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Steam is a ticking time bomb (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 155 points 7 months ago (17 children)

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode.... Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don't disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author's key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn't investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn't too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve's attention. So who is being "anti-consumer" in this example, Valve or Apple?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

To be clear there’s only been a single generation (2006) of x86 based Macs that weren’t 64bit. They’ve been telling everyone since 2007 (well actually earlier even, the final PPC generation was 64bit), that the 32bit was going to go away.

I hate to defend Apple arbitrarily but all us developers had plenty of notice, and had to specifically reconfigure the default settings on their projects to only be 32bit. If developers ignore deprecation notices for over a decade, then is it really the fault of the other side?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I am not a developer and honestly curious about this. What's Apple's reason for ditching 32 bit programs? Isn't backwards compatibility a net positive for both developers and consumers?

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