[KingMachiavelli]

Video games are a weird type of application. They seem to be one of the only applications that isn't in the process of becoming a web application (outside of just rending it on a remote server and even that isn't growing very fast). This is despite the fact that every platform/OS essentially has had it's own graphics library/interface (DirectX, OpenGL, Metal). At least Vulkan seems to be making a lot o progress in making more things cross platform although IIRC it leaves a lot of area to be implementation specific.

I think the dominance of Windows & console for video games has meant that developers are much more used to shipping immutable dependencies with their game. Relying on Windows SxS to avoid DLL hell. While they might provide updates for the game for a few years there are mostly game related updates rather than library updates (at least from what I have seen).

The big downside to this is that some things which shouldn't be dependent on the game developer providing updates like controller support, game engine fixes, etc.

I'm not sure if the problem is just the game developer/publisher not having any financial motivation to reexport/update their games or if the game engines themselves make it difficult to provide these kinds of updates.

[armchairhacker]

Video games aren’t becoming web applications precisely because there are so many GPU libraries. I think this is also why they have so many immutable dependencies: they rely on low-level optimizations and various hacks which break on newer libraries.

Video games need to do expensive computations in real time. Most other apps don’t, which is why they can be ported to the web.

[lmm]

The other side is that video games have a lot less need to be correct than most applications. Even a blatant user-visible bug is probably fine (and might even add to the fun). Crashing is a problem, but running with massive state errors often isn't.

[rowanG077]

Running with massive state errors is a huge problem. There are untold amounts of video games that can become uncompleteable if you do a certain thing. Also called "hard lock". This is much worse then a crash.

[lmm]

There's a pretty small class of games where that happens in a relevant way. And tbh players and reviewers seem to punish that a lot less than a game that outright crashes.

[gh02t]

Arguably they have an incentive not to support games for years. Not when they can re-release the same game with a little refresh 10 years later to "fix" issues.