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Comment by spookie | Hacker News Reader

Is it a Valve problem, or a Microsoft one at that point? Nevertheless, you could still download your game and remove the thin DRM layer (tools available to do so), and then play them on your Windows<10 machines.

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Valve problem. Selling merchandise you know/stated the customer can't use is negligent at best, malicious at worst.

Obligatory IANAL.

Valve offers a generous refund policy. If the game doesn't work on your system, refund it.

Seems like the obligation falls on developers and studios. It’s Capcom’s responsibility to keep Street Fighter X Tekken working because Capcom is the seller. Fortunately the community usually warns buyers about abandonware and you can always get a refund.

Also if you're playing on Linux a lot of those older games run perfectly through WINE, better than they run on modern Windows.

wine is rolled into proton.

Please excuse me while I become 'that guy', but Proton is a distribution of Wine with a bunch of patches and extra components like DXVK. The vast majority of proton is unmodified wine.

“[Proton] is a collection of software and libraries combined with a patched version of Wine[….]”. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not an expert in Proton or anything. Thanks for the input though.

It’s the obligation of the developer to make sure their game runs acceptably on supported platforms and on systems that meet the stated requirements.

If Valve is offering supplemental support on top of what the developer is offering (eg: running Windows games on the Steam Deck via Proton), then its Valve’s obligation to keep things running, as the developer has never committed to keeping things running outside their supported platforms. That said, additional support from the developer (eg: Microsoft/343i for Halo, Respawn for Apex Legends) to get games running on other platforms is always appreciated.

It would be ideal but it sounds like too much runaround for Valve.

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