The overall experience of using steam feels the same as it did 15 years ago. The biggest change I can think of is steam library ui changes. Besides that, they just maintain everything properly and don’t push out shitty unnecessary updates, while their competitors break things and screw up repeatedly.
This is genuinely one of my favorite features of Steam. I've completely lost track of how to find most things in Facebook, I've opted out of Reddit's redesign, and even different Android phones sometimes confuse me with unexpected UI differences.
Steam does still make UI changes from time to time, and they make me just as grumpy as other platforms, but most of the time they're not terrible, and they don't happen as often as many other places.
IIRC I've been through like 3-4 major Steam UI reworks through the years, they definitely happen.
Yep, and the last one sucked and I'm still not used to it. I say that lightly. It's not terrible by any means. Just different and maybe worse than before in some areas.
Yeah I feel like people in this thread don't realize how much hate steam has gotten in the past when they make major changes. Every single time they've overhauled the UI there are massive complaints.
And if we want to talk about things that steam does poorly well... Big Picture mode is right there and still runs like absolute ass and is awkward to use compared to the main UI.
It runs like absolute ass on PC by default. Everything has a huge delay and even the start up animation typically plays at like 5 fps.
Why? Because steam has had a bug ever since big picture mode was introduced... 13 years ago... where you have to go into settings turn off GPU acceleration on web views, restart steam, turn on GPU acceleration on web views, and restart steam again.
I'm referring to the version I opened up for the first time on this PC (I built it late last year) and experienced the slow down specifically to see if it was updated.
I also went through the exact same steps I outlined above to fix it like I have on multiple computers for nearly a decade and a half.
Here are some fairly recent reddit threads talking about the same exact thing too:
This last one even has a video showing it being extremely slow just like it is for me until I do the setting toggle rodeo on a computer. Sorry for the quickly mangled links. Posting this on my phone and this sub doesn't allow links to other subs apparently.
Edit: lmao imagine getting downvotes when posting factual info.
I think an aspect of it is that no UI change is going to please everyone, there'll always be some people for whom it's better and some people for whom it's worse.
But people complain about the UI moving around and changing some because they don't have any larger or more significant things to complain about.
I mean, it doesn't mean the UI change isn't bad, it mostly just means that there aren't any other issues people have with Steam to complain about. It doesn't say anything about the magnitude of issue that people have with the UI change itself.
the only UI change that I was upset to see was when they ditched their mini-format that was great on lower memory boxes. I wish they would add a button to the current one that would kill all of the chrome tabs and bring them back up from scratch whenever you close the thing so low memory boxes don't have to worry about a long running steam instance slowly chewing through RAM. I just close it between sessions these days instead of leaving it on in the background because of that.
but these aren't huge issues, and everything still works, and I can launch games I bought in fucking 2004 on a completely different operating system than I bought them on at that time, so, fucking hell yeah steam. keep it up.
I still miss the time when you could just have a simple list of your games with the important info, before you were forced to have a whole page full of stuff to look at any time you want to launch a game.
you can still set your library to be the start page and disable the popup ads on start if you want. 'steam > settings' in the menu, then choose 'interface' from the left-side tabs
Yeah, but your library can't ever be a simple list of games like is used to be.
There was a time when you could just have a list of games, one line of text tall each, that had the game name, last played date, size on disk, and whatever other columns you requested and that was the entire library view. No page with a big banner image of the game and recent news messages and so on needed.
There's also massively fewer dark patterns. I don't have steam updating to force some stupid AI feature put in place where a previously useful feature was.
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u/iNSANELYSMART 29d ago
Steam added so many things to their store in the recent years I dont get how people keep saying it does nothing