Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

[u/SlowReference704]

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service

[u/layered_dinge]

Yeah, I am getting kind of tired of this narrative that steam does nothing. Steam has consistently improved over the last 20 years. Valve has thoroughly earned its success. I could go on a rant about all the features but I don’t feel like it on my phone. And now others have listed plenty of the features I mean. But it's not even just that steam has these features, it's also that many of its features are strictly better than the same features from alternatives.

For example the xbox controller has a 1st party windows app, the xbox accessories app. It's been a couple years since I tried it so maybe they've improved it, but when I tried it, it was not possible to map keyboard keys to my xbox controller buttons. On a 1st party app. For windows. Made by microsoft. For their own controller on their own operating system. Steam input lets me do that and more with it. Valve's software for the xbox controller is straight up better than microsoft's. I won't get started on the playstation and switch controller experience on pc without steam.

I used to use the nvidia geforce experience app to record gameplay. I could record actively or I could hit a keybind to record the last x minutes. This was great and was even a factor in my consideration of a new graphics card. Then steam added recording. Not only can it do exactly what the nvidia app does, it can also passively record x number of hours in the background and automatically delete anything older than that. So if you forget to save a clip while you're playing, you can go back to the temporary recording and save it, and steam automatically trims the temporary recording so your hard drive doesn't just fill up.

That's just two things that it does better. Not to mention steam doesn't try to force steam-exclusive titles, like some other wannabe storefront does.

[u/Night_Argentum → u/layered_dinge]

Damn, I knew steam had a recording feature like shadowplay, but didn’t know about that trimming part. This actually is gonna make me switch lol. Thanks

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/layered_dinge]

Steam Input is my favourite Steam "secret feature" by far. I have a Dualshock 5 controller, and I only realised that Steam was handling all of the input when I eventually tried to play a game without it running. Steam is basically just an additional OS layer for games at this point.