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Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good

• chongli 11y ago
  Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.
  • philwelch 11y ago
    Many Steam games can be rolled back to previous versions using the "betas" feature.
  • cpcallen 11y ago
    This includes breaking updates to the Steam client itself - which stopped working on 10.6.8 in November. I can roll back to an earlier version, but it immediately auto-updates to the latest version. So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed. Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for work) and am able to run the Steam client again, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy a game through Steam again.
    • aeontech 11y ago
      Just want to point out that you could upgrade the base OS to latest, and run 10.6.8 in a VM for any older apps that do break in new versions.
      • brazzledazzle 11y ago
        Also 10.6 isn't getting much in the way of security updates anymore...
  • forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Automatic updates is great. The lack of ability to easily rollback is not. GOG's Galaxy has rollback built in. I feel like Steam will add it eventually.
• delecti 11y ago
  I would argue that Steam itself is excellently poised to do so, if they wanted to.
  • jdmichal 11y ago
    They already are: http://store.steampowered.com/software/ http://store.steampowered.com/software/
• heartbreak 11y ago
  Where would you say that Steam currently falls short as a desktop app store? Didn't they roll out general purpose apps for Windows a while back?
  • darryl42 11y ago
    They did, but most of them seem like toy apps or old versions of an application, old version on steam new version direct from vendor.
  • vitd 11y ago
    1) It's buggy. Literally 50% of the time when I launch it, it says it can't reach the network. Meanwhile my browser and email are chugging along just fine. Another launch of Steam and suddenly it sees the network. No other app I run has any problem reaching the network ever. 2) Steam "updates" itself every time I launch. I see others saying it only happens once a month, but I literally cannot launch it and have it not update. If I quit and immediately relaunch, it says it's updating and starts downloading stuff. WTF? 3) It shows me ads. Note - it's not like the App store which opens to a list of "what's hot/what's new/what's promoted". It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface. 4) It shows me ads for games that don't work on any system I've ever used Steam on. 5) Support from Valve is non-existent. If you try to get support for a game, they will by default tell you it's the game vendor's fault, even before figuring out what the problem is. If you try to use their support forums, you are required to use a different login and password than the one you use for the store. WTF? Why would they ever do that? The list goes on. It's just a terrible app. In my opinion the Mac App Store is lightyears ahead of it in just about every dimension I care about. I no longer use Steam when there's any other option available.
    • squeaky-clean 11y ago
      > It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface This is pretty easy to disable, there's an option within the Interface tab in the settings.[0] [0] http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/28415/is-there-a-way-to-turn-off-the-ad-popup-that-appears-when-you-close-a-steam-game http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/28415/is-there-a-w...
• dreen 11y ago
  Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway. I realise this is still better than Mac App Store, but I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.
  • chipperyman573 11y ago
    Once you launch a game once through steam you can just run the launcher file.
    • dreen 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure That still launches steam app and updates it before launching the game.
      • squeaky-clean 11y ago
        That's up to the game/publisher. With Bastion for example, you can copy the game directory to another PC and it will still work. But most games will require Steam to run first.
  • wtallis 11y ago
    If you don't let Steam run in the background, then of course it's not going to be able to update games in the background. The delay in launching games is thus at least partly self-inflicted. And Steam certainly has justifications other than DRM for being strict about keeping games up to date: any networked game will probably need to match the version of the server, and in general it's good policy for Steam to trust developers have good reasons for pushing out updates. There are also Steam games that don't use Steam's DRM and can be run without Steam. It's up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.
  • gknoy 11y ago
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  I love when the top two comments on a story really nail it. In this case I think the parent comment combined with the GP comment capture the issue, when the App Store concept is implemented poorly, it negatively effects user experience, vendor experience, and customer satisfaction. When it is done well, it enhances those things. The key is that Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet, and worse they haven't really internalized some of the things that make App Stores "good" or "bad". As a result, people are leaving. The response though will be even more interesting, either Apple can give application delivery the focus it needs and become the best in class example, or they can continue to languish, or worse they mandate by fiat use of feature which negatively impacts the brand. App Stores try to be too many things at once. They started off as discovery, distribution, and payment processors. They have evolved into sort of microservice delivery applications. When the sandbox + App starts looking like a container instance running a unikernel, you've really supplanted the OS entirely. But that model doesn't work well for what many people think of as "productivity" apps. I hope Apple chooses to give this problem the focus it needs. I could easily see this as the "feature" on which a lot of OS seats are sold.
  • pkamb 11y ago
    > Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet They really did, for the first year or two of the Mac App Store's existence. It was great. All of the "$10 utility apps" would be there today if not for Sandboxing. Maybe this wouldn't have included the apps where the 30% or poor support for upgrades/subscriptions would really impact sales (Adobe, Microsoft, perhaps, interestingly, Sketch...), but sandboxing is the only outstanding issue that prevents you from shipping an app to the Mac App Store.
• mrec 11y ago
  I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering. I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, automatically, with 30 seconds of box-checking. I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.
  • the_af 11y ago
    Same here. I like and use Steam, but its UI for casually browsing games (aka "casual shopping") isn't very good. For example, when you are browsing a list of games, if you click on one to see additional details and then try going back, you lose your place in the list. This is infuriating for long lists. It kills the browse & shop experience. The web interface for Steam is better than the app's. Then again, this is what web browsers are there for...
    • mrec 11y ago
      Yes! Forgot to mention that, but it drives me nuts too.
    • Orva 11y ago
      Funny enough, when looking at Steam processes tree (and if I recall correctly, also licenses), client is done with Chromium Embedded Framework.
      • toyg 11y ago
        Which is probably why it still looks like shit on Retina screens. Oh, how I love HTML apps...
        • greggman 11y ago
          What does that have to do with HTML5 apps? In the browser, when HD-DPI support was added every page started using HD-DPI font rendering, HD-DPI CSS, HD-DPI SVG, only image were still lo-res Conversely I still have native apps that are low-res only because updating them to HD-DPI meant shipping a new app.
• rcthompson 11y ago
  I think games are much easier to sandbox than general desktop applications. Games mostly just need access to input devices, output devices, hardware acceleration, and disk access in their own private folder, all things that are relatively easy to provide in a sandbox.
• staticelf 11y ago
  After Steam, Windows Store is definately the best app store I've used. Normally a Linux fan, but I'm really impressed by Microsofts products lately.