Absolute bullshit, lol. Nowadays you can boot your PC, launch Steam and start into your game while 20+ years ago you were still looking for the damn CD.

And don't get me started with game updates, you had to do them MANUALLY. Go to the developer website, look at a download page, then you get offered updates: 1.0.1a, 1.0.1b, 1.0.2, 1.0.2b, 1.0.3, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1abc, ...

For smaller updates you had to install them in order, so you download 1.0.1a, install it, then download 1.0.1b, install it, then download... if you are lucky the bigger updates like 1.1.0 or 1.2.0 could be directly installed without any in-between steps.

Oh and installing games? World of Warcraft had 4 CDs and if you bought it with Burning Crusade you had to use 8 CDs in total for installation! And the install took ages too.

And during the installation you had to type in a cd key, which took longer than all your popups you're describing together.

I've been mostly playing on PC for the last 27 years, what we have today, even if some stuff is annoying, is 100 times better than how it was back then.

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.

Somebody clearly doesn’t remember boot disks and configuring your soundblaster hardware interrupt number.

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

• Open cracked games folder
• Find game
• Double click .exe

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.

Who here remembers inserting disk 4 of 12?

The steam ad window can be disabled in settings.

something changed

Pop up window minimizes game: do you want to allow this program to communicate on private and/or public networks?

Gotta add a few hours of fiddling with your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to free up memory to the "Gaming Then" column.

Install with GOG a single time. Be able to archieve old versions in case gameplay changes.

wine ./bin/x64/Cyberpunk2077.exe

Done.

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?

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

Don't forget about:

#THIS GAME SUPPORTS AN AUTOSAVE FEATURE DON'T SHUTDOWN YOUR COMPUTER #🆗

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.

The enshitification of everything.

Itch.io is pretty straightforward. Download .exe and play.

EULA bullshit

• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• reinstall
• uninstall
• refund

😬

To be fair, the vendor intro 1-2-3 taking a while has been a problem since PS1 era. With the PS2 came an extra serving of infinite cutscenes

Ya'll motherfuckers are forgetting the days when you had to have a fucking paper-slot decoder thing or read word 3 on page 50 of the manual to start your game.

Vulcan Shaders have stepped into the ring

pirated games don't have this issue. been doubleclickjng exe files for all my games

TBF it used to take a really long time with multiple disks to install literally anything.