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.
  • JoeCoT@kbin.social
    841·
    3 years 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@kbin.social
      155·
      3 years 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@kbin.social
        12·
        3 years 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@feddit.de
      3·
      3 years 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.

          • Dubious_Fart@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            3 years ago

            Theres been a couple games that had this issue.

            I know Myth 2 had it if you installed it into the wrong directory or something.

            There was some not-mainstream MMO that had the issue too at one point.

            but I cant remember the name of the xcom knockoff that had it.

            and I cant find anything about it cause I keep finding 5000 pages of results about recovering uninstalled games.

    • averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 years ago

      I’m full l having flashbacks to Fantasy Empires. I don’t know if I ever had the manual. I think I just got a list of words from someone.

  • thefool@sh.itjust.works
    28·
    3 years ago

    I remember visiting my friend while he was in the middle of installing a game, and it failed on the 10th of 10 disks

      • SeaJ@lemm.ee
        3·
        3 years ago

        That was more Windows 95 or NT but the point still stands. CDs were a massive leap in capacity.

    • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee
      2·
      3 years ago

      Unreal Tournament 2004 was 7 CDs if I remember correctly. That’s the most I ever dealt with, and I would gladly insert 100 CDs if it meant we got games of that quality again.

        • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
          1·
          3 years ago

          I had it on one DVD The ways I spent modding the maps in the map editor ! Every time I listen to the Offspring again, like I did at that time, it takes me back to DM-Rankin and its creaky stairs

  • marv99@feddit.deEnglish
    231·
    3 years 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.
    • Nailbar@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      3 years ago

      Luckily my brother took care of that part. I just had to remember:

      d:
cd games
cd cannon
[Space][Space][F3]

      To play Cannon Fodder.

        • Nailbar@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          3 years ago

          Note that only a few years earlier I was rebooting the computer whenever I got stuck in King’s Quest, which was a lot, since I didn’t understand english.

          I don’t know which King’s Quest.

  • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
    14·
    3 years 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@lemm.ee
    11·
    3 years 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@feddit.deEnglish
    9·
    3 years 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?