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Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

19 pointslproven8 comments

I would say the title is pretty misleading, the actual announcement [0] is much more mundane:

> Added "End of Life" alert for macOS 10.13 ("High Sierra") and 10.14 ("Mojave"). Steam Client support for these operating systems will end on February 15th, 2024 at 10am.

[0] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

Yeah. For additional context, Apple isn't supporting these two versions either anymore. Last Mojave release was in 2021.

Title very misleading, since the obvious assumption is Steam will not longer support macOS which would be major news. Vs the real news which is simply Steam: macOS 10.14 and earlier reach end of life. 10.14 was released back in 2018, so far less exciting news which is presumably why The Register wrote the misleading title.

This could probably link to the original post which is clear that Steam drops support for 32-bit versions of macOS and thus pretty much all games that haven't been updated to 64-bit on that platform.

Which includes all classic valve games like portal and half life, as they were never updated to 64 bit.

If you bought those for OSX this is the end of the line for being able to play those games on that platform.

Not posted to incite rage, just elaborating on the impact.

This sort of elides the point that Steam is practically the only 32bit application I run on MacOS these days.

Steam on macOS is 64-bit, because macOS supports only 64-bit apps. I think on Windows is still 32-bit.

One of the most frustrating things about my industry (gamedev) is that sometimes it moves at a glacial pace.

The idea of using 32bit x86 in 2023 is almost hilarious, but once released: games rarely get any attention. That's also assuming that:

A) The Software Bill of Materials even supports 64 bit; it's not just your code it's all the code you depend on also

B) The build system hasn't been destroyed (this happens pretty soon after a game release, within a few years ultimately it becomes nearly impossible to build the game from source again)

C) It actually gives the game any actual benefits outside of "marginally wider" hardware support.

It's sort of a tragedy of the commons, nobody wants to put effort on anything that isn't the underlying core product. Nobody is making engines anymore (outside of Epic, Unity (heh) and Embark) and nobody will go back to old products anyway.

Installing Steam on Linux in 2014 was weird because I did not have a multi-lib system back then and it dragged in half an operating system userland to function, but I understand why: I would have had issues with the games themselves even if Steam itself hadn't pulled in all those dependencies.

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