Steam doesn't plan on disabling old build downloads, after all

After reports began circulating yesterday that Steam may no longer let you download old builds of games, Vavle has got in touch with PC Gamer to clarify the situation and promise that customers will still have access to rollback versions of games.

"We are actually not planning to disable downloading old builds," a statement provided to PC Gamer notes. "What we are working on is an approach on handling edge cases involving unowned content, and helping partners more easily take down builds that need to be removed for things like copyright issues. We’ll have more to share on that work when it’s ready to ship."

As we reported yesterday, these issues are largely to do with how Steam handles authentication and file downloads, so it looks like the files that were uncovered in the beta client build are simply prototypes designed for more specific situations.

And that's good news: modders, speedrunners, and achievement enthusiasts rely on older builds of games, and Steam making them unavailable in the long run would have been fairly short-sighted.

It looks like something related to curating and controlling older versions of games could still be on the horizon, though – the wording of the statement given to PC Gamer hints at a larger announcement to come.

The likelihood is that certain developers will have the option to enable the features preventing legacy builds from being downloaded – perhaps if they contain copyrighted music, or something – but that remains to be seen