Thank you for the answers. This is where i am coming from.
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TLDR; I cant use a product i own, because it requires an update that i dont want.
[coming from the latest Nova Drift Update]
So given the current topic of having a non functional game after an update i thought lets be smart about it, and just deactivate all updates of all my games. I know best when i want to update my game right, and steam has the functionality. Turns out i am wrong. Steam removed the ability to stay on any given version some years ago. There are people who protested against getting auto updates shoved down their throat, but given that those threads are years old and nothing has changed since means its here to stay.
Though thats not the only change that has happened unnoticed over the years. My conception of steam was that i am in possession of my games, and that i can start them with and without being logged into steam. That is now wrong too. More and more games at least need you to log into your account, if they dont even require a working internet connection. Nova Drift is one of them. While i do pardon Nova Drift for that fauxpas, since it is in development, i dont excuse that kind of behaviour for other games, which have reached version 1.0 a long time ago. Rome 2 comes to mind, where you bought the game, and a later update would introduce more female generals than historically acceptable, for diversity as a political move, and you simply couldnt go back, no matter what. The comment of the developers "If you dont like it, dont play it." Yes, but i want my money back because i didnt pay for a product that you switch out for something else down the road.
Im currently looking through my games to see which games exhibit that behaviour, and the shocking truth is, most of them ! if not all of them. I have a handful of games that i can start even without being logged into steam, but thats it. Now that wasnt a problem when you still had the option to log out of updates ( and then would loose the privileges of being connected to the internet, but whatever ) but now games get forced to get updated, even in offline mode. Connect to the internet once, the game gets scheduled for update, change to the offline version and you cant start the game anymore without updating. Whats the solution for this ? Never start steam online anymore ? Also why is there no global setting to only update games when running them ? I had to manually change the setting of the 30 games i own. Also Steam can just arbitrarily decide to update your games, and they can reset your settings, so there is no guarantee that ANYTHING you do is actually protecting your games from getting updated.
I really wonder why i didnt realise that earlier. Oh right. Factorio. Factorio has branches for each and every backward version. For two years now i have been sitting on my heavily modded version and i never had to fear that it would break at any point. Heavily out of date, but i can continue the gameplay experience i want to have. From a buisness perspective, i think its unacceptable that i pay for something, that can later get sneakily switched out for something else. But i dont wanna start arguing with developers over how important the availability of earlier version is, my time is better spent somewhere else.
Anyway, all of this makes me have to reconsider how i buy my games in the future. I dont think that whining somewhere is going to change things, all i can influence are my future investments. I will take a step back from buying things on steam in general. A platform that doesnt allow to disable updates has lost most of its creditability. I won´t buy games anymore that link the start of the their product to something else ( like an account on a platform ). That puts your product at the mercy of whatever that account or platform is up to. And there are countless examples of why that is bad. Company of Heroes required you to ping the Relic server. The company went down, the servers with them, and all of a sudden you couldnt connect to the servers and that meant you couldnt play the game anymore. Bioshock was on Games for Windows Live, that went down, and if you werent aware of this issue, and grabbed a time limited patch, you were stuck permanently with a version that couldnt connnect to a non existing server. Mass Effect 3 is also a good example. The multiplayer experience was centered around loot boxes, which you incidently also could buy with ingame currency, that you spend real money on. The infiltrator + sniper combo was one of the strongest combos in the game, but one day the comapny decided that they werent making enough money. So they nerfed all non paying strong options into the ground, and made the paying options stronger. You had a fun multiplayer experience that you invested your time into, and BAM one day you find yourself getting stuck in a team that had all the same outfit and gear, because on the highest difficulty nothing else but paying options is viable anymore.
I have been gaming for over 30 years, and i never thought there would come a point where i would have to fight for my right of owning the product that i payed for. As a customer that buys software i want the guarantee of the availability of the software that i buy at the date that i buy it. Worst case is that i make a hard copy myself. Updates need to be voluntary, given the possibility that future updates can simply be downgrades. You cant sell me a BMW and then downgrade it to a bike when you are not making enough money. That is malicious intent. I want games to be in the hands of the people who care about playing them, not in the hands of people who care about how to make the most amount of money after people already bought the game.
And advertisment really doesnt belong into the main menu of a game.
Short term, this doesnt really mean anything. But long term it means platforms like steam lost me as customer, and developers who practice such methods lost me as a customer too. Lets see how things develope.
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I want to thank all people who have answered me, but sadly, i can only mark one answer as the solution, but i appreciate all the feedback i got <3. If what you said is true and there is no better alternative than gog, you have won me as a potential customer.
Post edited April 14, 2021 by Tstone117
