> I don't think it's unreasonable of valve to drop support for OS's that Microsoft aren't maintaining
I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste. I don't expect anybody to put effort into continued support for old stuff, but I do expect them to not break stuff that used to work. With Valve/Steam specifically you also run into paradoxical situations where they sell you old games on Steam, but those old games only run on old Windows version on which Steam itself does no longer runs.
That said, Valve is among the least problematic offender here, they put a ton of effort into Linux support for Windows games, they allow developers to keep selected older versions of games available and they have forums that make it easy to find workarounds. So most of the time, there is some way to get things to work, even if it's a bit more labor intensive than it should be.
But generally speaking, the whole software industry needs to get their shit together and figure out how to keep old stuff around and working. If I buy something digital, it should be at least available for as long as the company that sold to me exists. That's really not too much to expect. It's embarrassing how billion dollar companies are unable to just move their digital goods into a permanent archive once they lost interest in actively working on it.
> I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste.
Nobody's doing that. There's a free upgrade from both Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10, and the hardware specs from MS are the same for all three OS's. For anyone who doesn't want to install Windows 10 on their devices, Steam is officially supported on Ubuntu. If you want to continue to play games on your windows 7 device, you have the option to download those games right now, and archive them in whatever way you see fit to continue to play them on your device.
> If I buy something digital, it should be available for as long as the company that sold to me exists.
Hard disagree here. You spending $20 on something doesn't entitle you to a perpetual access to a version of something under your terms. You have the option to access the game still on your hardware.
I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste. I don't expect anybody to put effort into continued support for old stuff, but I do expect them to not break stuff that used to work. With Valve/Steam specifically you also run into paradoxical situations where they sell you old games on Steam, but those old games only run on old Windows version on which Steam itself does no longer runs.
That said, Valve is among the least problematic offender here, they put a ton of effort into Linux support for Windows games, they allow developers to keep selected older versions of games available and they have forums that make it easy to find workarounds. So most of the time, there is some way to get things to work, even if it's a bit more labor intensive than it should be.
But generally speaking, the whole software industry needs to get their shit together and figure out how to keep old stuff around and working. If I buy something digital, it should be at least available for as long as the company that sold to me exists. That's really not too much to expect. It's embarrassing how billion dollar companies are unable to just move their digital goods into a permanent archive once they lost interest in actively working on it.