Just did a GOG survey that focused on the idea of a paid membership option on GOG. Seems they're determining what people would be willing to pay extra for. Some of the options were
- a tool for backing up offline installers
- ability to install previous versions of a game
- extra insight into the preservation work they're doing.
- voting rights on games to bring into the preservation program.
And others that I can't remember.
Wait so currently you can't install previous versions of games you only get the most up-to-date version. That's daft to expect people to pay for, that's a free feature on Steam.
I honestly thought this was an option, but I can't see it in the client, and the offline installers only offer all patches and the latest version. Not the original version.
I agree that's daft, and hope that feature doesn't get paywalled. The more people who do the survey and stress these points, the better.
That is absolutely not a free feature on Steam. Some publishers like Paradox leave old versions as 'beta' branches to allow us to reinstall them, but Steam as a whole is very against you playing anything but the latest version.
You cannot instruct Steam to not update a game. When you launch a game, Steam will update regardless, unless you have gone offline, or you launch it in a way that bypasses the Steam client. If you ever forget to go offline before launching a game, Steam will forcibly update it
That's not an official/proper feature on steam, there's nothing in the interface to select an older version, right? Just the beta system that lets developers have multiple branches available, which is often used to keep a limited number of previous versions available.
I thought it was a command that you could launch steam with that would give you access to older versions. I'm sure I have done that when trying to mod GTA and it needed a particular version.
Ah, seems you're partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.
I'm still upholding the fact that it's not a "proper" feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user's control, this isn't something most people could figure out themselves.