Filter games by "playable"

[Dodo-Ukko]

Steam knows every piece of hardware installed on each users' PC. It would be useful to show whether this laptop / hardware can run this game. For example in "Library", you could filter to only games which are "Playable" (on current hardware). This way I could right away see which ones of my games run on my laptop / PC and which ones won't.

[Gwarsbane]

Been suggested, like weekly, been rejected just as many times because of all the issues it would have including people blaming Valve because it said they could play a game when they couldn't, or couldn't play a game when in fact they could. Because its that inaccurate and there are too many things to take into account including software that can make stuff unplayable with certain configs.

Just use the search feature and you can see all the previous posts about this.

[Dodo-Ukko]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

Been suggested, like weekly, been rejected just as many times because of all the issues it would have including people blaming Valve because it said they could play a game when they couldn't, or couldn't play a game when in fact they could. Because its that inaccurate and there are too many things to take into account including software that can make stuff unplayable with certain configs.

Just use the search feature and you can see all the previous posts about this.

For every issue there is a solution. These could be based in either minimum / recommended specs and then blame is on the developer. In addition Steam could build a database where Steam would follow which hardwares have been running which games (at minimum an hour + so you can be sure theyve been played). So if there has been hundreds of players using same Graphics card and playing same game, Steam could provide info to players that there are 300+ userrs playing this game with the same graphics card. Possible problem may lie somewhere else. You could do amazing troubleshooting help stuff with this kind of data. People would need to contact support less and very rarely support can provide this good info anyways.

[Gwarsbane]

Steam support is no there to help you play a game anyway, thats what the discussion areas for the games are.

Just know your own computer specs and read the page BEFORE you buy a game.

[Dodo-Ukko]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

Steam support is no there to help you play a game anyway, thats what the discussion areas for the games are.

Just know your own computer specs and read the page BEFORE you buy a game.

Gah, why couldn't things just be easy for the player. Isn't that a reason alone. Why must be PC folks be so anti-usability.

[The_Driver]

Originally posted by Valomäki:

Why must be PC folks be so anti-usability.

They're just realistic.

You propose telemetry data to be used to determine whether a game runs (well) on a system. Do you see how much outrage there is against windows 10 with it's telemetry?

Currently the hardware (and software) survey is voluntary, I'd like it to stay that way, even though that means it won't be objective (e.g. the ratio of privacy loving persons appears to be higher under Linux based distributions).

Then there's the technological hurdle. Implement it. Make sure e.g. intel laptop graphic solutions are even reported when used in offline mode (--> used in a mobile setting) or they are underrepresented and that may indicate a problem that's not even there. That sort of thing.

Thing is, you can't even really do a pure score based analysis, because in the future, APIs, protocols etc may be deprecated and removed and hence some software may not run anymore on an up to date system. E.g. some games might run on Windows XP but not on Windows 10.

In the end, what the user does is check OS, RAM, CPU and GPU, the rest is usually ignorable. And with that it should be somewhat easy to get a basic reading.

Why basic? Because you are responsible for your system. You may have installed a dozen programs that run in the background at all times, stream/transcode video to your TV, possibly using a good amount of your CPU and network, run a VM with dedicated video memory, run a file server for other pc in the network, decreasing available disk performance, do basically whatever... all possibly decreasing your games performance or even ability to run at all. So no, it doesn't get easy.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Valomäki:

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

Steam support is no there to help you play a game anyway, thats what the discussion areas for the games are.

Just know your own computer specs and read the page BEFORE you buy a game.

Gah, why couldn't things just be easy for the player. Isn't that a reason alone. Why must be PC folks be so anti-usability.

Who do you think would know more about game issues? Valve, the people who do not make the game. Or the games developers who were the ones who made the game?

And things ARE easy for the players. They just need to know whats in their computer, if they are unwilling to learn something that simple, they should stick to consoles cause their hardware specs never change.... oh right now they have changing specs too, so you're gonna have to make sure the game you want works with the version of console you have...

PC gaming in general is far more complex because of all the hardware and software choices out there. For example, lets take a look at just one of the latest nvidia card, the 1060. I recently seen one maker coming out with 5 or 6 versions of that one card. Seeing as how there are at least 10 different makers, all making variations of those cards there is going to be at least 25 to 30 versions of just the 1060. This doesn't even consider the 1070, or 1080 or the new Titan XP. In within a year or 2, there will be 1065, 1075 and 1085. Then of course you have AMD with their cards for the latest generation.

My video card is over 6 or 7 years old yet I can still play the latest games. There has been at least 5 other generations of cards since then and thats just for AMD and each generation has at least 6 to 10 different cards with at least 5 to 10 different makers of the cards. Again just for AMD.

Now CPUs have changed, ram has changed. Each one of those all have various ranges in their speed and cache on board and lots of other stuff. With certain items like ram and motherboards, there are quite a number of different makers out there.


So we are talking about possible combinations in the millions with what someone could have in their machine.

All that hardware effects each other in some way and then toss on top of that that 2 cards of the exact same cards that came off the assembly line one right after another might not have the exact same running specs, one might run slower then the other.

Then toss on top of that, all the software that could be running in the background also effects how well the hardware runs. Are the using the latest drivers? Are the using drivers that are a year old? Are they running an antivirus, if so which one, is it always doing an active search for issues, is it doing nothing at all. Do they have other programs running in the back.... and so on and so on.

With the billions of combos that could be out there, its virtually impossible to any kind of hardware to tell you if you are going to be able to run something or not.

And as I have said before, Valve doesn't want to be the one that gets a whole lot of hate mail (more then they already get) for stuff they have ZERO control over.

So the reason why PC folks are so "anti-usability", is because the ones who are arguing against software like this understand just how impossible it is for it to be accurate and know that Valve will not make something like that because they also know how pointless it is. We also believe its far better for you to know your own PC, it will be better for you in the long run.

[🍁𝑨𝒔𝒉𝑭𝒐𝒙🍁]

It won't be accurate at all, developers set the min/recommended specs, and every dev got their own standards when they set'em, for example one sets a rig that can run the game 30 fps on low settings for min, while some other dev sets a rig that can run the game at 144 fps on low settings for min. naturally a lot of people who don't meet the requirements can run that game at like 30-60 fps while steam told them they can't. and the other way around.