Re: A Completely Out-of-the-blue Gripe

On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 19:26:52 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:
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On 10/3/2024 9:00 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
Prepare for the stupidest complaint I've yet made!

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I'm actually with you although in my case it's Steam, because I look a
lot at older games, and it's the date it appeared on Steam, or was
re-released on Steam, as such I find their release dates about useless.

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Steam is all over the place with its reported release dates.
_Sometimes_ it will be the original release date. _Sometimes_ it will
be when the game was reissued. And sometimes it will be -as you
mentioned- when it appears on the Steam platform. It's a mess.
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I'm a little more forgiving, though, since it's apparent that Valve
just doesn't care as opposed to GOG's trying to manipulate the dates
for their benefit. Arguably, many of these re-releases are "new'
versons of the game (since most of them have been updated in one way
or another to better run on modern hardware), so a modern release date
isn't completely outrageous.
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But I wouldn't mind some consistency.
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PC release dates are weirdly hard to nail down anyway, especially with
older games. Except for a handful of really high-profile games (Doom,
Duke Nukem 3D, etc.) you usually can't narrow it down to better than
the release _month_, and for some games you're lucky if you know the
year. But back in the 80s and 90s, there often wasn't a hard-and-fast
release date. Games were shipped and sold when they were available. In
an era when many games were hand-packed by the developers themselves,
and there was no just-in-time shipping, the release date depended a
lot on when the store got the game (and few stores waited for a
specific date; the games got put on shelves immediately).
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Which is really annoying to those of us who'd like an exact date. But
the past was a weird place. ;-)