Meme transcription: A table comparing the steps to start a game ‘then’ vs. ‘now’.

Content of the “Then” column:

  • Double-click GAME.exe
  • Play game

Content of the “Now” column:

  • Launch Steam

  • Steam updates

  • Steam opens

  • Close Steam’s ad window
  • Select Game

  • Game launcher starts

  • Game launcher launches Game launcher updater

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Ok

  • Would you like to sign up for our newsletter?

  • No

  • Our EULAs have changed. Please review them before continuing

  • Scroll
  • Scroll
  • Scroll
  • Scroll
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes, sell my soul
  • Start game
  • Skip vendor intro
  • Skip vendor intro #2
  • Skip vendor intro #3
  • Sit through nVidia The way it’s meant to be played
  • Skip opening cutscene

  • Main menu opens

  • Would you like to connect your Steam account to account?

  • No
  • Press play.
  • Play game.
  •  Vlyn   ( @Vlyn@lemmy.zip ) English
    125•1 year ago

    Absolute bullshit, lol. Nowadays you can boot your PC, launch Steam and start into your game while 20+ years ago you were still looking for the damn CD.

    And don’t get me started with game updates, you had to do them MANUALLY. Go to the developer website, look at a download page, then you get offered updates: 1.0.1a, 1.0.1b, 1.0.2, 1.0.2b, 1.0.3, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1abc, …

    For smaller updates you had to install them in order, so you download 1.0.1a, install it, then download 1.0.1b, install it, then download… if you are lucky the bigger updates like 1.1.0 or 1.2.0 could be directly installed without any in-between steps.

    Oh and installing games? World of Warcraft had 4 CDs and if you bought it with Burning Crusade you had to use 8 CDs in total for installation! And the install took ages too.

    And during the installation you had to type in a cd key, which took longer than all your popups you’re describing together.

    I’ve been mostly playing on PC for the last 27 years, what we have today, even if some stuff is annoying, is 100 times better than how it was back then.

  •  JoeCoT   ( @JoeCoT@kbin.social ) 
    56•1 year ago

    Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.

    Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.

    Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There’s only one set of games I still have easy access to – Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I’m sure none of them work. But any game I’ve bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.

    Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there’s a new one.

    •  pjhenry1216   ( @pjhenry1216@kbin.social ) 
      14•1 year ago

      Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run?

      They weren’t always like that though. Don’t forget piracy didn’t start with the video game industry. It only started once it took off. CDs came later.

      Source: person who remembers playing games off 8" floppies.

      Edit to add: a game 20 years ago will only run because Windows says it’s ok. If it’s a linux-based game from 20 years ago, then it depends on a lot of other stuff. It’s not Steam that keeps them running. Steam just provides you a copy for the most part. GOG exists and doesn’t have the DRM that Steam allows. Does it have the same library? No. But we shouldn’t support DRM to begin with, so if it’s not on GOG, than I don’t trust the game itself.

      •  JoeCoT   ( @JoeCoT@kbin.social ) 
        10•1 year ago

        I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn’t know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.

    •  aksdb   ( @aksdb@feddit.de ) 
      3•1 year ago

      Also updates were typically incremental to save bandwith. So not only do you need “the update”, you may need a cascade of updates you need to download and install, in order.

    •  Droechai   ( @Droechai@lemm.ee ) 
      4•1 year ago

      Going through .ini-files to find any bugs and manually change to get it to run is something I don’t miss with modern releases.

      Or buying a game and realize your specific graphic accelerator isn’t supported in the dark ages before DirectX

  •  marv99   ( @marv99@feddit.de ) English
    26•1 year ago

    I know what you mean, but who are this “double click” and “exe” guys?

    • Press RUN/STOP and SHIFT.

    • PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

    • Press PLAY on tape.

    • OK
      SEARCHING
      FOUND Ultimate Game II

    • Take walk with the dog.
    • Play game.
  •  KSP Atlas   ( @KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz ) 
    12•1 year ago

    Depends on the game, factorio is available both on steam and as a direct download (in fact, devs recommend purchasing on their site and transferring to steam if you want) and you can just click the factorio executable to start the game. Now KSP2? That’s the second thing by far

  •  TheOakTree   ( @TheOakTree@lemm.ee ) 
    11•1 year ago

    Legitimately why I still pirate some games that I purchase through Steam.

    The pirated copy runs better 95% of the time, and people can’t even argue that you’re meaningfully stealing because you already own access to the same exact game.

  •  coffinwood   ( @coffinwood@feddit.de ) English
    10•1 year ago

    I don’t know what time in the past you compare the present to, but my current PC boots quicker into Windows, starts up Steam, and launches a 70 Gigabyte game than a 286 could count its two Megabytes of RAM on POST.

    To “double-click an .exe file” one had to manually launch DOSShell or Windows, because else one would have to traverse into the game’s directory (by heart). But launching a game via Windows would often leave the machine with too few resources to run the game.

    Did I mention the constant reboots to switch RAM and driver configurations because not every game would just run? The hassle to setup sound cards? Having to have the game disks ready all the time?