It’s a neat idea- but there are several problems. Firstly- remember there are “minimum specs” and on from there. So the quality you consider “running” vs someone else may not be the same. Limited modes, crashes occasionally or takes 15 minutes to load a save? It can run. They could likely filter out games that they are 100% sure won’t run on your hardware and software. But that requires you to be aware of what you have on your machine, accurately input all of it, and update it if it changes. Devs set requirements so even if you do that and Steam goea off dev specs and you have a problem or want a refund, are you going to complain to Steam or the Dev? If someone puts their specs wrong or forgets to update.. how many of those people will be contacting them? That’s without any bugs in their filter blocking games you know will work, and letting games through that don’t.
They take all the liability, and for what benefit to them? If they give you the devs minimum specs and you don’t read them- they have no liability. They never said or implied it would work on your computer. That’s between you and the dev, or you and yourself for making a mistake. If they give you the spec and you can’t read it right- then you wouldn’t be able to input your specs accurately anyway so a filter won’t help you. That is the drawback to the freedom of open operating systems and platforms. There are so many possible permutations and flavors that it is very difficult to just point at something and say it will or will not work. When every user is running what is basically a semi unique machine (hardware+software combo,) it’s on them to make sure their machine that they spec’d can do what they want, not a developer to anticipate every combination that could possibly exist. With PC power comes PC responsibility.
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· 5 years ago
Another issue that would likely pop up during development is that how do you know what part trumps what. For CPUs do you go off of cores or processor speed or Intel vs AMD? And that's just for CPUs. You'd have to create a similar comparison for graphics cards too.
I went with AMD all the way. I'm not going to spend extra just to get a G-Sync monitor, sign up to update my Graphics card through the app, and buy overpriced GPUs.
Not that this whole idea would ever be feasible, but if they ever did do something like this, there are rankings already in place. Benchmarks are rigorous tests that push CPUs, GPUs, RAM, & hard drives to their limits. Below is the site I used when I was building my computer if you want to see where your hardware ranks.
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net
(They have other hardware benchmarks as well, not just video cards)
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net
(They have other hardware benchmarks as well, not just video cards)