You soon won’t be able to play older versions of Steam games

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The latest Steam beta has added a feature that seemingly removes the ability for users to roll back game updates or play older versions of games on Steam. Under the new version, users cannot download depots of Steam games to play earlier updates of games they own – and many are unhappy about this change.

There are many games that change radically between updates – there’s an entire fan collective dedicated to finding and archiving all the various versions of Minecraft over the years, for example, and the likes of Counter-Strike update regularly with big changes.

As of right now, it’s completely possible to download and play older versions of games owned on Steam with the help of somewhere like SteamDB – all you need to do is find the depot of the version you want to play. However, the September 23 beta update of Steam has seemingly put a stop to this practice – so once this update goes live in Steam proper no one will be able to play older versions on Valve’s client.

This was spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, who says the change that “all installed and Cloud-enabled games are synchronized as soon as possible” means that it’s now impossible to download older game depots of Steam games and play them. Pavel also says that this means SteamDB will now have to “go back to the times where it could only track files for what it owns”.

Last Steam beta introduced an important change to game downloads.

With this change, it is no longer possible to download older game versions, because client asks for a code (GetManifestRequestCode) that rotates every five minutes.
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) September 23, 2021

Valve says that this change is “to avoid delays when launching games and to prepare for possible offline play”, but that’s not stopped a lot of Steam tinkerers from being upset with this change and asking for it to be reversed. Whether it will be before going live is entirely up to Valve, of course.