10 ms·

I may be out of the loop, but what’s the issue with Steam? It seems like it hasn’t changed that much over the decades?

by manmal 3y ago

eulers_secret 3y ago
May be because they're a private company, so there's no pressure from shareholders to "extract the value from the brand"
- Runepika 3y ago
  Isn't Microsoft doing a piss-poor job of that with Xbox Games Pass?
  - danudey 3y ago
    Game Pass is doing a lot better than the XBox itself is. I honestly think that Microsoft needs to pull a Sega, stop making hardware and release their games on other people's hardware instead. Game Pass on PS5 would get a lot of subscribers. Halo on PS5 would do insanely well.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      Is Xbox losing money? Even if it is not mega-profitable, having a consumer device sitting in many living rooms has got to be worth something. If nothing else, as a gateway to Game Pass. If you are looking at weirdo things - Microsoft still makes keyboards. That has to be such a minuscule part of the business as to be completely irrelevant.
hef19898 3y ago
They did add a bunch of achievements for each gamr, collectables and in game purchases along with a plattform to trade those. But it is not on the nose, and mostly cosmetic stuff like skins as far as I can tell. All of that is offset by Steams drive to get more and more games playable under Linux so.
- unpopularopp 3y ago
  >They did add a bunch of achievements for each gamr That's done by the game developers not Valve. It's not obligatory to have achievements unlike on the PlayStation
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >> It's not obligatory to have achievements unlike on the PlayStation While it is indeed mandatory for your game to have achievements on Playstation, the TRCs don't specify anything about the quanity nor quality of those achivements. If you want you can launch the game with a single achievement for starting the game and it would still be approved.
- manmal 3y ago
  It’s been in existence for 20 years now, so I‘m rather amazed by how little it has changed, while obviously the background work (scaling, security) has always kept up.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    I love it, really do! And as I said, the trading of in game stuff, that doesn't have game impact most of the time, is more like a fun add-on for people who like it. Steam is a great service, something that represents the internet we could have had in a different time-line.
the_af 3y ago
Same question. Steam works wonderfully for me...
dmonitor 3y ago
If anything, it’s just gotten better for everyone.
- Lendal 3y ago
  How is it better? Seems to me the client is about the same as it ever was, which is another way of saying stagnant. Only the games have changed, and they don't make the games.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Proton was the one meaningful new feature, and that's only if you use Linux. Otherwise it's gotten more stable, which was a low bar.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Sometimes software that runs stable and does its thing, and does so in the same manner for years, is quite refreshing. Doing its job good, and stable, wothout adding shit nobody needs is a goodbthing.
      - red-iron-pine 3y ago
        Aye, I still use MATE on Linux because I don't need a new, fancy interface or new desktop effects, I just need something simple to do what it needs to do. Same with Steam -- it's just an interface to get to the games. Doesn't need to be obtrusive or detailed, just good enough to help me do what I need it to do.
      - hot_gril 3y ago
        To be clear, I like that they haven't added more features. Though Steam always did a lot of unnecessary stuff to begin with, like forcing updates or opening itself when I want to run a game.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    The client supports seamlessly streaming games from my PC to any device I own. A friend in another city is able to play local co-op games that have no online support. Controller support in Steam has continued to improve: supporting pretty much any controller, gyroscopes, per-game custom mappings, sharing/applying community created mappings, etc. I'm not aware of anything similar in competitor's stores. Library filtering and search is hugely improved over the old system that only supported manually adding games to your own tag categories. "Dynamic collections" can be created which include games based on store tags, genre, controller support, whether a particular list of friends also have the game, and a few other things. Updates/news for games you own or are following is a lot more visible than it used to be as well.
HWR_14 3y ago
Steam seems to suffer from the issues of discovery of great content among the sea of average stuff. That's a different, common and hard to overcome variant of enshitification.
- digging 3y ago
  It's true that Steam pushes big-name AAA games, but Steam still regularly shows me incredible games I've never heard of without me prompting it to. As someone who browses game forums frequently, I'm amazed at that. The bigger problem IMO is just the insane oversaturation of video games. Even if I quit my job and all my other hobbies, I would never catch up to all the games I want to play. So I don't think it's even possible for Steam or another storefront to nail discovery in a truly satisfying way.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  This is true -- there is a lot of dross and spam on Steam -- but there is also a whole galaxy of game reviewers, curators, and commenters. It's not hard to find a few and follow their advice. Meanwhile, no one is reviewing all of the cheapo garbage on Amazon. 44 different drop shippers all selling stuff from China, and all without any meaningful way to differentiate them. Hell, they could all be the same company.
hot_gril 3y ago
I've always disliked Steam cause I view it as just an extra DRM/adware/forced-update step to run Steam-exclusive games, but don't see how it's gotten worse over time. It's gotten a little more stable if anything.
- danudey 3y ago
  Steam is better DRM than the DRM options we had before, which were an absolute nightmare. Upgraded your motherboard? Better call customer support to get your account restored. Spore is the worst example[0] that I remember. The article has someone complaining "no way am I paying $50 to rent a game!", but while we still do that (irritatingly) at least the "rental" process is now smooth and streamlined, and, in my experience, works great. [0] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/has-spore-been-destroyed-by-its-own-drm/ https://www.denofgeek.com/games/has-spore-been-destroyed-by-...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    They're not mutually exclusive. Some Steam games have their own DRM and/or online registration on top, most infamously GTA IV. Same game later received an "update" via Steam that removed some soundtracks. And I've heard of newer mainstream games with Denuvo anti-cheat/DRM on Steam with similar hardware checks. It was about time that someone standardized the game purchase/update process, and yeah publishers are gonna want DRM, but I wasn't happy with the choice. Steam was needlessly in the way. (Past tense cause I don't play games anymore)
unpopularopp 3y ago
Not me but terminally negative people usually repeating that: - it's not open source - games are expensive (even though it's set by the publishers not Valve) - DRM (even though the Steam launcher is not a DRM itself which people mistaking with the SteamWorks DRM system which is optional) - monopoly (even though you can use GOG, Uplay, EA, Humble, BattleNet, Amazon Prime, MS Store and the countless other options on PC if you wish unlike on iOS and consoles) etc.
- danudey 3y ago
  Users: "Steam is awful, we need alternatives." Epic: "Okay, we've started buiding one." Users: "Yeah well it sucks because it doesn't have these extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build."
  - krono 3y ago
    No end of consumer hostile practises, undeclared telemetry gathering, half-baked service even today (is there a wishlist yet?), basically ran by the Chinese government through Tencent.. ok that last one is a semi-joke. There are many valid and grave complaints people have regarding them, not merely some princess and the pea type things as how you make it out to be.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      The website is right there, feel free to check if they have wishlists.
      - Eji1700 3y ago
        If your adoption strategy requires people constantly checking in to see if you've finally got features they want, then it's a bad strategy.
      - krono 3y ago
        The point I was trying to make is that wishlist, shopping cart, and similar features were missing for the longest time, not at all what you'd consider "extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build"
kibwen 3y ago
Steam is only good relative to its competitors. From a technical perspective, it's a dumpster fire that hasn't notably evolved in twenty years, full of broken, abandoned, and half-implemented features (off the top of my head: search, profiles, group chat, voice chat, the phone app, broadcasting, the community tab, the in-game overlay, big picture mode, and any context where it ever feels like rendering a website in its own janky, slow, insecure fork of some 2008-era browser engine all fall into one these categories). Fortunately, it mostly works to launch games, which is all it needs to do. Valve's own legendary internal dysfunction is perhaps a reason why it hasn't been enshittified as thoroughly as other launchers. (And I say this as someone who is happy that Valve puts any thought at all into gaming on Linux, and intends to buy a Steam Deck someday.)
- eertami 3y ago
  The new and rearchitected Steam client (currently in public beta) is an improvement over the old client for me. It feels like a pretty good evolution, bringing performance and new features. It's pretty clear they have spent a lot of time and effort on this release, without enshittifying it.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    I haven't heard of the new client, I'll happily eat my words if they manage to fix any of the things that I've been grousing about for years.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      You'll be disappointed, it's not an entirely new client but rather a hybrid. Some pages are in a new design, some in the old, it's a huge mish mash in the same way Windows is.
      - fzfzq 3y ago
        [dead]
  - 3y ago
1023bytes 3y ago
Some fans are disappointed that Valve doesn't develop many new games, which they don't need to since they get so much money just from running Steam
- manmal 3y ago
  Been waiting forever for Left 4 Dead 3.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Half-Life 4? Preferably non-VR so.
  - ridgered4 3y ago
    If they just released a new map pack for L4D2 and called it L4D3 I'd probably buy it for $60.
hgs3 3y ago
I agree. Valve is one of the few companies I would deem "good" or at least not evil. I suspect this is because the company is privately owned and their CEO, Gabe Newell, is a software engineer and not an MBA. He's also a hardcore gamer which means he's a user of the end product like the rest of us.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Agree, except the bit about MBAs. After all, some of the worst scandals in the last two decades where driven and caused by pure-blood engineers.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I like Steam. It is much better than pretty much every other game store platform thingy. I do sort of wonder—Valve is notoriously slow with their development. Maybe that’s an advantage for a platform developer. They seems to make surprisingly few shit moves, but then, they also don’t make many moves at all. Either they are on the same enshittification trajectory as everybody else, just moving along more slowly. Or they can see the other platforms steal their ideas, sprint ahead in to shitsville, and say “ok let’s not do that.”
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Small org + a huge and VERY responsive -- often negatively -- user base. Some dude will run roughshod over the worst potholes and never say a peep to city hall (or even vote), but if their copy of Steam crashes twice a week they'll get on every platform known to man and complain.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Which is why I am fearful of the future. When Gabe retires, what happens then? I suspect Microsoft/Google/EA/anybody have already offered sweet-heart billion dollar acquisitions offers. Will the next CEO continue to turn down those deals?
pornel 3y ago
Steam is not shitty yet, but they are resting on their laurels. The main issue is that Steam takes a much bigger cut than Epic (30% vs 12%). Of course Epic will inevitably enshittify themselves once they take market share away from Steam. The Steam client just gets stuff incoherently bolted on top of old codebase, and the UI became eclectic. GoG client library can seamlessly integrate with Epic client. It used to work well with Steam too, but now integration with Steam has become clunky and buggy. I'm not entirely sure whose fault is that, but I suspect Steam started defending their moat.
- Jochim 3y ago
  Steam's UI has been a mess but Epic is garbage in comparison. It took Epic three years to support buying more than one game at a time. Unless things have changed recently, they're nowhere near Steam when it comes to basic functionality like search and filtering. Remote Play/Remote Play Together alone puts Steam ahead personally.
Jochim 3y ago
Two charitable readings would be that the author is either: * Suggesting Steam is a platform like any other, and therefore likely to experience the same process. * Critical of the quality of some of the titles released on the platform. Steam used to be much more selective in deciding which games made it on to their store. Indie developers and even small publishers were often unable to get their games approved for distribution. This didn't start to change until the introduction of Steam Greenlight[0] in 2012, allowing users to vote on which indie games they'd like to see on the platform for the first time. However, approvals were still heavily curated compared to what we have today. Greenlight was replaced by Steam Direct[1] in 2017. I don't necessarily disagree with either, although I do think Steam has been improving rather than "shittifying". Wading through low quality games is annoying but there are a lot of fantastic games that would never have been approved under the old system; Vampire Survivors is a great example of something that probably would have gone straight in the bin. [0] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595?snr=2_groupannouncements_detail_ https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... [1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1328973169870947116 https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
- bombcar 3y ago
  Isn't Valve privately held? If Gabe doesn't give a shit about "maximizing his shareholder value by enshittification" it won't occur.
  - lp0_on_fire 3y ago
    We are very lucky that Valve is privately owned and that GabeN retains majority control (at least he did last I checked). He is famously "pro gamer" and IMO one of the main reasons Valve hasn't gone through enshittification (yet). My fear is that once he goes, the bulwark goes with him.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Aye, it is. GabeN and a few others. Also means they don't have to grind or worry about specific quarterly performance. It shows -- the platform is generally pretty good. I've had grumbles, but compared to most of the other paid software I use, Steam still delivers -- even on Fedora Linux. Proton in Linux is great, btw. Been able to run Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon ZD, and other major games with little to no issue. Shout out to the ProtonDB and WineDB -- if anything doesn't work they usually have the answers on how to fix.
detuned 3y ago
Features-wise: -game inventories system. --extreme slowness and shittiness of this feature (pages not loading, low rate limits for looking at inventory pages) -player item trading. --trading experience sucks it also runs into the rate limit and inventories not loading. -steam market. --half-baked, can't sell quickly. If you get 5 items it takes like 2 minutes to list each individual item. This is ALSO affected by the slow pages. Using a bot is against the TOS but is also the only decent experience. -social hub for each game, maybe this is too opinionated but now every game is also a social media page. Bad/abandoned games even get used as an image hosting service for unrelated profile adornments. -streaming, intrusive streams in store pages. -Popularized if not invented loot crates which have now infected everything. -Popularized cosmetics micro transactions, which turned into far more expensive transactions. -created new types of FOMO for sales and incentivizing spending money via limited time trinkets (badges, stickers, profile customization), steam points. Opinions ofc but these range from being somewhat on target to wildly out there and speculative and on top of that many of their projects get quietly dropped and are left without support after initial release like the inventory ui and the market.
NikkiA 3y ago
Some of us would argue that the absolutely endless stream of anime rape simulators on Steam have rendered it nigh useless for finding good new content. But apparently we're in a minority.
- Haga 3y ago
  [dead]

I may be out of the loop, but what’s the issue with Steam? It seems like it hasn’t changed that much over the decades?

by manmal 3y ago

I may be out of the loop, but what’s the issue with Steam? It seems like it hasn’t changed that much over the decades?

May be because they're a private company, so there's no pressure from shareholders to "extract the value from the brand"

Runepika 3y ago
Isn't Microsoft doing a piss-poor job of that with Xbox Games Pass?
- danudey 3y ago
  Game Pass is doing a lot better than the XBox itself is. I honestly think that Microsoft needs to pull a Sega, stop making hardware and release their games on other people's hardware instead. Game Pass on PS5 would get a lot of subscribers. Halo on PS5 would do insanely well.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Is Xbox losing money? Even if it is not mega-profitable, having a consumer device sitting in many living rooms has got to be worth something. If nothing else, as a gateway to Game Pass. If you are looking at weirdo things - Microsoft still makes keyboards. That has to be such a minuscule part of the business as to be completely irrelevant.

hef19898 3y ago

They did add a bunch of achievements for each gamr, collectables and in game purchases along with a plattform to trade those. But it is not on the nose, and mostly cosmetic stuff like skins as far as I can tell. All of that is offset by Steams drive to get more and more games playable under Linux so.

unpopularopp 3y ago
>They did add a bunch of achievements for each gamr That's done by the game developers not Valve. It's not obligatory to have achievements unlike on the PlayStation
- gambiting 3y ago
  >> It's not obligatory to have achievements unlike on the PlayStation While it is indeed mandatory for your game to have achievements on Playstation, the TRCs don't specify anything about the quanity nor quality of those achivements. If you want you can launch the game with a single achievement for starting the game and it would still be approved.
manmal 3y ago
It’s been in existence for 20 years now, so I‘m rather amazed by how little it has changed, while obviously the background work (scaling, security) has always kept up.
- hef19898 3y ago
  I love it, really do! And as I said, the trading of in game stuff, that doesn't have game impact most of the time, is more like a fun add-on for people who like it. Steam is a great service, something that represents the internet we could have had in a different time-line.

the_af 3y ago

Same question. Steam works wonderfully for me...

dmonitor 3y ago

If anything, it’s just gotten better for everyone.

Lendal 3y ago
How is it better? Seems to me the client is about the same as it ever was, which is another way of saying stagnant. Only the games have changed, and they don't make the games.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Proton was the one meaningful new feature, and that's only if you use Linux. Otherwise it's gotten more stable, which was a low bar.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Sometimes software that runs stable and does its thing, and does so in the same manner for years, is quite refreshing. Doing its job good, and stable, wothout adding shit nobody needs is a goodbthing.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Aye, I still use MATE on Linux because I don't need a new, fancy interface or new desktop effects, I just need something simple to do what it needs to do. Same with Steam -- it's just an interface to get to the games. Doesn't need to be obtrusive or detailed, just good enough to help me do what I need it to do.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      To be clear, I like that they haven't added more features. Though Steam always did a lot of unnecessary stuff to begin with, like forcing updates or opening itself when I want to run a game.
- Jochim 3y ago
  The client supports seamlessly streaming games from my PC to any device I own. A friend in another city is able to play local co-op games that have no online support. Controller support in Steam has continued to improve: supporting pretty much any controller, gyroscopes, per-game custom mappings, sharing/applying community created mappings, etc. I'm not aware of anything similar in competitor's stores. Library filtering and search is hugely improved over the old system that only supported manually adding games to your own tag categories. "Dynamic collections" can be created which include games based on store tags, genre, controller support, whether a particular list of friends also have the game, and a few other things. Updates/news for games you own or are following is a lot more visible than it used to be as well.

HWR_14 3y ago

Steam seems to suffer from the issues of discovery of great content among the sea of average stuff. That's a different, common and hard to overcome variant of enshitification.

digging 3y ago
It's true that Steam pushes big-name AAA games, but Steam still regularly shows me incredible games I've never heard of without me prompting it to. As someone who browses game forums frequently, I'm amazed at that. The bigger problem IMO is just the insane oversaturation of video games. Even if I quit my job and all my other hobbies, I would never catch up to all the games I want to play. So I don't think it's even possible for Steam or another storefront to nail discovery in a truly satisfying way.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
This is true -- there is a lot of dross and spam on Steam -- but there is also a whole galaxy of game reviewers, curators, and commenters. It's not hard to find a few and follow their advice. Meanwhile, no one is reviewing all of the cheapo garbage on Amazon. 44 different drop shippers all selling stuff from China, and all without any meaningful way to differentiate them. Hell, they could all be the same company.

hot_gril 3y ago

I've always disliked Steam cause I view it as just an extra DRM/adware/forced-update step to run Steam-exclusive games, but don't see how it's gotten worse over time. It's gotten a little more stable if anything.

danudey 3y ago
Steam is better DRM than the DRM options we had before, which were an absolute nightmare. Upgraded your motherboard? Better call customer support to get your account restored. Spore is the worst example[0] that I remember. The article has someone complaining "no way am I paying $50 to rent a game!", but while we still do that (irritatingly) at least the "rental" process is now smooth and streamlined, and, in my experience, works great. [0] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/has-spore-been-destroyed-by-its-own-drm/ https://www.denofgeek.com/games/has-spore-been-destroyed-by-...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hot_gril 3y ago
  They're not mutually exclusive. Some Steam games have their own DRM and/or online registration on top, most infamously GTA IV. Same game later received an "update" via Steam that removed some soundtracks. And I've heard of newer mainstream games with Denuvo anti-cheat/DRM on Steam with similar hardware checks. It was about time that someone standardized the game purchase/update process, and yeah publishers are gonna want DRM, but I wasn't happy with the choice. Steam was needlessly in the way. (Past tense cause I don't play games anymore)

unpopularopp 3y ago

Not me but terminally negative people usually repeating that: - it's not open source - games are expensive (even though it's set by the publishers not Valve) - DRM (even though the Steam launcher is not a DRM itself which people mistaking with the SteamWorks DRM system which is optional) - monopoly (even though you can use GOG, Uplay, EA, Humble, BattleNet, Amazon Prime, MS Store and the countless other options on PC if you wish unlike on iOS and consoles) etc.

danudey 3y ago
Users: "Steam is awful, we need alternatives." Epic: "Okay, we've started buiding one." Users: "Yeah well it sucks because it doesn't have these extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build."
- krono 3y ago
  No end of consumer hostile practises, undeclared telemetry gathering, half-baked service even today (is there a wishlist yet?), basically ran by the Chinese government through Tencent.. ok that last one is a semi-joke. There are many valid and grave complaints people have regarding them, not merely some princess and the pea type things as how you make it out to be.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    The website is right there, feel free to check if they have wishlists.
    - Eji1700 3y ago
      If your adoption strategy requires people constantly checking in to see if you've finally got features they want, then it's a bad strategy.
    - krono 3y ago
      The point I was trying to make is that wishlist, shopping cart, and similar features were missing for the longest time, not at all what you'd consider "extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build"

kibwen 3y ago

Steam is only good relative to its competitors. From a technical perspective, it's a dumpster fire that hasn't notably evolved in twenty years, full of broken, abandoned, and half-implemented features (off the top of my head: search, profiles, group chat, voice chat, the phone app, broadcasting, the community tab, the in-game overlay, big picture mode, and any context where it ever feels like rendering a website in its own janky, slow, insecure fork of some 2008-era browser engine all fall into one these categories). Fortunately, it mostly works to launch games, which is all it needs to do. Valve's own legendary internal dysfunction is perhaps a reason why it hasn't been enshittified as thoroughly as other launchers. (And I say this as someone who is happy that Valve puts any thought at all into gaming on Linux, and intends to buy a Steam Deck someday.)

eertami 3y ago
The new and rearchitected Steam client (currently in public beta) is an improvement over the old client for me. It feels like a pretty good evolution, bringing performance and new features. It's pretty clear they have spent a lot of time and effort on this release, without enshittifying it.
- kibwen 3y ago
  I haven't heard of the new client, I'll happily eat my words if they manage to fix any of the things that I've been grousing about for years.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    You'll be disappointed, it's not an entirely new client but rather a hybrid. Some pages are in a new design, some in the old, it's a huge mish mash in the same way Windows is.
    - fzfzq 3y ago
      [dead]
- 3y ago

1023bytes 3y ago

Some fans are disappointed that Valve doesn't develop many new games, which they don't need to since they get so much money just from running Steam

manmal 3y ago
Been waiting forever for Left 4 Dead 3.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Half-Life 4? Preferably non-VR so.
- ridgered4 3y ago
  If they just released a new map pack for L4D2 and called it L4D3 I'd probably buy it for $60.

hgs3 3y ago

I agree. Valve is one of the few companies I would deem "good" or at least not evil. I suspect this is because the company is privately owned and their CEO, Gabe Newell, is a software engineer and not an MBA. He's also a hardcore gamer which means he's a user of the end product like the rest of us.

hef19898 3y ago
Agree, except the bit about MBAs. After all, some of the worst scandals in the last two decades where driven and caused by pure-blood engineers.
bee_rider 3y ago
I like Steam. It is much better than pretty much every other game store platform thingy. I do sort of wonder—Valve is notoriously slow with their development. Maybe that’s an advantage for a platform developer. They seems to make surprisingly few shit moves, but then, they also don’t make many moves at all. Either they are on the same enshittification trajectory as everybody else, just moving along more slowly. Or they can see the other platforms steal their ideas, sprint ahead in to shitsville, and say “ok let’s not do that.”
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Small org + a huge and VERY responsive -- often negatively -- user base. Some dude will run roughshod over the worst potholes and never say a peep to city hall (or even vote), but if their copy of Steam crashes twice a week they'll get on every platform known to man and complain.
fbdab103 3y ago
Which is why I am fearful of the future. When Gabe retires, what happens then? I suspect Microsoft/Google/EA/anybody have already offered sweet-heart billion dollar acquisitions offers. Will the next CEO continue to turn down those deals?

pornel 3y ago

Steam is not shitty yet, but they are resting on their laurels. The main issue is that Steam takes a much bigger cut than Epic (30% vs 12%). Of course Epic will inevitably enshittify themselves once they take market share away from Steam. The Steam client just gets stuff incoherently bolted on top of old codebase, and the UI became eclectic. GoG client library can seamlessly integrate with Epic client. It used to work well with Steam too, but now integration with Steam has become clunky and buggy. I'm not entirely sure whose fault is that, but I suspect Steam started defending their moat.

Jochim 3y ago
Steam's UI has been a mess but Epic is garbage in comparison. It took Epic three years to support buying more than one game at a time. Unless things have changed recently, they're nowhere near Steam when it comes to basic functionality like search and filtering. Remote Play/Remote Play Together alone puts Steam ahead personally.

Jochim 3y ago

Two charitable readings would be that the author is either: * Suggesting Steam is a platform like any other, and therefore likely to experience the same process. * Critical of the quality of some of the titles released on the platform. Steam used to be much more selective in deciding which games made it on to their store. Indie developers and even small publishers were often unable to get their games approved for distribution. This didn't start to change until the introduction of Steam Greenlight[0] in 2012, allowing users to vote on which indie games they'd like to see on the platform for the first time. However, approvals were still heavily curated compared to what we have today. Greenlight was replaced by Steam Direct[1] in 2017. I don't necessarily disagree with either, although I do think Steam has been improving rather than "shittifying". Wading through low quality games is annoying but there are a lot of fantastic games that would never have been approved under the old system; Vampire Survivors is a great example of something that probably would have gone straight in the bin. [0] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595?snr=2_groupannouncements_detail_ https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... [1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1328973169870947116 https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

bombcar 3y ago
Isn't Valve privately held? If Gabe doesn't give a shit about "maximizing his shareholder value by enshittification" it won't occur.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  We are very lucky that Valve is privately owned and that GabeN retains majority control (at least he did last I checked). He is famously "pro gamer" and IMO one of the main reasons Valve hasn't gone through enshittification (yet). My fear is that once he goes, the bulwark goes with him.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Aye, it is. GabeN and a few others. Also means they don't have to grind or worry about specific quarterly performance. It shows -- the platform is generally pretty good. I've had grumbles, but compared to most of the other paid software I use, Steam still delivers -- even on Fedora Linux. Proton in Linux is great, btw. Been able to run Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon ZD, and other major games with little to no issue. Shout out to the ProtonDB and WineDB -- if anything doesn't work they usually have the answers on how to fix.

detuned 3y ago

Features-wise: -game inventories system. --extreme slowness and shittiness of this feature (pages not loading, low rate limits for looking at inventory pages) -player item trading. --trading experience sucks it also runs into the rate limit and inventories not loading. -steam market. --half-baked, can't sell quickly. If you get 5 items it takes like 2 minutes to list each individual item. This is ALSO affected by the slow pages. Using a bot is against the TOS but is also the only decent experience. -social hub for each game, maybe this is too opinionated but now every game is also a social media page. Bad/abandoned games even get used as an image hosting service for unrelated profile adornments. -streaming, intrusive streams in store pages. -Popularized if not invented loot crates which have now infected everything. -Popularized cosmetics micro transactions, which turned into far more expensive transactions. -created new types of FOMO for sales and incentivizing spending money via limited time trinkets (badges, stickers, profile customization), steam points. Opinions ofc but these range from being somewhat on target to wildly out there and speculative and on top of that many of their projects get quietly dropped and are left without support after initial release like the inventory ui and the market.

NikkiA 3y ago

Some of us would argue that the absolutely endless stream of anime rape simulators on Steam have rendered it nigh useless for finding good new content. But apparently we're in a minority.

Haga 3y ago
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