A Steam practice I find odious

Something I find often on Steam I LOATHE and find utterly detestable is finding games that are obviously left to rot by developers who could at least ensure it will function on modern PCs when bought.

Two games in particular this is odious on are Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Invisible War


The first one admits it's not gonna run well on anything newer than Windows 7 and requires several fan patches to fix issues that the official developers could have taken twenty minutes out of their lives to do themselves. Considering one usually has to still buy Fallout 3 and use it as one half of the Tales of Two Wastelands Mod just to run it on the Fallout New Vegas engine (which is modern computer friendly), and considering they still expect people to pay money for it and it has a very active modding community even now, you'd THINK Bethesda could be bothered to care.

Nope. They are too busy running customer goodwill into the ground with that trashfire called Fallout 76.

As for Deus Ex:Invisible War, granted, it's not all that great a game, but it's still a Deus Ex game, and when you consider the amount of work that went into all the other games in that series, keeping that running on modern computers would not be that hard, given it runs on Unreal Engine 2 and fans already made a patch to make it stable enough to run well to do just that.

But again, the official developers just could not be bothered to try.

In Bethesda's defense, they did at least have the decency to warn people about the issues on the store page, but there is no similar caveat emptor for Invisible War, which is REALLY could use given that without a fan patch it runs like crap and can crash every 10-15 minutes.

Another reason I despise this is because Good Old Games averts this practice, as they try to bundle everything they sell with whatever it needed to make sure it can be run or decently emulated before it's sold, even if that means they must resort to bundling fan patches, because they don't want you to be disappointed what you bought is dead on the table when you try to play it.

However, to devil's advocate for a moment, I supposed one could say Steam is under no obligation to FORCE developers to care so long as their games at least turn on when purchased, that is up to Steam's discretion.

Then again, I'm sure most players want to play what they bought, not just load the executable.