4 ms·

> They've set a seriously high bar for digital store fronts I agree with your general point, but no. No they have not. The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsi

by fhood 7y ago

> They've set a seriously high bar for digital store fronts I agree with your general point, but no. No they have not. The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsive, un-intuitive, and surprisingly bad for searching in as well.

outworlder 7y ago
> The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsive, un-intuitive, and surprisingly bad for searching in as well. I can only agree with the last one. It works fine for, you know, downloading and playing games. It rarely ever has issues. The store could use some work, but it does a better job than, say, Apple App Store – the discovery queue has shown me titles I would have never seen before, as did the curators. Have you tried the competition?
- fhood 7y ago
  Steam's only real purpose is as a store right? I can open an executable pretty well most of the time. And Steam makes enough money through said store that I think they need to be held to the standards of Amazon, rather than their contemporaries.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Store, purchase tracker, platform identification system, and analytics engine to push data on game performance and hardware configuration back to the Steam service itself as a mass aggregator so they can keep their finger on the "pulse" of real PC deployments and thereby come quite close to solving the problem that was once the bane of the entire industry ("Game doesn't work on my PC because drivers"). I think people tend to overlook how valuable Steam has been as a clearinghouse to aggregate that last piece of data.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Some of those things are true, but their competition isn't generally better and who else provides the same level of community features and discovery tooling? The new Steam Labs stuff is actually a pretty big improvement over traditional systems.
defterGoose 7y ago
I agree. I have no idea why so many people praise steam endlessly. The last two games I tried to play through the app were unfixably buggy at times. These games were Portal and Doom2016. Boooooo.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Steam is a shop, it has little to do with the quality of the games sold there.

by fhood 7y ago

outworlder 7y ago

> The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsive, un-intuitive, and surprisingly bad for searching in as well. I can only agree with the last one. It works fine for, you know, downloading and playing games. It rarely ever has issues. The store could use some work, but it does a better job than, say, Apple App Store – the discovery queue has shown me titles I would have never seen before, as did the curators. Have you tried the competition?

fhood 7y ago
Steam's only real purpose is as a store right? I can open an executable pretty well most of the time. And Steam makes enough money through said store that I think they need to be held to the standards of Amazon, rather than their contemporaries.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Store, purchase tracker, platform identification system, and analytics engine to push data on game performance and hardware configuration back to the Steam service itself as a mass aggregator so they can keep their finger on the "pulse" of real PC deployments and thereby come quite close to solving the problem that was once the bane of the entire industry ("Game doesn't work on my PC because drivers"). I think people tend to overlook how valuable Steam has been as a clearinghouse to aggregate that last piece of data.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

Some of those things are true, but their competition isn't generally better and who else provides the same level of community features and discovery tooling? The new Steam Labs stuff is actually a pretty big improvement over traditional systems.

defterGoose 7y ago

I agree. I have no idea why so many people praise steam endlessly. The last two games I tried to play through the app were unfixably buggy at times. These games were Portal and Doom2016. Boooooo.

icebraining 7y ago
Steam is a shop, it has little to do with the quality of the games sold there.