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Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data
- smittywerben 1y agoFor context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
- gowld 1y agoSteamDeck says what?
- prophesi 1y agoSteam Deck uses a desktop OS (Arch), and Steam's Big Picture mode is well-optimized for controllers.
- mopenstein 1y agoEverybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action? They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
- haunter 1y ago>They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity. They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more
- steelbrain 1y agoI’m out of the loop here. What does gambling here refer to? Is it the Steam trading cards?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wlesieutre 1y agoI would think “loot boxes” but Steam doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly on that
- some_random 1y agoLoot boxes are nothing next to the CS:GO (and others) item marketplace
- haunter 1y agoCounter Strike skins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1] On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money. And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone 0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/ https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/ 1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-amount-of-money-from-cs2-cases-just-last-month-alone-3176876/ https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...
- haiku2077 1y agoAnd the 3rd party sites mostly target children who can't gamble at a regulated casino but can get keys through gameplay/steam gift cards
- daedrdev 1y agoGacha are also unregulated digital gambling, I think steam was simply the first
- haunter 1y agoYou can't make money from gacha that's the difference. I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink. In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then) I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price. Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250 Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve). And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer. Few days later bought my first gaming PC. Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
- Ekaros 1y agoI think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players. Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.
- Farbklex 1y agoYeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.
- morsch 1y agoThere's a Steam app that's basically the store?
- hombre_fatal 1y agoDoes it make sense? The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your console will autodownload it for you. Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish web app I've ever used.
- esseph 1y agoI'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam app, it seems fine between the two. Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years? I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky. Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.
- Rohansi 1y agoYou can buy Steam games and download them to your PC from your phone, too. Only problem is the website isn't designed specifically for mobile. Most pages work well but use a lot of data to pull media.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- smittywerben 1y agoA user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose. The sole defender of this system, a user who bought a game from Steam on their mobile device, completely unaware of any Steam app, maintains that the portable wallet vacuum works as intended. It's too late. Negative convergence of the Dyson vacuum's warranty appears inversely proportional to Gaben's proximity to retirement. The Y-combinator is reaching criticality. The Steam Chat app opens. Sent from my Steam™ (Claude x Gemini "Dew It Right" 2025 Black Edition).
- tschellenbach 1y ago[flagged]
- tomstockmail 1y agoSteam by Valve, the gaming company.
- HaZeust 1y agoMight want to work on your sentiment analysis platform, this is about Steam by Valve
- dsizzle 1y agofwiw the substack app did this to me too
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y agoThey were browsing the point shop. On Desktop (FF ctrlF5) this page loads 20-30MB of data. A mix of gif webm and animated pngs https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop
- jorvi 1y agoThis is one thing that Telegram did right with their .tgs animated sticker format (based on Lottie) and that somehow no one else in the message space seems to want to take the effort to replicate. JSON and vector-based, heavily optimized for filesize and battery use.
- keyringlight 1y agoI wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on connections good enough for game downloads so they must be using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at Valve now).
- Ekaros 1y agoAlso Valve has relatively small workforce. That being only couple hundred. With good part working on two of the most popular games. And then other projects. In the end they don't have that much idle hands.
- keyringlight 1y agoI'd have some sympathy for this if they weren't the biggest fish in the pond with huge "make it happen" resources at their disposal. They have the potential available to do almost anything they want if they decide to, and at this point it's a conscious decision not to.
- jorvi 1y ago
- msgodel 1y agoSteam has always been a pig with data. When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered satellite connection. Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950 drivers. I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from GOG pretty much because of that experience.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y agoI had to learn that same lesson with Civ 5.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Fogest 1y agoThe huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem. I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.
- esseph 1y agoTry the steam website and see if you have the same problem?
- Fogest 1y agoThe funny thing is that it actually works fine for me on their mobile app, which is the same app this post talks about with the poor data usage. It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow for the store page. Even things like the community pages and workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero problem. I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.
- LorenDB 1y agoWhy are ISPs apparently limiting some plans to just 1 GB of data? That's not nearly enough for 2025.
- toast0 1y agoFor mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while you're out. If it's 1GB hard cap, you might have some bad months, but 1GB fast data and unlimited slow data is totally doable.
- reaperducer 1y agoFor mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while you're out. The people who are downvoting you must be terminally online. Like you, I use wifi at home and work. My mobile data use is typically around 150MB/month.
- gylterud 1y agoNot downvoting, but any typical online activity during commute or while travelling will blow through 1GB. Music every day, or a video once in a while… I also have WiFi at my usual hangs, but thus far this month I am on 15GB of my 50GB monthly plan. Sure I could pre download music or videos to watch, but it would be much more of a hassle. And some sites, like twitch, don’t really have an option to download.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dangus 1y agoThere’s a massive difference between “terminally online” and “goes out of their way to avoid using any of the capabilities of the technology.” If I’m paying for a 5G connection on a phone that’s more powerful than the computer I owned 5 years ago you’re damn right I want to watch my dumb video in 4K and stream my music lossless.
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- autoexec 1y agowhat is the point of a digital sticker? What are you supposed to stick it to?
- ascagnel_ 1y agoAt one point, your Counter-Strike guns.
- autoexec 1y agoWow, I looked it up and it's depressing that people are paying money for that at all but some of the prices are insane. What a scam. I'm surprised there isn't a bunch of mods letting people add them for free/design their own.
- vel0city 1y agoCan't really run mods if you're on official matchmaking servers. Even if you did modify the textures locally, those textures wouldn't show up for everyone else. A part of this is so other people can see the skins/stickers/farkles you've added to your gun collection.
- phatskat 1y ago> Even if you did modify the textures locally, those textures wouldn't show up for everyone else. Yep! My friends and I would make our own skins for CS in Paint and then share them on floppies so we could see each other
- ang_cire 1y agoActual answer is your chat window. The steam app has a friends chat function, and "stickers" that are often game-specific images or gifs, can be sent, e.g. [1] this bouncing sheep from Mabinogi: [1]: https://imgur.com/a/N4LE2lx https://imgur.com/a/N4LE2lx
- autoexec 1y ago
- micromacrofoot 1y agoSteam has an enormous amount of headway, and I'm a massive fan of what they've done... but they're going to lose ground with their laissez-faire development practices, I run into random issues like this all the time with the store.
- Ekaros 1y agoHave not checked GoG galaxy lately, but maybe it is my stockholm syndrome. But other stores do not really feel better. That is Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox... Haven't checked EA lately, but that was also a mess flipping between Origin and EA something... Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should be solved issue. But what do I know...
- micromacrofoot 1y agoYeah really Steam continues to succeed because everyone else is so bad at it, and the smaller players don't have the benefit of getting in early. Epic and Microsoft are maybe the best positioned to pull if off, but they've done a lot of fumbling so far.
- tetrisgm 1y agoWould you say you were delighted?
- ars 1y agoThe big companies really don't seem to care about low bandwidth users. I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long enough? Not sure. But it never worked. I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further. So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails. I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line. I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a while and learn how to be more efficient.
- sitzkrieg 1y agosteam, like every other program that switched to web based uis are simply flat out worse in every way. even browsing the old store in cef was lightyears ahead