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My main beef with steam is that the client is a piece of crap. With the big bucks they have they should have a much better UX/UI and overall engineering. They

My main beef with steam is that the client is a piece of crap. With the big bucks they have they should have a much better UX/UI and overall engineering. They enjoy a massive network effect plus the key handling helped increasing the switch costs, but they should go down. Platforms like itch.io are much better, and GOG.com at least keeps improving.

Karunamon 9y ago
Steam definitely takes the Google approach - throw out a minimum viable product, automate as much as possible, and provide little-to-no support. That also means the experience is similar. When it works, it works well and you don't have to think about it. When it doesn't work, be prepared to lose hours-to-days of your life to a system that seems to be as kafkaesque as possible.
- dreen 9y ago
  Except its not minumum and not viable. Its bloated with lots of features added over the years on top of each other, and its terrible.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  This is not in touch with reality. The steam client has like 10 years, its bloated, slow and unsatisfactory. If you could do steam ratings on the steam client, they would get clobbered.
dreen 9y ago
Absolutely agree, the load time is often very slow and completely unnecessary, just have a thin client in the background checking for updates, and if you want to look at your "Steam Inventory" whatever the fuck that is there should be a separate thing for that.
rhinoceraptor 9y ago
Graded on a curve, the Steam client is excellent. Origin and Blizzard's desktop client are both incredibly bad. It's like you're using a GPU manufacturer's overclocking GUI from 2007.
bariereefwozere 9y ago
I'm hoping GoG keeps up it's thing. Having standalone, downloadable installers for games makes me a lot more comfortable than a service which could potentially disappear or change it's terms. Things like music licenses expiring and having that retroactively applied worry me [1]. Steam strikes me as a bit of a monopoly at this stage, and a 30% cut off all sales seems like money for jam - I'd be a bit less bitter if they offered excellent customer support or I felt they were doing something interesting with all the revenue. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141110/09535529096/hooray-licenses-update-strips-17-songs-steam-users-purchased-copies-grand-theft-auto-san-andreas.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141110/09535529096/hoora... Edit: I guess there's nothing to stop GoG disappearing either, but at least I have standalone installers if needed.
phatfish 9y ago
I find the Steam client does it's job of launching games particularly well. It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them, and keeps them up to date in the background. I have noticed that they don't screw with the UI every 2 months (Spotify et al.) and stick with what works. That seems to be a negative these days though.
- hobarrera 9y ago
  > I find the Steam client does it's job of launching games particularly well. The client is really heavy, and if it's out of date, you're in for a long wait before being able to launch a game. >It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them, Yeah, it opens the webpage inside the app. Any browser would do the same. > and keeps them up to date in the background. The steam client has no such feature: it only updates games IN THE FOREGROUND. There's no service or deamon that does anything in the background.
hobarrera 9y ago
The UX/UI on the steam client truly is awful, unintuitive, and the update processes are really ugly (plus, two different updaters actually run, with completely different UIs). Also, it doesn't even have highdpi support, so it's already small fonts become illegibily small.

Karunamon 9y ago

Steam definitely takes the Google approach - throw out a minimum viable product, automate as much as possible, and provide little-to-no support. That also means the experience is similar. When it works, it works well and you don't have to think about it. When it doesn't work, be prepared to lose hours-to-days of your life to a system that seems to be as kafkaesque as possible.

dreen 9y ago
Except its not minumum and not viable. Its bloated with lots of features added over the years on top of each other, and its terrible.
conanbatt 9y ago
This is not in touch with reality. The steam client has like 10 years, its bloated, slow and unsatisfactory. If you could do steam ratings on the steam client, they would get clobbered.

dreen 9y ago

Absolutely agree, the load time is often very slow and completely unnecessary, just have a thin client in the background checking for updates, and if you want to look at your "Steam Inventory" whatever the fuck that is there should be a separate thing for that.

rhinoceraptor 9y ago

Graded on a curve, the Steam client is excellent. Origin and Blizzard's desktop client are both incredibly bad. It's like you're using a GPU manufacturer's overclocking GUI from 2007.

bariereefwozere 9y ago

I'm hoping GoG keeps up it's thing. Having standalone, downloadable installers for games makes me a lot more comfortable than a service which could potentially disappear or change it's terms. Things like music licenses expiring and having that retroactively applied worry me [1]. Steam strikes me as a bit of a monopoly at this stage, and a 30% cut off all sales seems like money for jam - I'd be a bit less bitter if they offered excellent customer support or I felt they were doing something interesting with all the revenue. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141110/09535529096/hooray-licenses-update-strips-17-songs-steam-users-purchased-copies-grand-theft-auto-san-andreas.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141110/09535529096/hoora... Edit: I guess there's nothing to stop GoG disappearing either, but at least I have standalone installers if needed.

phatfish 9y ago

I find the Steam client does it's job of launching games particularly well. It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them, and keeps them up to date in the background. I have noticed that they don't screw with the UI every 2 months (Spotify et al.) and stick with what works. That seems to be a negative these days though.

hobarrera 9y ago
> I find the Steam client does it's job of launching games particularly well. The client is really heavy, and if it's out of date, you're in for a long wait before being able to launch a game. >It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them, Yeah, it opens the webpage inside the app. Any browser would do the same. > and keeps them up to date in the background. The steam client has no such feature: it only updates games IN THE FOREGROUND. There's no service or deamon that does anything in the background.

hobarrera 9y ago

The UX/UI on the steam client truly is awful, unintuitive, and the update processes are really ugly (plus, two different updaters actually run, with completely different UIs). Also, it doesn't even have highdpi support, so it's already small fonts become illegibily small.