It's old and bloated. It's on the low end of usability. It's not dynamic.

A few things I've noticed:

• Wish lists have to refresh to remove an entry
• The Cart will default to using your wallet even if you don't want it to
• Clicking the top menu options (Store, Library, etc) brings you to the last page accessed in that tab (a game page or cart rather than the Store menu)
• The Android apps run hella slow even on my 2013 Nexus 7 (attribute to bloat)

These are my core complaints. I don't mess with forums or Community in general, so I don't know how bad it is there.

You are of course free to not use Steam...otherwise I'm not sure what the point of this topic is. Maybe you should go post this on the Steam Community forums and hope for some feedback.

I was snooping around inside Steam for Android's APK one time and was shocked to learn that it actually uses Fragments. It looks and feels like the entire app is a WebView, but apparently it uses Fragments to some extent.

Of course using Fragment doesn't make an app automatically great, but it typically indicates an understanding of the platform, which I'm not seeing in the app.

If you really want to be a PC gamer, though, Steam is pretty much unavoidable.

Is Steam a crappy program? I don't think it's crap. I think it's fairly decent. It could definitely use some improvements and it sometimes feels a little too clunky, but "crap" is far too strong a word to describe it. Why is it that everything on the internet is either total crap or very, very good?

The mobile versions of Steam, though, come across as the work of an amateur who can't optimize a program for shit. Feel free to call the Android and iPhone Steam apps any name that you want to, I certainly do every time I try to use it.

The mobile version? I forget that thing exists. I should take a look at that someday...

As for the desktop, seeing how other stores are handled on PC, Mac, and Linux...the Steam application is a dream come true especially for Mac and Linux. Although it is readily apparent that parts need to be cleaned up due to feature creep and sprawl.

Yeah, it could certainly some improvement. I don't use Origin or UPlay or any other game-store-client-things, but I hope the competition continues to grow and succeed to the point it finally spurs Valve into devoting some serious resources to working on the client again.

Yeah, the Steam client is pretty cumbersome to use. It kinda feels like it's just a web browser for the Steam store. As long as the Library tab works I suppose.

Maybe because it IS just a web browser for the steam store? It's a glorified web app.

The term 'Grammar Nazi' has become mainstream, so now I'm embarking on my mission to claim stake for 'Poor-Excuse Nazis', starting with "Don't like it? Don't eat." That is not a valid excuse; never was, never will be. As the market leading product for game purchases, it's kind of in their best interest to satisfy customers, not to sit around awaiting praise from fans, as your "don't eat" reply would imply. Someone in the thread said "feature-creep" and that's kind of what it is. Last-gen consoles experienced this too as time went on. The physical aspect of the console was never built to support all of the software additions. Likewise, Steam was built for a limited purpose, and was built using older tools (I assume). The point is, it doesn't feel like a modern app because it isn't. They keep releasing updates but a real change would require them to rebuild it from the ground up.

Yep

Steam has never been a particularly great thing it was just the only thing for such a long time so it has market dominance (and silly people like Brad are resistant to any and all alternatives), gog is vastly superior though they seem to be going more steam-like for whatever reason. Steam's primary purpose appears to be to sell people games they won't even play. The offline mode is trash and not being able to patch incrementally is also trash.

Bizarre as it is, this seems true. It's amazing how, at the opening a Steam sale, people will go nuts and buy any and every game they can at the sale prices despite the fact that they'll never get around to playing many of those games and might not have had any interest in them to begin with if it weren't for the sale. People seem to lose their minds at the sheer ability to spend money. Meanwhile, the quality control on Steam has gone down the shitter, with early access and even some broken, busted games being sold as full retail products, constantly appearing on the storefront and clogging up a marketplace that's already overloaded to the brim with games of all shapes and sizes.

Steam used to be the place to go to get your small game noticed. Now you're lucky if it gets noticed among piles of hot garbage and AAA titles selling for ridiculously low prices. The whole thing just feels like it's going to collapse in on itself unless Valve takes better care of the service.

@hailinel: I don't think it will collapse as there is still a very large contingent of believers in the system and there's plenty of inefficient yet somehow still successful systems out there (like Windows or Facebook); but it is pretty telling how much like xblig Greenlight is.

As someone who's come into PC gaming in a big way relatively recently, I've been wondering why people don't bring this up more. It's pretty terrible. Browsing the store is slow and UI is pretty crap. Scrolling down 10 games at a time, clicking on one to check it out, then clicking back only to have to start from the top again. Ugh. Valve has more then enough cash to overhaul that thing into something more usable.

That said, I'd still rather have it in it's current state then not...for whatever that means.

While Steam has its issues, GoG is doing the right thing. I have quite a library on both, but I'd rather buy on Steam rather than GoG because of the centralized download capability. GoG simply downloads installers and lets you handle the rest. Right now all of my GoG games are populating my desktop. I can't wait to see how GoG Galaxy turns out.

@ch3burashka: I think individually downloading the games increases your chances of actually playing them since it's not just a name in a list (for some a ridiculously long list).

Absolutely true; however it's a toss-up between dedication to playing the game vs. ease of access. I'll either play it or never go through with installing it, especially if it's a game I'm only sort of interested in. I'm aware of this problem which is why periodically I sit down and look at my Steam list for things I've yet to play, don't particularly want to but do it anyway. That's how I beat Binary Domain. It was neat.

@hailinel said:

That might be an overstatement, I think that's a habit Steam happily exploits rather than purposefully set out to do at least originally. Now humblebundle on the other hand....

You're absolutely right that Valve needs to get serious about curation and discoverability. Their quality control has really nosedived in the last 6 months or so with all these alphas/early access among other things. Plus they are selling some straight up busted games, e.g. Jade Empire won't even launch with messing with the install files and Steam is still selling GFWL games without any sort of warning of a possible shutdown.

Steam does a lot of things well as a seller, but if they make it too hard to find good games they will lose all they've built. People don't just want a large selection they want a quality one. If Steam stops providing that, there's plenty of places that will.

but hey Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends Complete Edition is 50% off today. :)

Yeah, but going with Good Old Games in this instance, as opposed to the Steam "compulsive purchase" environment, you're bound to save some money because when it comes to GoG, you aren't buying games simply because they're there. Ideally, you're buying games because you have an active interest in playing them, and not just to have them. When it comes to Steam Sales, it's practically a track meet with all of the consumers lining up at the blocks to buy everything that they possibly can with Gabe Newell off to the side firing the starter pistol. It's online consumerism at its most absurd; buying up ridiculous numbers of games that you might never get around to playing, much less downloading an .exe (and forget owning a physical, material copy of the game). People end up with lists of games in the hundreds, possibly thousands after multiple Steam sales, and will only ever touch a fraction of their purchases.

Already have the PS4 version! (Also, I heard that the PC version's quality was not great.)

dang really? Man I'll have to look into that , I was considering a purchase on the last day of the sale assuming I don't use up my budget I've set for myself.

re: GOG- Their summer sale is basically the same thing though... just not as game-ified with trading cards/badges/teams and whatnot. If anything they pound the Flash Sale angle harder with the whole artificial scarcity thing (get the deals before they run out!).

@slag: The way GoG has structured their sales has become more steam-like as of late (used to just be here's a series of games on sale, which works great if you're interested in that series or not interested, though it can be a bit of a trap if you're somewhere in between) but it's still not quite as bad and is generally much easier to navigate. I imagine it'll become quite similar whenever they have the app up and running but hopefully they improve the other aspects of the product.

Steam, while not perfect, is a shit ton better than Uplay.

The wishlist and Android client hasn't been updated in a long, long time... and I think it's because not enough people use those features, so nobody at Valve cares much. Nobody I know IRL uses them. It's sad, but hey at least they're functional.

I also doubt that Steam will collapse on itself - at this point it would be really hard for them to go belly up because of any one thing.

It's a very important observation that they've somehow managed to create this strange buying compulsion in people which is both fascinating and worrying. When you visit these Steam threads some people are almost proud of the fact that they've bought games 'just because' and not to actually play them simply because they were cheaper than usual.

As for the client itself it needs an overhaul. Having almost no competition on the PC market has made them very complacent - not to mention that to some Steam can do no wrong. It's actually quite astounding that it has gone on for so long without any major changes. I guess it's not all bad because what it's meant to do it does well. The process between clicking "Buy" and playing the game is smooth enough - it's simply all this other stuff they've tacked onto the client that isn't holding up very well.

This is partially why I actually want things like Uplay and Origin to exist and keep growing, because maybe once they get big enough Steam will be forced to acknowledge some of it's own shortcomings. As it stands, being the behemoth that it is, I doubt we will see any significant changes unless it's somehow going to earn them more money. This is why despite years of fans begging and pleading they haven't done anything with Half-Life and have chosen instead to concentrate on DOTA.

I agree. Steam has always been cumbersome but lately it's been a lot worse. I used to have it auto start when I turn on my computer but now I just open it when I want to play a game.

Im almost certain that a smartphone icon appears next to your name on peoples friends list when you are on the mobile app, kinda like the controller icon for people in big picture mode, tell your friend not to message you when they see it.

re"deal hunting compulsion- I really don't think they created anything. That compulsion and market has always been there, Steam has just done an excellent job capturing of that market and making it readily visible in a way it wasn't previously. But it was always there whether it be people at yard sales or at gamestop etc, there's always been deal hunters in games.

The cult of the deal hunter is present in nearly every type of retail and the whole flash thing is perhaps even larger in the fashion industry than in games (with sites like gilt.com etc).

Totally agree with you that competition is a good thing as it forces companies to innovate and I think it's coming on PC. GOG Galaxy really looks like a shot right at steam going right after the social side of things that people do like about it, them and Origin I think are the only serious contenders right now although both are significantly smaller. Uplay/Battle.net/Desura are all more second/third tier players.

Man, I think this thread fell out of 2003. The fact that you have to install steam to play CS is bullshit.

Agree on wishlists, and since Steam should know what games you've purchased or been gifted, it should automatically remove entires.

The cart doesn't default to my wallet, but I inconvenience myself by keeping my card info out of the database in case my account is hacked.

Clicking the top menu buttons does bring you back to the last page accessed, but clicking twice on the store button will get you back to the top menu of the store. It really should work the same for the library, but I don't believe it actually does.

There's no Windows Phone app at all, and the unofficial one is obviously very limited as such : (

I think if you compare Steam to other services though, the only one remotely close is still Origin, and while it's come a long way, It's still lacking basic recognition of previously installed games when I have to do an OS wipe. That's on top of many other missing features. I would think EA would have worked that out with a service that primarily runs their own games.

@slag: I've never used Origin so I might have to check it out to see if it's really in the second spot. I have used Uplay extensively in the past several months and it's a service that is "fine" at best and completely unusable at worst. Bought Watch Dogs through them and couldn't even play the game until the next day because of server issues - and they didn't allow pre-loading either. The one good thing I can say about Uplay is that much like Microsoft with the XBO they are continually working on it. It's baby steps like making the Friends list actually on par with a modern UI but it's something. At least I know that they are honestly trying to make it better, which is more than I can say for Steam at this point.

As for the deal-seeker syndrome, I absolutely agree that Valve didn't invent it - but they did come up with a way to capitalize on it in the gaming market like no one else thus far. They are increasingly becoming more adept at manipulating people into spending money. This years Summer Sale "teams" game is a concept that I almost find distasteful. Everything they do these days is on the outside good fun but always leads back to preying on weaker individuals to spend more. I barely have any badges crafted despite playing a ton of games because I'm never willing to go out there and buy imaginary cards after my "limit" on a particular game has run out.

Try using Origin or UPlay. You'll be praising Steam.

I'll also add it would be nice for Origin, a service operated by EA which sells almost exclusively EA products, to figure out the ability to integrate older EA published games into the service. When Steam launched, Valve ported their entire back catalog (consisting entirely of Half-Life and other GoldSource derivatives, but still...) and let you add your retail games to that online catalog. Origin still can't integrate the more keystone titles released even around the same general timeframe as the service. Namely, I'd sure love to be able to tie Spore and The Sims 2 to my account and just be able to download/execute them from Origin rather than try to finagle a disc install from a remote desktop to the only other devices I use for gaming - a lptop and a desktop PC - neither of which have an optical drive of their own anymore.

Network-shared disc drives don't often work with DRM from the time when discs were a thing with PC gaming.

Steam's browser is pretty shitty, and seems so ancient compared to modern browsers. Trying to go from Community pages to the store and going back and forth is just a mess. You'd think as ubiquitous Steam has become on PC's that they'd have done some major overhauls of the UI but they didn't, and they keep piling more features on to a rickety structure.

As much as I like Steam and the store, it's got problems.

Origin is far better than steam on a purely application basis, what you on about?

Oh Uplay ugh, definitely the worst of the worst.

Origin is what it is, I only have it because I have to for certain games. The pluses are the download speeds, the social interface seems ok and the UI is attractive, but everything else is inferior. No one ever seems to be on it, there is no sales and the selection is very limited etc. But yeah feature wise it's definitely second imo, pretty distant second but second. EA seems committed to improving it, but unless they address the selection and sale side of it I don't see how they will ever come close to catching Steam.

GOG I think will pass Origin based on superior selection and pricing once Galaxy launches. Obviously they never had a client, so when they do if you care about that stuff, GOG's superior selection and pricing could make them a formidable competitor to Steam. If you don't care about a client GOG already is better, asl long as you don't care about new AAA games.

you're right Valve is very good at exploiting that. And yeah unfortunately it seems F2P business models (with a focus on a few huge "whales" as they call them, supporting everybody else who largely freeloads) seems to be what works for digital goods.

I guess I can't criticize them too much because I benefit from this new status quo, I could care less about badges and trading cards or DOTA 2 item drops, but I have probably earned a couple dozen bucks in credits over the past year dumping them onto the community market (which I turn into future game pruchases so they get their pound of flesh from me too). But you're right it is kind of unsettling to think that the buyers of these cards etc may be young kids or people who have impulse control problems.

Well that's not fair. The "Don't like it? Don't eat it." excuse is perfectly valid, and completely different from the "don't like steam? don't use it" excuse. There are a ton of different things you can put in your mouth, and only a handful of PC gaming clients. Use a better analogy, dummy!

The problem is that they keep bolting on new features constantly to an existing platform that was never designed to have all of that at the same time. This is a general problem with everything Valve does, they keep making new stuff without properly testing it first and then don't bother to fix things, short of them being actively on fire, before moving on to the next new thing they want to do. Problems just keep piling on top of each other.

It's still a platform/service that is vastly more fully featured than anything the competition has to offer but all of it seems to barely hold together with a lot of duct tape.

Thanks for the PG-rated "insult". In case it wasn't abundantly clear, that's not a literal phrase. I was not comparing food to game clients. It's a commonly used phrase that means "don't participate in something you don't like." That's good when there's an abundance of choice. When you're talking about the de facto standard for a platform, that excuse becomes invalid. What if I don't like Youtube, Amazon, Google search? Am I supposed to quit them too rather than expecting improvement?

A bit of an overstatement there. The Valve I know is infamous for making very little new stuff, testing it over and over again for years so that they can fix everything, and then spending a ton of time adding on to that thing before carefully moving on to a next project. I totally agree that Steam feels fucking shaky, but saying everything that Valve does is as you described is literally the complete opposite of reality considering how they treat their own games.

I think with Steam they suffer from a lot of what Giant Bomb also seems to have problems with. That the technology for improvements and efficiency has advanced, but they are tied down to the core programming from digital caveman times that just can't be completely changed, so they end up with some shoddy chimera that has awesome flashy parts, but could also just explode at any moment.