware there was one available - and God forbid you had a slow/flaky connection - no gaming for you today, not even through Offline Mode !).

Combined in at least one instance with the new version not being able to load the old multi-hours save, and no rollbacks, so hopefully you manually backed up the whole game ! (At least the devs fixed it in a patch after some days...)

I'd say if I have one big complaint about Steam, it's that it's update control needs work. I don't know if it's intentional or not but rolling back to an old version is...impossible? I'm vaguely aware there is an option to maintain the version you already have but I believe it's quite buried.

I've had updates completely change game balance, making character load outs I'd grinded up not work the way they did before. I've also had new linux versions break compatibility. This is understandable in multiplayer games, but I was playing these games single player.

Some devs enable (an often limited form of) rollback through the "beta" functionality.

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