Steam Says it’s Not Disabling Older Versions of Games

"After some concerns from the beta test over older versions of games possibly being disabled, Steam says that this is not what's going to happen.

To say that Steam is the global dominant face of PC gaming is perhaps an apt description. At the beginning of 2021, the Valve client broke its concurrent player record, with a peak of 26.4 million gamers. It's a testament to how vital the service is to the PC gaming market. However, it does sometimes do things which upsets a lot of people. Recently, there were some concerns that users would lose access to older version of games, but the company has come forward to say that this won't be happening.

A week ago, it was spotted in the beta client that Steam may disable older iterations of titles going forward. Many in the community were concerned about this, especially those who are from the speedrunning community. Speedrunners often use older versions of games for certain runs, but without access to these in the future, those specific runs would effectively come to an end. This was also an issue for those who simply wished to preserve the opportunity to roll back their games to previous updates.

However, in a statement issued to PC Gamer recently, it transpires that this is not what Steam is intending to do in a future patch. The statement says that there are no plans to "disable downloading old builds" adding that what the community is likely referring to, is a feature which will allow partners to take down versions for the purposes of preventing copyright infringement. The statement went on to say that there would be some more information about this feature once the new update to Steam is "read to ship."

It's likely that this will be good news for a lot of people who were originally concerned. It seems as though that gamers will still be able to download old versions after all. As many are aware, Steam received a big update recently, which had a focus on the download page, and the way the client handles storage. It was after this patch went live that the concerns began to grow after some detail in the Steam beta client was noticed by SteamDB.

While Valve is currently busy with its upcoming Steam Deck handheld system, it's still putting work into its most lucrative asset. With a new patent for Steam being filed recently, one which would look into better "quality of life" features for the software, it seems as though the company is keeping things ticking over, perhaps in preparation for when the Deck does arrive."

https://gamerant.com/valve-not-disabling-older-versions-steam-games/