Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjettter 1919 days ago
A lot of them don't work on Catalina. My kids accidentally upgraded and now their favorite games won't play. Steam is not a VM. And once you pay for something you have no guarantees that it will continue to work with an OS upgrade. Well, I guess that's industry standard, but I wish it was more obvious what works and what doesn't, instead of incredibly obtuse error messages. Not in favor of Steam at all.
4 comments

This is an artifact of not allowing 32-bit applications on Catalina. It seems silly to blame Valve over this. Have you considered setting up bootcamp for gaming? Otherwise you can pick up fairly cheap refurbished laptops off eBay or amazon. Remember proton is for Linux, support has and always will be shotty for MacOS.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1055-ISJ...

Thanks. Yes. But none of this is obvious after the fact and a lot of googling. Apart from that, if you search for games on Steam and you want to play one, you don't find out that it's incompatible until after you buy it! (Unless you happen to find a friendly site that lists catalina incompatible games). It maddens me that I can buy something that ca't possibly work.
Be mad at Apple, not Valve. Apple made the decision to sunset 32 bit applications.
Catalina is definitely not Linux.

And I am not sure what you meant by obtuse error messages? My steam clearly marks the games that don't run under Catalina (which as a few false positive actually -- since .NET game still runs despite being mark as not compatible).

I didn't screenshot the error messages, but I'm a developer and they were at that level: incomprehensible to end users. So I figured it out but only because I was savvy. Now my girls want PCs. Usch!
I don't know what you are talking about because in my stream it is written there in a yellow text next to Play button that 'this games does not support Catalina'.
That must be new. A while back the only way was to buy and try.
If software does not work after an OS upgrade, maybe the OS is the problem?
The upgrade was an accident. Maybe that was a problem.

I would like if the OS upgrade advised me of all the things that I had installed that would stop working.

MacOS != Linux
No, not really. Agreed.

But I thought Steam = Steam. My mistake :) I didn't consider the computational model until it was too late.