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.

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

something changed

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

i’m tired of software constantly needing to download fucking updates for every little fucking thing. you can’t just use sEcUrIty as an excuse to make things 2000x more annoying

For most games, including ones on Steam this is what I do.

Being up program launcher with key combination.
Start typing name of game, hit enter.
Then if Steam is not open Steam launches,. Game launches.

Get yourself a launcher program. Having to bring up Steam and search a library of dozens of games seems maddening when you could just type a few letters.

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

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?

I hate that this is so accurate

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.

The enshitification of everything.

I hate this, above Steam client is slow as hell (GOG isn’t much better). But you can hack it in most games to start the game clicking in the Icon. Look at the properties of the games in the folder, there is usually a game launcher, it is this one whose icon appears when this game is installed, it is this one that launches Steam (or GOG), but apart from that there is usually the original executable (look also in the subfolders, mostly in bin) which directly launches the game without Steam or GOG.

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.