6 ms·
Not a gamer - Is Steam basically a package manager like 'yum' or 'brew', but for games?
by supportengineer 2y ago
Not a gamer - Is Steam basically a package manager like 'yum' or 'brew', but for games?
- dark-star 2y agomore like an app store
- Jnr 2y agoYes, and also a store and a community platform.
- PeakKS 2y agoMore like flatpak/flathub since it has it's own runtime, with the addition of community features and purchasing.
- ranger207 2y agoSimilar to Google Play with Google Play Services: both an app store and a set of services for games to use
- ukd1 2y agoYes; but more like the apple App Store - they take a cut, and (to some/varying extent) try to ensure some level of legitimacy / quality.
- sunshowers 2y agoLike 10% of Steam is yum/brew. The other 90% is: * GUI * managing installations, including things like Proton to run Win32 games on Linux, and Fossilize to precompile shaders * bandwidth-saving stuff like being able to transfer games locally * being able to play remotely in a variety of configurations: LAN, WAN, or having a friend connect to your local session ("Remote Play Together") * pretty good support for mapping any controller you have to any controller inputs a game wants * cloud saves * a bunch of community features like forums and broadcasting * family sharing * a VR runtime * marketing for devs (regular sales, algorithmic recommendations etc) * an API for devs with various services * the backend infrastructure for all of the above It's been around for a long time so it's quite feature-rich at this point. Lots of things that generally make sense to have.
- m463 2y agoand telemetry
- red_admiral 2y agoMore like an app store, which is really just a GUI/payments/licence layer on top of a package manager.